The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (55 page)

Carmen Maria Machado
is a Nebula-nominated fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in
The New Yorker
,
Granta
,
The Paris Review
,
AGNI
,
The Fairy Tale Review
,
Tin House
's Open Bar, NPR,
The American Reader
, the
Los Angeles Review of Books
, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in several anthologies, including
Year's Best Weird Fiction
and
Best Women's Erotica.
She has received the Richard Yates Short Story Prize, a Millay Colony for the Arts residency, the CINTAS Foundation Fellowship in Creative Writing, and the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop and lives in Philadelphia with her partner.

• A founder of Oulipo, a French literary movement preoccupied with constrained writing, once said, “In the world we live in, we are beholden to all manner of terrible constraints—mental, physical, societal—with death the only way out of the labyrinth. The least we can do is mark off a little section where we get to choose the constraints we are mastered by, where we decide which direction to take.” I have always been a fan of formal conceits and constraints, fictional artifacts, and stories that look like other things. There is something deeply satisfying about throwing up obstacles in my own path and having to climb over them; the result is often something unclassifiable, beautiful, or strange.

It wasn't too long after crowdfunding entered the zeitgeist that I became obsessed with the idea of a Kickstarter-shaped story. Here, I decided to use this very modern conceit to illustrate a tragedy about two sisters. There were many decisions to make: Do I put the updates in chronological order or backward, like they appear on the site? Do I try to write a transcription of a video? In what order should I present the comments and messages? Because a Kickstarter page is so visual, I had to try to figure out the most natural and dramatically appropriate order in which to present these sections. But those concerns were a pleasure, a puzzle that I had to sort out for myself. I hope I've done Ursula and Olive justice.

Seanan McGuire
is the author of more than a dozen novels and an uncounted number of short stories. (Seriously. She has never counted them.) Her latest work,
A Red-Rose Chain
, was released in September 2015. McGuire won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She lives in a decrepit farmhouse with her two abnormally large blue cats.

• I have always worked best from prompts. Say “Write me a story” and I'll stare at you blankly for days. Say “Write me a story about bees” and I'll give you the world. So when an editor friend asked me to write her a story, I requested a prompt, and was given “Women do better on submarines than men do.” The story constructed itself from there. I'm constantly doing research into one thing or another, and abyssopelagic marine biology is currently one of my obsessions. Knitting the two together was both natural and surprisingly easy, like making soup using a familiar casserole recipe. Just add water, and everything comes out fine at the end.

Sam J. Miller
is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in
Lightspeed, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Minnesota Review, Arts & Letters
, and
Strange Horizons
, among many others. He is a nominee for the Nebula Award, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop. He lives in New York City and at
www.samjmiller.com
.

• “We Are the Cloud” is science fiction, but it's also not. Sauro's world is
our
world, plus some futuristic technology to further oppress the poor. The story extrapolates from the interconnected systems of exploitation I was seeing up close through my work as a community organizer with homeless people. The moms I met in shelters had lost kids to the foster care system; the folks I met at soup kitchens had aged out of foster care . . . so had the boys I saw hanging out in Morningside Park, who got arrested and fed into the prison system by cops looking to fill their quotas, and who also starred in the super-low-budget gay porno flicks some guys I worked with would share. So this is our world, where the systems that are supposed to help people end up hurting them, not for lack of resources (NYC really does spend four times as much to keep someone in a shelter as it would cost to provide someone housing) but because these systems are in place to disempower and divide certain communities. A world where, as in ours, big businesses make a ton of money profiting off the bad decisions that people in a tough spot are forced to make to survive. And in a world like that (in a world like ours) none of us come out clean. We're all culpable. One person's comfort is another person's nightmare. I love my smartphone, but workers in the factories that make them are committing suicide because of how bad conditions are. With that said, of course, people have an astonishing capacity for resistance, and I like to think of “We Are the Cloud” as a supervillain origin story: Sauro's exploitation by the status quo gives him the power to destroy it.

Susan Palwick
is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches creative writing and literature. Her most recent novel,
Mending the Moon
, was published in 2013 and followed three previous novels:
Shelter
(2007),
The Necessary Beggar
(2005), and
Flying in Place
(1992). Her story collection,
The Face of Mice
, appeared in 2007. Recent short fiction has appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, in
Asimov's Science Fiction
, and on the Clarkesworld and
Tor.com
websites. Palwick's fiction has been honored with a Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. She has also been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award.

• The son of a family friend is in prison, under very different circumstances from Graham's. “Windows” is drawn partly from my friend's stories of long, expensive—and sometimes futile—trips to visit him. But Vangie is a fictional character, not this friend. I'm fascinated by narratives about people who are marginalized or forgotten. A more conventional science fiction story would focus on Zel's experience, on what's happening in the generation ship. My own impulse is always to look for the untold story, to think about the people left behind. Vangie navigates her life within tolerances arguably as narrow as those faced by either of her children. This is a story about different kinds of confinement and survival, and about what it sometimes takes for us to acknowledge common humanity.

