The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven
Page 1
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE CONTRARY GARDENER
THE WOMAN WHO FOOLED DEATH FIVE TIMES
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
GREAT-GRANDMOTHER IN THE CELLAR
THE EASTHOUND
GOGGLES (C. 1910)
BRICKS, STICKS, STRAW
A BEAD OF JASPER, FOUR SMALL STONES
THE GRINNELL METHOD
BEAUTIFUL BOYS
THE EDUCATION OF A WITCH
MACY MINNOT’S LAST CHRISTMAS ON DIONE, RING RACING, FIDDLER’S GREEN, THE POTTER’S GARDEN
WHAT DID TESSIMOND TELL YOU?
ADVENTURE STORY
KATABASIS
TROLL BLOOD
THE COLOR LEAST USED BY NATURE
JACK SHADE IN THE FOREST OF SOULS
TWO HOUSES
BLOOD DRIVE
MANTIS WIVES
IMMERSION
ABOUT FAIRIES
LET MAPS TO OTHERS
JOKE IN FOUR PANELS
REINDEER MOUNTAIN
DOMESTIC MAGIC
SWIFT, BRUTAL RETALIATION
NAHIKU WEST
FADE TO WHITE
SIGNIFICANT DUST
MONO NO AWARE
NIGHT SHADE BOOKS
An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC
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 1–7
Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volumes 1–4
The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows
Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier
Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron
Godlike Machines
Engineering Infinity
Edge of Infinity
Fearsome Journeys (forthcoming)
Reach for Infinity (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: Volumes 1–2
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
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven
© 2013 by Jonathan Strahan
This edition of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven
© 2013 by Night Shade Books
Cover art © 2012 by Sparth
Cover design by Claudia Noble
Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich
Introduction, story notes, and arrangement © 2013 by Jonathan Strahan.
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-460-8
Night Shade Books
An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC
New York, New York
www.nightshadebooks.com
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
Introduction, story notes and arrangement by Jonathan Strahan. © Copyright 2013 Jonathan Strahan.
“The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times” by Eleanor Arnason. © Copyright 2012 Eleanor Arnason. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jul-Aug 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Great-Grandmother in the Cellar” by Peter S. Beagle. © Copyright 2012 Avicenna Development Corporation. Originally published in Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, published in the US by Random Childrens and in the UK & Commonwealth by Hot Key Books. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard. © Copyright 2012 Aliette de Bodard. Originally published in Clarkesworld, No. 69, June 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Troll Blood” by Peter Dickinson. © Copyright 2012 Peter Dickinson. Originally published in Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures (Small Beer Press). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Close Encounters” by Andy Duncan. © Copyright 2012 Andy Duncan. Originally published in The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (PS Publishing). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Blood Drive” by Jeffrey Ford. © Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (Hyperion). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Adventure Story” by Neil Gaiman. © Copyright 2012 Neil Gaiman. Originally published in McSweeney’s 40. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“The Grinnell Method” by Molly Gloss. © Copyright 2012 Molly Gloss. Originally published in Strange Horizons, September 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Beautiful Boys” by Theodora Goss. © Copyright 2012 Theodora Goss. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“The Easthound” by Nalo Hopkinson. © Copyright 2012 Nalo Hopkinson. Originally published in After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (Hyperion). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson. © Copyright 2012 Kij Johnson. Originally published in Clarkesworld 71, August 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Bricks, Sticks, Straw” by Gwyneth Jones. © Copyright 2012 Gwyneth Jones. Originally published in Edge of Infinity (Solaris Books). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Goggles (c 1910)” by Caitlín R. Kiernan. © Copyright 2012 Caitlín R. Kiernan. Originally published in Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution (Tachyon Publications). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“The Education of a Witch” by Ellen Klages. © Copyright 2012 Ellen Klages. Originally published in Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, published in the US by Random Childrens and in the UK & Commonwealth by Hot Key Books. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“The Color Least Used by Nature” by Ted Kosmatka. © Copyright 2012 Ted Kosmatka. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Significant Dust” by Margo Lanagan. © Copyright 2012 Margo Lanagan. Originally published in Cracklescape (Twelfth Planet Press). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Two Houses” by Kelly Link. © Copyright 2012 Kelly Link. Originally published in Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (William Morrow). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Mono No Aware” by Ken Liu. © Copyright 2012 Ken Liu. Originally published in The Future Is Japanese (Haikosoru). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden” by Paul McAuley. © Copyright 2012 Paul McAuley. Originally published in Edge of Infinity (Solaris Books). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Swift, Brutal Retaliation” by Meghan McCarron. © Copyright 2012 Meghan McCarron. Originally published in Tor.com, 4 January 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“About Fairies” by Pat Murphy. © Copy
