The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  THE BEST

  SCIENCE FICTION AND

  FANTASY OF THE YEAR

  Volume Twelve

  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 & Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1-12

  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

  Infinity’s End (forthcoming)

  Fearsome Journeys

  Fearsome Magics

  Drowned Worlds

  Mission Critical (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 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

  First published 2018 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 © 2018 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: 978-1-78618-100-8

  For the One True Original Jon Oliver, on the occasion of

  our final Best of the Year together, with thanks.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THANKS TO MY long-suffering editor Jonathan Oliver and to the rest of the team at Solaris for embracing the series in the way that they have. I remain grateful to them 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

  Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance, Tobias S. Buckell

  Probably Still the Chosen One, Kelly Barnhill

  The Martian Obelisk, Linda Nagata

  A Series of Steaks, Vina Jie-Min Prasad

  Carnival Nine, Caroline M. Yoachim

  Eminence, Karl Schroeder

  The Chameleon’s Gloves, Yoon Ha Lee

  The Faerie Tree, Kathleen Kayembe

  The Mocking Tower, Daniel Abraham

  Sidewalks, Maureen McHugh

  My English Name, R. S. Benedict

  Crispin’s Model, Max Gladstone

  The Secret Life of Bots, Suzanne Palmer

  Concessions, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

  Confessions of a Con Girl, Nick Wolven

  The Smoke of Gold is Glory, Scott Lynch

  The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine, Greg Egan

  The Lamentation of their Women, Kai Ashante Wilson

  An Evening with Severyn Grimes, Rich Larson

  Though She Be But Little, C. S. E. Cooney

  The Moon is Not a Battlefield, Indrapramit Das

  The Worshipful Society of Glovers, Mary Robinette Kowal

  Come See the Living Dryad, Theodora Goss

  Fairy Tale of Wood Street, Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Babylon, Dave Hutchison

  Bring Your Own Spoon, Saad Z. Hossain

  The Hermit of Houston, Samuel R. Delany

  Belladonna Nights, Alastair Reynolds

  Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue, Charlie Jane Anders

  Also edited by Jonathan Strahan

  Introduction

  Jonathan Strahan

  2017 WAS A challenging year by anyone’s estimation. The United States elected a highly controversial leader. The United Kingdom took political steps that pointed to upheaval and possibly more. Tragedy continued in Syria and in parts of Africa and Europe. Frankly, the whole world seemed to face chaos at every turn, human tragedy was widespread, and the weather didn’t help. Catastrophic storms battered the Caribbean and North America, the world’s permafrost melted, and the oceans rose. Parts of Florida faced regular flooding, while Pacific Islanders continued to wonder, as they have for some time, just how long their countries would be above water.

  But the news wasn’t all bad; it wasn’t all dying reefs, extinctions, and the onset of the end-times. In the second half of the year men in powerful places, who had used their positions to abuse those less powerful than themselves, began to face the consequences of their actions. Some animals on the brink of extinction stepped back, with a little help from their friends. There was even a moment when NASA sent a signal to the Voyager spacecraft, the only human-made object to have left our solar system, to turn on backup thrusters to re-orient the spacecraft so it could continue to report back to home and, after 38 years, they worked! It was a moment to make any space geek feel good.

  But what of science fiction and fantasy, the remit of this book? The Marvel-Disney Military Industrial Entertainment complex continued to spread across the world, like weed clogging a pond, ending the year by acquiring Fox for a mere 60 billion dollars. They did deliver a couple of fun films along the way, though: Spiderman Homecoming, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Thor: Ragnarok, Logan, and various superhero TV shows that all entertained, though some more than others. DC chipped in with the landmark Wonder Woman and a Justice League movie I didn’t bother to see. Denis Villeneuve spent a whole heck of a lot of money to follow his marvellous Arrival with the incredibly loud, incredibly close Blade Runner 2049, which the world wasn’t overly interested in. Maybe it’ll become a cult classic in 20 years, like its prequel. Who knows? And then there were franchise instalments from Star Wars and Planet of the Apes and Alien and just about everyone else. Most of them made money, even if we may not remember them come next summer.

