The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  This is the last time you will be here. It’s up to you to figure out why.

  You stand outside her cage and she rears up to face you.

  “Be careful,” says the man from the shelter.

  Jane’s flank is shaved over a ragged wound and her front leg is splinted. Her brown eyes are calm and confident. She breathes in your face. You draw nearer.

  Jane has been labeled as dangerous. She will need time and training and patience and love. You could fail her. She will never consider alternate timelines or wonder if she deserved better. She will never know when her last day comes.

  This will be your only chance. The most important thing about this moment is not that it has never happened before but that it will never happen again.

  In three years you will rest your hand in the soft ruff of her neck as the needle goes in, and she will relax under your hand, and you will let the moment go.

  You touch her bandaged paw through the cage. She does not withdraw.

  “I’ll never leave you,” you whisper, and you never do.

  Contributors’ Notes

  Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a writer from Spring Valley, New York. His first book, Friday Black, was chosen by Colson Whitehead as a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. He was the 2016–2017 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in fiction at Colgate University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Printers Row, Gravel, Esquire, The Paris Review, Longreads, and others.

  ▪ “Through the Flash” was one of the most difficult stories I’ve had to write, and somehow in that difficulty I knew it was the piece that would complete my collection. I wondered what it would be like to have a young girl who had somehow traveled to the very bottom of evil, seen what was to be seen, and come back intact and ready to help, knowing there was nothing worthwhile in the pit. To get there I needed an event. I imagined a nuclear fallout. One so devastating the future might try to stop it. And what if in their changing of history a timeline was flung from the continuum and set to a loop? What were the possibilities there? This story offered a chance to play in that possibility, starting with Ama, a girl who is as bad as they come and also the best. It was fun to learn who she was: a reformed viscous monarch. Still, it was also very hard to get the story to stabilize in a way that was followable. Time is a quick looping circle and I had to find a way to make that clear. More importantly, I had to find ways to make it feel that even in a loop, even if everything every day is the same, there might be a chance for something better.

  Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the U.K. and grew up in Nigeria and wherever else her father was stationed for work. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Granta and have been honored with a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Award. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the MacDowell Colony and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” Her debut collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, won the 2017 Kirkus Prize and the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour–New York Times book club, among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. She lives in Las Vegas and is working on a novel about you.

  ▪ I was surprised by how much harder this story was to write than other speculative fiction I’d written to that point. It was originally intended to be in my first collection, but I couldn’t get it together to make the story work. With most of the speculative stories I’d written, there was a specific element of “magic,” whether live hair babies or someone with the ability to remove grief, and those elements helped to drive the story forward. In this case the invention (forced nakedness) was a state of being, not a propulsive element that provided any momentum. It didn’t help that Ejem, the protagonist, didn’t want anything tangible that I could send her after; she just knew she didn’t want what other women had. This uncertainty led to a lot of narrative aimlessness, something I’m not used to, and I threw a lot of things at the story that wouldn’t stick (A resistance! A revolution!). What finally grounded the story was lessening the scope to the everyday. It didn’t need a big bang or a “final battle”; it was at its center a story about female friendship.

  Martin Cahill is a writer working in Manhattan and living in Astoria, Queens. He is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop and a member of the New York City–based writing group Altered Fluid. He has had fiction published in Fireside Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer Magazine, and Lightspeed Magazine. Martin also writes nonfiction reviews, articles, and essays for Book Riot, Tor.com, the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, and Strange Horizons.

  ▪ Through every draft of Hark’s story, he and the reader are immediately confronted with the strange: a cut of godmeat stinking of hibiscus and saltwater. “Godmeat” takes the reader to a strange, fantastic world of gods, monsters, and magic and the many people living amid that chaos. It also offers a new perspective on this strange world: that of a chef. Bringing that grounded perspective in with Hark, seeing how he dealt with the fantastical, how he cooked and prepared the gods themselves, was one of my favorite parts of the story. But watching him navigate a world full of beings beyond him with only his innate talents was one thing; seeing him recognize the power and position he finds himself in was another. For someone who’s never had power but who holds so much pain, Hark doesn’t realize until too late what it is he’s allowed himself to keep doing. When he finally does see how his actions have put the world at risk, it breaks something in him and pushes him toward a potential chance at redemption.

  “Godmeat,” can be a story about many things: what addiction to power does to someone in pain, how you can’t truly serve others without giving away a part of yourself, how redemption and change can come at any age, and much more. I hope readers get something out of the story they never realized they were looking for and enjoy this first, strange foray into the Wild World. Most of all I hope readers finish the story and find it hard to shake that first image and what it represents: the raw godmeat on the counter, stinking of hibiscus and saltwater, and the skilled, broken man who will cook it, only just becoming aware of what he’s doing.