Cat Rambo
lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her short stories have appeared in such places as
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
,
Tor.com
, and
Clarkesworld Magazine.
She has produced four story collections and a novel,
Beasts of Tabat
, whose sequel,
Hearts of Tabat
, will appear in late 2015. She has been nominated for Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards and is the former editor of
Fantasy Magazine.
She is the current president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Find links to her online work as well as information about her online classes at
www.kittywumpus.net
.

• I actually have a tortoiseshell cat named Taco, and the story grew out of learning that you can't clone one and expect the same fur pattern because of the way X-linked inactivation works. At the same time, I'd been thinking about clones and personality for a while, and that led me to mulling over why you'd want to clone someone, and if the results would be what you expect. When the title, “Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable,” came to me, the story clicked into place.

Jess Row
is the author of the novel
Your Face in Mine
and the story collections
The Train to Lo Wu
and
Nobody Ever Gets Lost.
His fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Atlantic
, and many other venues, as well as three times in
The Best American Short Stories
, and he has received a Whiting Award, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. He's at work on a new novel and story collection as well as a collection of essays on race and American fiction,
White Flights.
He teaches at the College of New Jersey and the City University of Hong Kong.

• It's weirdly fitting, to me, that “The Empties” has found its way to a collection of science fiction and fantasy writing. I'm not an active reader, let alone writer, of science fiction or fantasy as genres—if I had to say what kind of writer I am, I would steal an old line from Trollope and say I'm much more interested in “the way we live now,” in lived human experience, in all its complexity, in the present. But in our present present, the world as it is in 2015, the line between actual technology and science fiction, between satire and sincerity, between what we expect of “the real” and what appears to be only fantasy, is obviously blurry. We have American politicians today who treat Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale
like a governance handbook—politicians who, needless to say, view science itself as fiction. In my own work, it's not so much that I found science fiction; I feel more like it found me.

In “The Empties” I was trying to create a gentle satire of what life might be like among people who are experiencing an actual apocalyptic event through the filter of all the other apocalypses they've ever imagined—in movies, in books, on TV. (Which is, of course, what would happen to us if the lights went off.) I kept trying to keep it lighthearted and metafictional, and yet the story kept pulling me toward the intimate details of one woman's lived experience. And that was before Cressida Leyshon, who edited the story for
The New Yorker
, started asking pointed questions that forced me to create a plausible Vermont-invasion scenario. In the end it seemed many people found the story quite disturbing and also wanted to know if there would be a sequel—a question I've never fielded before. The answer is no. I'm really quite comfortable not knowing how it ends.

Karen Russell
is the author of the story collections
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
and
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
, the novella
Sleep Donation
, and the novel
Swamplandia!
, which was named one of the five best fiction books of 2011 by the
New York Times Book Review
and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program (SOA '06), a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

• I love stories of metamorphoses. One of my favorite Ovid stories was Daphne's flight from Apollo—she escapes him by becoming a laurel tree. The Greek Witness Protection Program. When I was a young reader, this exit strategy struck me as alternately miraculous and horrifying: to become a tree, to forfeit your life as a woman. I don't remember exactly what sent me back to Ovid, but I reread Daphne's story and I started to imagine a reverse Leap—what would a tree do if it were changed into a human?

And then I visited Joshua Tree National Park and saw my first Joshua tree, a Dr. Seussical species that looks like God's first draft of a tree, or maybe Satan's melting telephone poles. I grew up in Florida, and the desert was an alien landscape to me—sublime in the old sense of the word. And the Joshua trees are nothing like the eastern deciduous trees, with their even arpeggios of branches. They seem to be bristling with strange life, as if they are only holding those poses, seconds from uprooting themselves and strolling through the desert. I thought that Florida had prepared me for dinosaur foliage, but the Joshua seems to be an emissary from another planet entirely. And a good candidate for a hitchhiking spirit that jumps into a human woman.

Darwin has written about the coevolution of the Joshua tree and the yucca moth, its exclusive pollinator—it's one of the most extraordinary partnerships in nature. One species cannot survive without the other. That fed into this story, too—two strangers evolve into a couple, and that interdependency both sustains them and makes them doubly vulnerable.

A. Merc Rustad
is a queer nonbinary writer and filmmaker who lives in Minnesota. Favorite things include robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea. Rustad's stories have appeared in
Fireside Fiction
,
Escape Pod
,
Inscription Magazine
,
Scigentasy
,
Ideomancer
,
Daily Science Fiction
, and
Vitality Magazine.
When not buried in the college homework mines or working, Merc likes to play video games, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or at the website
http://amercrustad.com
.

• This is one of the most personal stories I've ever written. It took years before I could understand, growing up, why I felt different and why it was (and is) so hard to interact in a world when your programming doesn't match what everyone tells you you should be.

It started as two different projects, actually. I'd written all the lists in one document, thinking it was going to be a collection of to-do slips assembled into a loose narrative. But then I had this other story chewing its way out (this was the first-person sections) and I was like,
Well, they're both good but I don't know how to make them work individually.
Which was when I realized they were all one story. When I stitched the two bits together, it was this epiphany moment: this is the story I have needed to tell for years and didn't know how, until I saved a new Word document with the title “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps.”