  And what about publishing? The people who produce the stories and books and things? How were they? I’d like to give you a decent survey of the publishing business, but I don’t think I can, really. My impression is that, like everything else, it’s doing well in parts. Last year the science fiction news magazine Locus described the market for short science fiction and fantasy as
stable, though with a lot of change happening. That description probably applies equally well to 2017. The print digests—Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Interzone—continued to publish a mix of high quality short fiction, while almost certainly suffering minor fluctuations in circulation. Analog was possibly the weakest of the big three, but did publish several fine novellas, while Sheila Williams’ Asimov’s and Charles Coleman Finlay’s Fantasy & Science Fiction both stood out.

  Online was, as always, a bit more volatile. The major online magazines—Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed—all flourished, and published some of the best fiction of the year. Tor.com remains the single best source of original short fiction in the field, with fine stories from a wide variety of writers. Clarkesworld andLightspeed both gave Tor.com a run for its money, though, and are essential publications. The next level magazines—Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare, and The Dark—also did well in 2017, with Uncanny and BCS firmly establishing themselves as sources of great fiction. So, too, did Fiyah and Strange Horizons. It’s true, though, that a handful of digital magazines like the Kickstarter-funded Gamut, Grendelsong, and Fantastic Stories closed their doors, while Mothership Zeta only managed a single issue, and a question mark must hang over its long-term future, at least for the moment.

  The publishing trend that seemed to be of most interesting to short fiction readers, though, is the rise of the novella. While it’s true to say that there is nothing new about publishing novellas, and that many of the major novella publishers have been active at some point in the past two decades, this past year or so has been different. Suddenly novellas are getting attention as stand-alone books in ways they rarely have before, garnering significant sales, widespread reviews, and critical acclaim. The leader here is Tor.com Publishing, now in its fourth year. During 2017 they published 30 new titles, including bestsellers Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor and Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan Maguire, and critically acclaimed books from Jeffrey Ford, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Dave Hutchinson, Ellen Klages, Tade Thompson, Martha Wells and J. Y. Yang. Kiernan’s compelling Lovecraftian Agents of Dreamland, Hutchinson’s vastly entertaining and ultimately moving space opera Acadie, and Klages’s lushly romantic Passing Strange all were personal favourites, and would appear in in this book but for length. Full disclosure requires me to state that I work for Tor.com Publishing and acquired the books by Kiernan, Klages, and Gwyneth Jones.

  Tor.com wasn’t alone in producing major novellas, though. FSG issued Jeff VanderMeer’s wonderfully strange The Strange Bird, which followed his landmark novel Borne in 2017. All of the magazines published worthwhile stories, and they featured in anthologies and collections. Among independent publishers, Tachyon produced In Calabria, a new fantasy from Peter S. Beagle, while Subterranean Press published a number of outstanding novellas, including K. J. Parker’s Mightier Than the Sword and Peter Straub’s The Process (is a Process All of its Own). One story stands out, though. At the very end of the year Sylvia Moreno-Garcia published her Kickstarter novella, Prime Meridian, to critical acclaim. A moving story about a women dreaming of life on Mars, it was one of the highlight novellas of the year, and is sure to gain more readers when the print edition appears in July. All in all, my own shortlists show about eighty original novellas of interest for the year, though the Internet Science Fiction Database shows close to 550 as having being published. A real boom time, and confirmation that readers do want short reads.

  Although you wouldn’t know it from sales figures, it was a strong year for original anthologies. I edited Infinity Wars, an anthology of military science fiction from Solaris, that featured stories by Nancy Kress, Indrapramit Das, Peter Watts and others. Given I can pretend little objectivity on the subject, I’ll simply say it’s a book that I’m proud of and recommend. The best of the remaining science fiction anthologies was probably Nick Gevers’ Extrasolar, a strong hard science fiction book from PS Publishing featuring some excellent stories by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Alastair Reynolds, Aliette de Bodard, and others. Extrasolar is a continuation of the Postscripts series, and the strongest anthology PS has produced. Also excellent was John Joseph Adams’ Cosmic Powers, a highly entertaining book of Guardians of the Galaxy style romps from Tobias S. Buckell, Charlie Jane Anders, Yoon Ha Lee, and others. Cat Sparks and Liz Gryzb’s fine Ecopunk! featured strong responses to our climate problems from Claire McKenna, D. K. Mok, and Jane Rawson, while Unsung Stories’ 2084 had excellent work from Dave Hutchinson, Christopher Priest, and others. The other major SF anthology of the year was Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s Infinite Stars, which featured good work from Alastair Reynolds, Linda Nagata, and Elizabeth Moon, along with some top-notch reprints.