  Adam-Troy Castro made his first nonfiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun Award (Japan) and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd Laßwitz (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection Other Stories, which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour in Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife, Judi, and a trio of revolutionary cats.

  ▪ “Pitcher Plant” was initially called “The Intruder,” but the editor said that this was awfully generic and I ultimately agreed. This title actually tells you more, though you won’t know it until after you finish it. I could just as easily have used the metaphor of a roach motel, I guess.

  The premise is one I’ve been toying with for some time, for a novel that has yet to gel and might never (or, conversely, might). If the novel ever shows up, it will not be an “expansion” of this premise but an entirely different creature, attached to this iteration only by the flimsiest of threads. Don’t hold your breath.

  I have been asked how this resolution of the tale would affect life as we know it. My sad answer is that the new normal would be beyond
horrific. Think about it.

  Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. A former resident of Chicago, they are a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and the University of Kansas’s MFA program. Nino’s fiction and essays have been published in dozens of different venues. Their short story collection Homesick won the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, and their novella Finna—about queer heartbreak, working retail, and wormholes—will be published in 2020. Nino has also written plays, screenplays, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer. One time an angry person on the Internet called Nino a verbal terrorist, which was pretty funny.

  ▪ My mom moved to an old farmhouse a couple years ago. To get there, you have to drive down a long, creepy dirt road, past an old graveyard, decrepit barns, and some sheep that are definitely up to no good. So this story started from a particular scene on that dirt road: two characters in a car, and one of them unintentionally starting to drive dangerously fast. Why? What was happening in that car? What were they talking about? The story spun out from what turned out to be a climactic scene. The beginning came easily, but the middle was a muddle. Maddie and Nita’s many conversations sat in a notebook for a couple years until I left Chicago for grad school in Kansas. The feelings of being simultaneously homesick for a place and estranged from it leaked into the story—with some added monsters and creepiness, just to keep things fun. I originally planned to write “Dead Air” as an audio drama, but realized that formatting it as a transcription would create a fourth wall for some extra horror to break through. Not that it was easy. It took multiple drafts before I could strike the right balance between giving readers enough information to understand the story and keeping the found footage aesthetic and structure.

  Phenderson Djèlí Clark is the author of the novellas The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His short stories of speculative fiction have appeared in various online and print venues. He presently resides with his wife, infant daughters, and pet dragon in an Edwardian castle in New England, where he is also a historian of slavery and emancipation.

  ▪ In a Mount Vernon ledger book, nestled between payment for window repairs at George Washington’s Alexandria home and compensation to a ship captain for imported Nankeen cloth, is a curious notation: “By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire.” Washington’s dental problems are part of popular Americana. They weren’t actually wooden (as folklore suggests) but instead made from numerous materials. And perhaps, based on this notation, the teeth of slaves. I wanted to write a story about those mysterious teeth and the lives of the enslaved who parted with them. When it comes to the voices of the marginalized, the historical record at times throws up vexing silences. This case was no exception. Who the enslaved were and their motives remain lost to us. But even if we can’t know, we can still imagine. As the early African American writer Pauline Hopkins maintained, fiction can be utilized to illuminate the larger truths of our fractured past. So in this story I turned to the speculative: mixing bits of history with elements of the fantastic to try to root out those larger truths.

  Hugo Award–winner Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and they are a regular contributor to Tor.com and B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog. Their short fiction credits include Fireside Fiction, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their debut novella, River of Teeth, was published in 2017 and was a 2018 Hugo and Nebula Award finalist. Their adult novel debut, Magic for Liars, was published in 2019. You can find links to their work at www.sarahgailey.com; find them on social media @gaileyfrey.

  ▪ “STET” was a labor of spite. I wrote this story after a conversation in which someone professed skepticism at the ability of a writer of genre fiction to read literary fiction and explore form in a similar fashion to a “literary” writer. At the time I tried to engage them about the false distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction, but when I got home, I was still angry. I decided to write a piece that in form referenced some of my favorite literary fiction, told in footnotes that inject emotion into an otherwise dry piece. My partnership with Fireside Fiction in publishing this was what brought it to the level it is now, both in content and in form.

