The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
- Автор: Рот Вероника, Адамс Джон Джозеф
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HMH Books : Mariner
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- Жанр: Малые литературные формы прозы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021». Краткое содержание книги:
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
■ When Jonathan Strahan invited me to write a story for The Book of Dragons, I knew instantly I wanted to tackle the theme of sacrificial women. I’ve always felt there was something obsessively misogynistic about tales of nubile virgins being sent to appease devouring beasts. Furthermore, in a harsh land ruled by a patriarchal order, it seemed to me that women who could potentially give birth to sons would be deemed too valuable to throw away. Not yet, anyway. Any woman growing older in the USA is all too aware of how often mainstream US culture vanishes older women, how they are seen to “lose value” once they are no longer young, fresh, and fertile. Too many of science fiction and fantasy’s modern narratives still elide and erase the presence of these women. So why mightn’t a society send worn-out elder women to be sacrificed to the fearsome dragons, who, being beasts, wouldn’t realize they were being gifted something the human society found worthless?
Yet having realized that was the story I wanted to tell, I couldn’t figure out how to tell it. I set it aside and tried three unrelated ideas, all of which felt flat. Then one day I wrote a paragraph in which an old woman woke to discover her husband had died in his sleep beside her. With each step she took, she would move farther away from the life she’d been told she had to live and the person she’d long ago accepted she had to be. The story became an unfolding scroll into a hidden wilderness that she and I traveled together to find out what the dragons really are.
A. T. Greenblatt is a Nebula Award–winning author and mechanical engineer. Her short stories and novelettes have appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Asimov’s, and other venues. Her work has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the WSFA Small Press Award. She currently lives in Philadelphia,
■ This story began as many of my stories do: with an image and an emotion. This time, the image was of a cyclist and a plucky robot going on a journey together, and it felt lighthearted and fun. It made me smile.
But I began writing the first draft of “One Time, a Reluctant Traveler” in the early days of the pandemic lockdown and suddenly, writing something cheerful felt like a farce as the infection rates began to climb, followed closely by the death toll. Everywhere there was a heavy feeling of depression and constant fear. Everyone I talked to felt trapped and powerless. The feeling spanned across my dissimilar social groups and across generations. So I used those emotions to take this image of a story and grow it into something very different than what I first envisioned. Instead of something lighthearted, this became a story about breaking out of a cycle and persevering in a place where there wasn’t much hope. Looking back on it, “One Time, a Reluctant Traveler” was a story I needed to tell myself in that moment.
One day, I’ll write that plucky robot story instead.
Daryl Gregory’s recent books include the Appalachian horror novel Revelator and the novella The Album of Dr. Moreau, both out in 2021. His novel Spoonbenders was a Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award finalist. The novella We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy and the Shirley Jackson Awards. SF novel Afterparty was an NPR and Kirkus best book of the year, as well as a finalist for the Campbell and Lambda Literary Awards. His other novels are the Crawford Award–winning Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet, Harrison Squared, and Raising Stony Mayhall. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories, a Publishers Weekly best book of the year. When there’s not a pandemic on, he frequently teaches writing seminars and is a regular instructor at the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop. This is Daryl’s second appearance in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, following the Hugo-nominated story “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” in 2019.
■ Legendary editor David Hartwell used to call many of my stories “neuro SF” because they were concerned with the hard (and weird) problems of consciousness: the illusion of free will, the nature of the self, the roots of both sociopathy and religious ecstasy, you name it. The idea for “Brother Rifle” was simmering for years after I read about the biological process of decision-making. It turns out that people whose emotion centers are damaged don’t become brilliant analysts like Spock; in fact, they find it harder to make even simple decisions. Certainty is an emotion, the signal from our subconscious that an answer has been reached, and that we can stop running in circles now. With the right tech, that signal can be blocked, diverted, or modified.
When Jonathan Strahan told me he was editing a robot anthology called Made to Order, I realized that this was an opportunity to write about a kind of human robot whose decisions are shaped by hardware and software. But aren’t we all human robots? Even without a chip in our heads, other preexisting conditions—genetics, social institutions, socioeconomic status, the friends and family who surround us, down to the food we ate for lunch and the current chemical states of our neurons—all conspire to narrow our degrees of freedom. Any final decision—red pill or blue pill?—is made inside a black box, beyond our control and outside of conscious awareness. We can only hope that the puppet master living in our brain is a benevolent one.
In other words, my brain decided to write this story, and hopes your brain likes it.
Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrofuturist freedom dreamer, Swahili sea lover, and femme storyteller hailing from Nairobi, Kenya. She holds a Literary Arts MFA from Brown University. Shingai’s short story “Holding onto Water” was longlisted for the Nommo Awards 2020 and her flash fiction “Remember Tomorrow in Seasons” was shortlisted for the Fractured Lit Prize 2020. Her work has also been published in Fantasy Magazine and Khōréō Magazine. She is a Clarion UCSD Class of 2020/2021 candidate and the cofounder of Voodoonauts: A free Afrofuturist workshop for Black writers. Shingai’s novella version, & This Is How to Stay Alive, is now accessible.
■ This story was drawn from grief, both collective and personal. When I think about the ones I’ve loved and lost and the ones who’ve remained, I am in awe of a love that lives outside of time, and I think that is the thing that I do not want to be missed. Baraka’s life carries a deep sadness (that exists in the lives of so many Kenyan boys who are forced to perform a certain type of masculinity to be considered valid in our society), but it also carries moments of deep hope, love, joy, and faith in family—these moments, for me, are where eternity lives. The in-between moments of dancing and breathless laughter, of swimming and endless stories. I am always incredibly conscious of stating that this is just one version of one story and there are hundreds of thousands of other queer and Kenyan and happy and sad and hopeful and curious Black stories to be told. I’m just grateful that this one gets to sit among them.
Mel Kassel is a writer working on her first story collection and novel. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, The Toast, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Clarion alumna, and a World Fantasy Award winner. Despite being a dog person who loves the ocean, she lives in the Midwest with a big gray cat. Find her on Twitter @MelKassel or online at www.melkassel.com.