  David Brin and Stephen Potts’ anthology, Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World, both stands with one of the best SF anthologies of the year and as a good example of what I’ve come to think of as think-tank fiction. In recent times, most notably with Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, we’ve seen the rise of interesting one-shot projects that aim to solve science fictional problems using stories produced for futurist and other conferences. The strength of these projects lie in the fact that they almost always feature top writers, and are aimed at answering problems. The major weakness is that often the need to fulfil the needs of the project lead to stories that are more fictionalised scenarios than stories. Chasing Shadows had excellent stories from Karl Schroeder, Bruce Sterling and James Morrow, among others. Other similar projects included Kathryn Cramer’s Seat 14C: A Flight to the Future, produced for ANA Airlines and including interesting fiction from Karl Schroeder, Hannu Rajaniemi, Nancy Kress, and others; Junot Diaz’s Global Dystopias, edited for Boston Review and featuring outstanding dystopian fiction from Charlie Jane Anders, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due; and NASA’s Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, with very strong work from Carter Scholtz, Eileen Gunn, and Karl Schroeder.

  It was a slightly weaker year for fantasy anthologies, with most of the best falling into the dark fantasy or horror camps. Still, the best books stand amongst the best fantasy anthologies of the past decade or so. The biggest and best, easily, was Gardner Dozois’s swashbuckling The Book of Swords, an enormous collection of new sword and sorcery including outstanding stories from Scott Lynch, Daniel Abraham, Ken Liu, Kate Elliott, C. J. Cherryh, and more. Giving Dozois a close run for best of the year was Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin’s outstanding The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories, which featured wonderful stories from Saad Z. Hossein, K. J. Parker, Monica Byrne, Usman T. Malik, and others. I expect these two to slug it out for the awards next year and recommend both highly. Of course, any year is incomplete without a book from venerable editor Ellen Datlow, who delivered not one but two strong anthologies. Mad Hatters and March Hares collects new stories in the world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and has powerful work from Andy Duncan, Priya Sharma, and others, while Black Feathers collects stories of dark fantasy and horror featuring birds, and has excellent work from Usman T. Malik, Priya Sharma, and others.

  Also deserving to stand among the best anthologies of the year is a mixed genre book edited by Dave McKean and William Schafer, The Weight of Words, which features stories in response to McKean’s art and which features wonderful work from Alastair Reynolds, Catherynne Valente and Neil Gaiman, among others.

  And there were collections. This year saw some exceptionally fine single author short story collections, all of which deserve your attention. My personal favourites include Christopher Rowe’s long-awaited debut collection, Telling the Map: Stories, which features one of the year’s very best novellas, The Border State. It’s an essential book everyone should have. Also essential was Carmen Maria Machado’s dark and powerful Her Body and Other Parties, which was deservedly nominated for the National Book Award. Caitlín R Kiernan delivered, Dear Sweet Filthy World, which collected recent work mostly from Sirenia Digest and deserves a
World Fantasy Award to match the one its predecessor received. Ellen Klages, who already had published one of the year’s best novellas also had a new collection Wicked Wonders, which featured one my favourites non-genre stories of the year, “Woodsmoke” along with the best of her recent work. These four collections are highly recommended, though I also was impressed by Sofia Samatar’s Tender: Stories, Naomi Kritzer’s Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories, and A. Merc Rustad’s So You Want to be A Robot. And then there was M. John Harrison’s You Should Come With Me Now, a fascinating selection of short pieces that were assembled into something curious and different and rewarding. All in all a good year!

  By the time you get to hold this book 2018 will be in full swing, and some of the best fiction of the new year will already have been published. More or less happily, many of the events that consumed us during 2017 will have come to a head, or at least progressed. The United States will go through major mid-term elections. Brexit will progress. Life will have moved on and science fiction and fantasy will be there, attempting to help us make sense of it all, or at least distract us from ourselves. It should be, if nothing else, a very interesting year. I’m looking forward to discussing it with you next year already.

  Jonathan Strahan

  Perth, December 2017

  ZEN AND THE ART OF STARSHIP MAINTENANCE

  Tobias S. Buckell

  Called “Violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s, Tobias S. Buckell (www.tobiasbuckell.com) is a New York Times Bestselling writer born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, and the islands he lived on influence much of his work. His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and his over 50 stories, his works have been translated into 18 different languages. He has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest novel is Hurricane Fever, a follow up to the successful Arctic Rising that NPR says will ‘give you the shivers.’ He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs.