The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title
Also by Jonathan Strahan
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Eleven
Indicia
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
Future is Blue
Mika Model
Spinning Silver
Two's Company
You Make Patataya
You'll Surely Drown
Salvaging of Ghosts
Even the Crumbs Were Delicious
Number Nine Moon
Things with Beards
Successor, Usurper, Replacemen
Laws of Night and Silk
Touring with the Alien
The Great Detective
Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home
Those Shadows Laugh
Seasons of Glass and Iron
The Art of Space Travel
Whisper Road (Murder Ballad No. 9)
Red Dirt Witch
Red as Blood, White as Bone
Terminal
Foxfire, Foxfire
Elves of Antartica
The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight
Seve Birthdays
The Visitor from Taured
Fable
Copyright
Also From Solaris
'Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume 9' by Jonathan Strahan
'Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume 10' by Jonathan Strahan
THE BEST
SCIENCE FICTION AND
FANTASY OF THE YEAR
Volume Eleven
Also Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)
Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005
Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1 - 11
Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Vols 1 - 4)
The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows
Life on Mars: Tales of New Frontiers
Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron
Godlike Machines
The Infinity Project
Engineering Infinity
Edge of Infinity
Reach for Infinity
Meeting Infinity
Bridging Infinity
Infinity Wars (forthcoming)
Drowned Worlds, Wild Shores (forthcoming)
With Lou Anders
Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery
With Charles N. Brown
The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction
With Jeremy G. Byrne
The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1
The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2
Eidolon 1
With Jack Dann
Legends of Australian Fantasy
With Gardner Dozois
The New Space Opera
The New Space Opera 2
With Karen Haber
Science Fiction: Best of 2003
Science Fiction: Best of 2004
Fantasy: Best of 2004
With Marianne S. Jablon
Wings of Fire
Fearsome Journeys
Fearsome Magics
THE BEST
SCIENCE FICTION
and FANTASY
OF THE YEAR
volume eleven
First published 2017 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
Cover by Dominic Harman
Selection and “Introduction” by Jonathan Strahan.
Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Strahan.
The Copyright section at the end of the book represents an extension of this copyright page.
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
ISBN 978 1 78108 562 2
For Marianne, who has stood by me through twenty years of doing this…
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS IS THE first volume of the second decade of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year anthology series, which started way back in 2007. I’d like to thank Jonathan Oliver and Ben Smith and the team at Solaris for picking the series up and for running with it in the way that they have. I will always be grateful to them for stepping in and for believing in the books and in me. I’d also like to thank Sean Wallace for his help this year, and everyone who worked on the Locus Recommended Reading list. Special thanks to my agent Howard Morhaim who for over a decade now has had my back and helped make good things happen. Finally, the most special thanks of all to Marianne, Jessica and Sophie. I always say that every moment spent working on these books is stolen from them, but it’s true, and I’m forever grateful to them for their love, support and generosity.
CONTENTS
Introduction , Jonathan Strahan
The Future is Blue, Catherynne M. Valente
Mika Model, Paolo Bacigalupi
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
Two’s Company, Joe Abercrombie
You Make Pattaya, Rich Larson
You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay, Alyssa Wong
A Salvaging of Ghosts, Aliette de Bodard
Even the Crumbs Were Delicious, Daryl Gregory
Number Nine Moon, Alex Irvine
Things with Beards, Sam J. Miller
Successor, Usurper, Replacement, Alice Sola Kim
Laws of Night and Silk, Seth Dickinson
Touring with the Alien, Carolyn Ives Gilman
The Great Detective, Delia Sherman
Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home, Genevieve Valentine
Those Shadows Laugh, Geoff Ryman
Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar
The Art of Space Travel, Nina Allan
Whisper Road (Murder Ballad No. 9), Caitlín R. Kiernan
Red Dirt Witch, N.K. Jemisin
Red as Blood and White as Bone, Theodora Goss
Terminal, Lavie Tidhar
Foxfire, Foxfire, Yoon Ha Lee
Elves of Antarctica, Paul McAuley
The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight, E. Lily Yu
Seven Birthdays, Ken Liu
The Visitor from Taured, Ian R. MacLeod
Fable, Charles Yu
Honourable Mentions
INTRODUCTION
Jonathan Strahan
WELCOME TO THE Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. The book you’re holding is a snapshot of sorts, one reader’s view of what was happening in fantasy and science fiction during the tumultuous year of 2016. As political philosophies duelled more nakedly across the world than they have in recent times, and as the world at large turned away from openness and inclusion, the science fiction and fantasy world continued on pretty much as it had before.