right 2012 Pat Murphy. Originally published in Tor.com, 9 May 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Nahiku West” by Linda Nagata. © Copyright 2012 Linda Nagata. Originally published in Analog: Science Fiction Science Fact, October 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Let Maps to Others” by K. J. Parker. © Copyright 2012 K. J. Parker. Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls” by Rachel Pollack. © Copyright 2012 Rachel Pollack. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jul-Aug 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Katabasis” by Robert Reed. © Copyright 2012 Robert Reed. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov-Dec 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“What Did Tessimond Tell You?” by Adam Roberts. © Copyright 2012 Adam Roberts. Originally published in Solaris Rising 1.5 (Solaris Books). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“The Contrary Gardener” by Christopher Rowe. © Copyright 2012 Christopher Rowe. Originally published in Eclipse Online, October 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Joke in Four Panels” by Robert Shearman. © Copyright 2012 Robert Shearman. Originally published under the title “Madalyn Morgan,” One Hundred Stories, 29 January 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Domestic Magic” by Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem. © Copyright 2012 Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem. Originally published in Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric & Arcane (Solaris Books). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Reindeer Mountain” by Karin Tidbeck. © Copyright 2012 Karin Tidbeck. Originally published in Jagganath and Other Stories (Cheeky Frawg Books). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente. © Copyright 2012 Catherynne M. Valente. Originally published in Clarkesworld 71, August 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
“A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones” by Genevieve Valentine. © Copyright 2012 Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Clarkesworld 73, October 2012. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
For Marianne, with love.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been one of the most challenging anthologies I’ve had to work on in my career. With ever more work published, and ever more demands on my time, I began to wonder if it would ever be complete. For that reason, I’d like to thank my wife and co-editor Marianne S. Jablon for her heroic work in helping me get this manuscript finished. Without her diligent, careful, and tireless efforts, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year would probably not have made it out this year and certainly would not be as good as it is. I’d also like to thank Gary K. Wolfe for his help in doing an emergency read and edit of the introduction after it was lost in a computer failure just before the book was due to be delivered. Thanks also to everyone at Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth, who helped keep me grounded and focussed in my reading during the year, and to all of the book’s contributors, who helped me get this year’s book together at the last. A special thanks, as always, to Liza Groen Trombi and all of my friends and colleagues at Locus, and to Ross E. Lockhart at Night Shade Books, who has been wonderful to work with year after year. And two special sets of thanks. As always, I’d like to thank my agent, the dapper and ever-reliable Howard Morhaim, whose annual parties are a highlight of the year. And finally, my extra, extra special thanks to my wife Marianne and my daughters Jessica and Sophie: every moment spent working on this book was stolen from them.
INTRODUCTION
JONATHAN STRAHAN
More than anything else 2012 was an interesting year for science fiction and fantasy. While people concerned with the business of the genre—publishers, editors, publicists—looked for ways to innovate and expand, to find new ways to get stories before the eyes of readers, those of us who are interested in the artistic health of the genre—writers, artists, critics, readers—were looking carefully at how things were proceeding as well.
Probably the single most interesting discussion of science fiction and fantasy during the year was prompted by “The Widening Gyre,” a fascinating and worthwhile review essay by UK critic Paul Kincaid published in the LA Review of Books where he examined a handful of “best of the year” anthologies like this one. In his essay Kincaid raised the question of whether science fiction had grown “exhausted,” not in the sense of becoming tired or rundown, but rather of having run short on compelling ideas, possibly having lost faith in or connection to the future.
In the extensive online discussions that followed, this sense of “exhaustion” seemed to be prompted by a number of recent works that could be said to be nostalgic, hearkening back to the way the future was, rather than attempting to engage meaningfully with the world we live in today, with all of its economic, climatic, and political upheavals and radical scientific discoveries. If a central mission of science fiction is to connect our world to meaningful believable futures, Kincaid and others asked, are too few writers currently addressing that mission? Kincaid also raised the question of whether fantasy might be losing touch with its mission as well. Touching on stories like K. J. Parker’s excellent novella “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong”—which went on to win the World Fantasy Award in November—Kincaid asked in what sense such works, with no overtly fantastical events or beings at all, were in any sense even “fantasy.” Couldn’t such a tale be transplanted into a historical setting with little apparent change?