  Daryl Gregory’s most recent novel, Spoonbenders, was a Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award finalist for 2018. His next novel will be coming out in 2020. Other recent works are the young adult novel Harrison Squared and the novella We Are All Completely Fine, which won the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus Awards. The SF novel Afterparty was an NPR and Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His other novels are the Crawford Award–winning Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet, and Raising Stony Mayhall. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories (a Publishers Weekly top five sci-fi/fantasy book of the year). His comics work includes Legenderry: Green Hornet and the Planet of the Apes and Dracula: Company of Monsters series (the latter cowritten with Kurt Busiek).

  ▪ Here’s the metaphor I’m going with: stories are rivers fed by many streams. “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” came from many different ideas flowing through my head over the years, and it’s impossible to say which came first, or which gave rise to the others. It’s the mixing that makes the story. Here’s a short and incomplete list of influences—ready? Our civilization’s failure to deal with global warming because we can’t think in global timescales, or even generational ones. My grandmother’s house in Tennessee. The unlikely tidiness of science fiction stories in which huge problems are identified and solved in the space of weeks or months. Love. My trip to Colombia. My best friend in high school, who risked coming out to me. Richard O. Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty, which introduced me to bowerbirds and the arbitrariness of aesthetic choices. Inflatable car-lot air dancers. Love. The video game my son created in high school which featured Fibonacci sequences. A time-lapse video of a bean sprout reaching for a ladder. The wacky 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, and Alanna Collen’s considerably less wacky but more eye-opening book, 10% Human. Andy Duncan’s meteoric mnemonic. My aging parents. My divorce. My aging body. My children. Love.

  Ada Hoffmann’s debut novel, The Outside, was released in June 2019. She is also the author of the collection Monsters in My Mind and of dozens of speculative short stories and poems as well as the Autistic Book Party #ownvoices review series. Her work has been longlisted for the BSFA Award for shorter fiction, the Rhysling Award, and the D Franklin Defying Doomsday Award. Ada is a computer scientist at a university in eastern Ontario, Canada, where she teaches computers to be creative and undergraduates to think computationally about the human mind. She has also worked professionally as a church soprano, free food distributor, and token autistic person. Ada is bisexual, genderfluid, polyamorous, and mentally ill. She lives with her primary partner, Dave, her black cat, Ninja, and various other animals and people. You can find Ada online at ada-hoffmann.com, on Twitter at @xasymptote, or support her work on Patreon at patreon.com/ada_hoffmann.

  ▪ “Variations on a Theme from Turandot” began in 2010, when I saw a full production of Turandot for the first time. I was enchanted by the characters and the music but dismayed by more or less the entire third act. My first instinct was to write a fix-it fic, the kind of thing that could go up on Archive of Our Own (AO3). But the more I worked on sketching out my ideas, the more I realized that there were more layers to them. I needed Liù not just to grow a backbone but to realize she was in an opera and to enter something very timey-wimey and meta. The questions I was tackling with this fic were so big that in 2010 I couldn’t quite work out where to start.

  In 2013 the story idea was still itching in my head. Having some time off school between degrees, I set aside a few weeks and dived into all of the Turandot scholars
hip I could find, as well as a musicological biography of Puccini. (I would recommend the paper “Turandot’s Victory,” by Jack M. Balkin, as a starting point.) This led me, finally, to a very clean-looking first draft.

  This was already the most careful planning and research I had ever put into a short story, but it was only the start of a long process of further revision. With every personal rejection and rewrite request I found even more layers that needed to be added in, including the hesitant relationship between the two sopranos in the “real” world and all the characterization of the Prince, whose interiority I had been actively avoiding at first. I consider the finished story one of the finest things I’ve ever written.

  N. K. Jemisin is the first author in the genre’s history to win three consecutive best novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She has been a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops, and a writer for the comic book Green Lantern: Far Sector. In her spare time she is a gamer and a gardener, and she is single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick, Magpie. Her essays and fiction excerpts are available at nkjemisin.com.

  ▪ I wrote “The Storyteller’s Replacement” to practice using a frame to tell a story, and to dig a little at the roots of modern English-language fantasy to see what I could learn from them. In particular I decided to see if I could tell a Grimm Brothers–esque fairy tale that suited my tastes better—you know, retaining the quintessential fucked-upness of the old tales but without the anti-Semitism, etc. What fascinates me about the Grimms’ tales is how utterly amoral they are. Moralizing, certainly—but not moral. In the pursuit of their goals, Grimm heroes frequently do horrific things; their heroism is strictly in the eye of the beholder. So what the tales teach, when they’re shared with children, is not only the societal morals being centered but also which morals a society considers disposable in the process. I wanted to explore that. (And I’m aware that there are entire fields of study devoted to deconstructing folklore like this, but I’m not a scholar. When I want to understand a thing, I write.)