The battle between old school Ess-Eff and that New Stuff, which I mentioned last year (and the year before), continued (I suspect it’s been continuing for at least the past century in one form or another), but everyone seemed a bit wearier of it to me, and I for one felt that light could be se
en on the horizon. Words were said (again), social media feeds ignited (again), and awards rules were revised and tinkered with (again), and if the whole thing didn’t peter out, at least it began to look like something we might get past. We’ll see how it all falls out come awards time, but my guess is it won’t prove to be that important at all.
Inclusion, or at least awareness of science fiction and fantasy from outside North American and British publishing, became more widespread as well, with important work by writers from Asian and African nations appearing in most of the major publishing venues during the year. Clarkesworld continued its successful program publishing Chinese science fiction each month, Tor.com added coverage of African SF, Lightspeed and Fantasy published worthwhile special issues, and anthologies like Ken Liu’s Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation and Hassan Blasim’s Iraq +100: Stories from Another Iraq showcased new voices for a wider audience. One of the challenges for inclusion is addressing how time tends to erase the voices of the past, and this year we saw two worthwhile books published that addressed the history of women in science fiction. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Women of Futures Past: Classic Stories and Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp’s Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction together provided an important corrective, showcasing the fine work women writers have always done in our field.
It was particularly satisfying to follow the science fiction and fantasy field’s many awards and see a diversity of writers and fiction collect major awards. Naomi Novik, Nnedi Okorafor, Sarah Pinsker and Alyssa Wong took home well-deserved Nebula Awards, N.K. Jemisin won a landmark Best Novel Hugo Award, while Nnedi Okorafor, Hao Jingfang, and Naomi Kritzer were also recognized with Hugo Awards this year. And close to the end of the year Anna Smaill, Kelly Barnhill, Alyssa Wong, and CSE Cooney received World Fantasy Awards for their work. You can get full details at the Science Fiction Awards Database (www.sfadb.com), but all of their work deserves your attention.
But how was it out there in the trenches this year? Well, it was not too dissimilar from the past few years. A lot of new short fiction was published, and in all sorts of places. I’ve been saying for several years now that upwards of ten thousand original stories are published every year and, without doing a detailed count, that seems to be true this year too. Interesting and worthwhile short fiction was published in magazines, anthologies, collections, as giveaways, on social media feeds, as ebooks, and so on and so on. It was easy to find new fiction throughout the year, but not easy to find it all. I doubt anyone saw everything published, but some of us tried hard. While compiling this book I saw some wonderful stories, the best of which are collected here, but I undoubtedly missed some great ones too.
I’m always asked about trends, and I saw one or two in 2016. Reaction to climate change continues to embed itself in science fiction, even where climate change is not referenced directly. It has become a default causal effect for change, and that is leading to some very interesting fiction. This was also the year that the novella boom hit. While novellas – long short stories and short novels – have always been a part of the field, especially from independent publishers like PS Publishing and Subterranean Press, and have always been featured in fiction magazines like Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and F&SF, we’ve seen more and more publishers focusing on presenting fiction at this length, with Tor.com Publishing in particular delivering some remarkable work. I spend the end of the year working on helping to compile Locus’s (www.locusmag.com) annual Recommended Reading list, and we easily saw double the number of novellas recommended than in previous years, with truly outstanding work from Victor LaValle, Kij Johnson, Kai Ashante Wilson, Alastair Reynolds, China Mieville, and others. I expect to see this continue, especially given the end of year announcement from Penny Press than Analog and Asimov’s would go bimonthly and publish longer issues.
It would be misleading to say that the publication of outstanding Lovecraftian fiction during the year highlighted a trend: we’ve seen Lovecraftian fiction published widely ever since August Derleth went to work back in the 1930s, and we’ve seen reinventions and reinterpretations of Lovecraft before. But three works published during 2016 are worthy of mention. Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and Kij Johnson’s The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe each reinterprets and reinvents Lovecraft in a way that places minorities and their experiences at the forefront of these stories in important and interesting ways. I think these stories, and those collected in several worthwhile anthologies published during the year, make a compelling case that work falling out of copyright and entering the creative commons benefits us all. Certainly, creators must receive fair recompense for their work and share in any rewards it may bring, but we all benefit when creative works eventually (and not too eventually) fall out of copyright and become part of the creative commons.
And there’s a point that I’d re-iterate from previous years, which was truer than ever in 2016 and which underscores the value of books like this one. With so many stories being published and with so many different venues out there, increasingly readers are not reading the same stuff. The science fiction and fantasy field has balkanized, and it’s easy not to look beyond your immediate reading cohort or special interest group and see what your neighbor is reading or writing. This has been a good thing in many ways, but it does mean that we see less consensus on outstanding work, simply because readers haven’t seen this or that book or story. Awards and ‘best of the year’ anthologies and ‘best of the year’ lists all work as a corrective to this, or at least I hope they do.