I do think science fiction—at least at the experimental/developmental end of the spectrum—is in a period of self-examination. Some of this is just our field’s constant navel gazing, but some is a deliberate attempt to find a way to imagine any kind of science fictional future at all. It is certainly imaginatively less innovative to revisit 1940s-style SF adventures, with those bright futures that now seem to have failed us, than to try to envision another kind of future from our own less optimistic age. And yet that is the challenge, surely. Not to imagine the way the future was, but the way the future might be. While I don’t think answers to this exist yet, I do think you can see the beginnings of attempts to find them.
The fantasy question vexes me a little more. I am not attracted to litmus tests and lab results for genre, but I do understand and accept the need to be able to meaningfully connect slipstream works to the field, to explain how quasi-historical fiction like that by, say, Guy Gavriel Kay or K. J. Parker belongs in fantasy at all. Discussing his novel Some Kind of Fairy Tale on The Coode Street Podcast recently, Graham Joyce talked about how he used the intrusion of the fantastic into our own world as a tool to interrogate our world, the people and relationships within it. Similarly, Kay has often claimed that placing historical events and people in a secondary world, as he does in major works like Tigana and Under Heaven, allows him to interrogate those events in new and worthwhile ways. I find myself convinced by this and, while I agree with Kincaid that it is valuable to have some idea of what fantasy is and what its mission might be, it’s equally valuable to be able to use it in the ways it has been by Kay, Parker, Joyce, and many others.
As always is the case each year, I couldn’t help but observe a number of interesting and encouraging trends. In 2012 science fiction and fantasy continued to move slowly but hopefully away from the white male Anglo Saxon Mayberry of its youth and towards a more mature, diverse, and inclusive future. This trend was nowhere better evidenced than in the brace of strong original anthologies that focused on fiction from other points of view. The best of these included Nick Mamatas & Matsumi Washington’s The Future Is Japanese, Anil Menon & Vandana Singh’s Breaking the Bow, Eduardo Jiménez Mayo & Chris N. Brown’s Three Messages and a Warning, Ivor Hartmann’s AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Lavie Tidhar’s The Apex Book of World SF, and Brit Mandelo’s Beyond Binary. While “Mono No Aware” by Ken Liu, inclu
ded here, was originally from The Future Is Japanese, it was only one of many on a fairly long shortlist of stories from these books that were actively considered for this book. The fact that these books were published and discussed during the last twelve months shows that, if nothing else, science fiction and fantasy is looking to become more inclusive, something which is long past due, even if there is still a long way to go.
The other trend I noticed was that writers, editors, and publishers, attempting to come to terms with the ever changing face of publishing today, looked to some interesting and slightly different ways to get their stories into the hands of readers. During the year David Hartwell and Tor.com published a short ebook-only anthology, The Palencar Project, that featured five stories based on a painting by John Jude Palencar. The stories were also offered free of charge on Tor.com. At around the same time Solaris Books in the UK published Solaris Rising 1.5, an ebook only anthology that was positioned as a “bridge” volume between the first and second books in the Ian Whates edited series. Finally, award-winning editor Gardner Dozois published Rip-Offs!, a very strong audio-only anthology which came out at the very end of the year, something John Scalzi did successfully several years ago with METAtropolis. While none of these approaches were new—and they stand in for countless similar examples—they nonetheless demonstrate creative ways of addressing an increasingly volatile and multifaceted market.
I could also point out how, with more and more venues for short fiction appearing, and others just a Kickstarter away, we continue to live through an extraordinary time for short story collections, with books like Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot Palace, Margo Lanagan’s Cracklescape, Lucius Shepard’s The Dragon Griaule, Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry and Andy Duncan’s The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, all able to stand with the very best the field has produced. I could also touch on how, despite strong books like Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s After and Ann VanderMeer’s Steampunk III: Steampunk Reloaded, it struck me as a weaker year for original anthologies. The short fiction scene also continues its inevitable change, with the distinction between print and online publication become more and more meaningless, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Subterranean Magazine establishing themselves as the new Big Four magazines to watch, although Beneath Ceaseless Skies was easily the most improved venue of 2012 and is nipping at their heels along with GigaNotoSaurus and others.