And where, you might ask, should you have looked for great short fiction in 2016? Well, Tor.com and its publishing sibling Tor.com Publishing continue to be the gold standard for the field, with Tor.com giving us outstanding work from Nina Allan, Theodora Goss, N.K. Jemisin, Paul McAuley, Delia Sherman, Lavie Tidhar, Alyssa Wong and others. Tor.com Publishing produced some of the novellas of the year, all too long for this book unfortunately, but the LaValle and Johnson books already mentioned, and Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Taste of Honey all come with the highest recommendation, and would appear here if room permitted. Fantasy specialist Beneath Ceaseless Skies was the single most improved venue this year, having the best year of its run to date, producing great work from Aliette de Bodard, Seth Dickinson, Yoon Ha Lee, K.J. Parker and others. It is one of the venues to watch in 2017. As should be expected by now, even though it was only an average year for them, Clarkesworld still produced first rate work during the year from Eleanor Arnason, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Rich Larson, Sam Miller, Genevieve Valentine, and others. Lightspeed had one of its best years in some while, publishing excellent work from Steven Barnes, Rich Larson (who was everywhere this year!), and Karin Lowachee. And the other venue that stood out online was Uncanny, which hit its straps in its second year with terrific work from Catherynne M. Valente, Alyssa Wong, E. Lily Yu and others. Horror falls mostly outside the remit of this book, except perhaps for some dark fantasy that sits on the borderline, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Dark and Nightmare, both of which published fine horror fiction throughout the year.
Traditional print venues were, if anything, a little disappointing this year. Asimov’s Science Fiction remains the best print magazine in the field, and your best go-to for great reading. It published outstanding work from Ian R. Macleod, An Owomoyela, Carrie Vaughn, Rich Larson, and Dominica Phettaplace, who published a wonderful series of stories in the magazine. The venerable Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in its second year under editor Charles Coleman Finlay, published good work from many of its regulars and outstanding work from Geoff Ryman, Alex Irvine and Lavie Tidhar. While Analog Science Fiction and Fact was a little out of step with my taste this year, it did publish top notch work from Nick Wolven and Rajnar Vajra, and Interzone continued to publish good work, as it has for many years, with highlights coming from Rich Larson, Rahul Kanakia, Malcolm Devlin and others. And at the very end
of the year, Bard College published a wonderful issue of its anthology-magazine, Conjunctions, guest-edited by Elizabeth Hand, which featured several of the best stories of the year most notably from Peter Straub, John Crowley, Jeffrey Ford, and Lavie Tidhar. It’s well worth seeking out, as is the web-only content, which features a very good story from Charlie Jane Anders.
It was a good year for anthologies, without being a great one. As I mention each year, I edit anthologies myself and so can say little about my science fiction anthologies Drowned Worlds and Bridging Infinity, other than that I am proud of them and think they contain work that would repay your attention. The anthology of the year, and my pick for the World Fantasy Award, was Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe’s book of retold fairy tales, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, which featured outstanding work from Naomi Novik, Daryl Gregory, Amal El-Mohtar, Sofia Samatar and others. In a similar vein, Erin Underwood’s The Grimm Future was also very worthwhile, with great work from Garth Nix and Max Gladstone. If I had to pick a runner-up for best fantasy anthology of the year, it’d be Paula Guran’s consistently entertaining and worthwhile The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, which had great Lovecraftian fiction from Usman T. Malik, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Veronica Shanoes, Lisa L. Hannett and others. Both come highly recommended.
Also worthwhile are Mika Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix 5, the best in this anthology series to date with great work from Rich Larson and others, Ian Whates’ Now We Are Ten, John Joseph Adams’ What the #@&% Is That?, and Jonathan Oliver’s excellent novella anthology, Five Stories High. I’d also make special mention of Jack Dann’s Dreaming in the Dark, the third in his long-running series of short fiction from Australia’s best writers. Definitely recommended, with stories from James Bradley, Lisa L. Hannett and others standing out. I don’t usually mention reprint anthologies here, but I can’t not recommend Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Big Book of Science Fiction, an enormous and endlessly impressive book that outlines an entire history of science fiction in its many, many pages. The VanderMeers together are the best editorial team of our time, taking that title from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling who dominated the 1980s and 1990s, and any of their books are meticulously researched, reliably engaging, and definitely recommended.