The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine Read online

  THE BEST

  SCIENCE FICTION AND

  FANTASY OF THE YEAR

  Volume Nine

  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 - 9

  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 (forthcoming)

  Godlike Machines

  Engineering Infinity

  Edge of Infinity

  Fearsome Journeys

  Fearsome Magics

  Reach for Infinity

  Meeting Infinity (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

  First published 2015 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 © 2015 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 (US): 978 1 78108 308 6

  ISBN (UK): 978 1 78108 309 3

  For Marianne, with love, as always.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My sincere thanks to the publishers and writers who have sent me their work, and to the authors who generously have allowed their stories to appear here. Special thanks to Jonathan Oliver, Ben Smith and David Moore at Solaris Books, who have given the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year such a great home. My thanks, too, to my agent, Howard Morhaim, who stood with me through a long and difficult year. And finally, as always, my sincere thanks to my loving wife Marianne, and daughters Jessica and Sophie. Every moment working on this book was stolen from them, and I am grateful to them for their kindness and understanding.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction, Jonathan Strahan 11

  Slipping, Lauren Beukes 17

  Moriabe’s Children, Paolo Bacigalupi 37

  The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family,Usman T. Malik 55

  The Lady and the Fox, Kelly Link 71

  Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind), Holly Black 97

  THE LONG HAUL from the ANNALS OF TRANSPORTATION, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009, Ken Liu 117

  Tough Times All Over, Joe Abercrombie 137

  The Insects of Love, Genevieve Valentine 171

  Cold Wind, Nicola Griffith 195

  Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No.8), Caitlín R. Kiernan 205

  Shadow Flock, Greg Egan 227

  I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There, K. J. Parker 255

  Grand Jeté (The Great Leap), Rachel Swirsky 275

  Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They are Terrifying, Alice Sola Kim 329

  Shay Corsham Worsted, Garth Nix 347

  Kheldyu, Karl Schroeder 361

  Caligo Lane, Ellen Klages 393

  The Devil in America, Kai Ashante Wilson 401

  Tawny Petticoats, Michael Swanwick 439

  The Fifth Dragon, Ian McDonald 469

  The Truth About Owls, Amal El-Mohtar 489

  Four Days of Christmas, Tim Maughan 503

  Covenant, Elizabeth Bear 509

  Cimmeria: From The Journal of Imaginary Anthropology, Theodora Goss 525

  Collateral, Peter Watts 543

  The Scrivener, Eleanor Arnason 571

  Someday, James Patrick Kelly 587

  Amicae Aeternum, Ellen Klages 601

  Also From Solaris

  INTRODUCTION

  Jonathan Strahan

  EVERY CHRISTMAS I take a short vacation with my family. It’s a time of year when the city gets hot and uncomfortable, making the cooler, greener southwest a tempting holiday retreat. This year we headed to a small town about 300km south of Perth where, between long mornings at the beach and longer evenings by the pool, I worked late into the night assembling the annual recommended reading list for Locus magazine.

  I’ve been part of the group that compiles the Locus list for nearly twenty years, starting as a book reviewer in 1997 and continuing after I became reviews editor in 2002. The nature of the job has changed over the years: what started as a few additions by a newcomer became long summer days sitting around arguing over inclusions and exclusions with publisher Charles Brown, who would fly to Australia so we could work on the list together. All these years later it’s evolved into a process where I compile a list of short fiction with a panel of experts and then discuss book recommendations with current publisher Liza Trombi, after which I retreat to work on my year in review essay.

  It’s also a time when I work on this book, reading stories that arrive at the last minute, and making final story selections, something that used to happen much earlier in the year. I look back to compiling Science Fiction: Best of 2003 with Karen Haber, which we submitted to our publisher in August of 2003, with some amazement. With digital publishing dominating the short fiction market, stories now appear right up to the very last minute of December, and often aren’t selected or edited until moments before that. Delivery dates for volumes in this series have moved from August to October to December and into January. And so, what was once pure vacation time has now become time for a little vacation and a lot of reflection on the state of science fiction and fantasy.

  To help make my vacation seem more like a vacation I usually take something with me to read that has nothing to do with the SF field. This year it was Carl Wilson’s fascinating discussion of taste and the music of Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. In a fascinating book Wilson talks about how consensus views of art grow and change over time, how critics and commentators striving for standards of ‘objective excellence’ lead to the formation of a canon of accepted excellence, and how that canon is and needs to be broken down and reformed over time. He says at one point that though “... science fiction fans may believe strongly in their own tastes, in aggregate they are acclimatized to the notion that separate taste groups can coexist peace
fully, without the need for external, official inspection and verification.” That is to say, without affirmation from a cultural elite that their tastes are acceptable. However, he goes on to talk about how the interaction between taste groups, between self-appointed cultural elites and so on has the positive effect of allowing a new consensus of excellence to evolve, become widely accepted, challenged and then broken down again, regardless of whether that conversation is uniformly welcomed or not.

  Wilson’s book struck a chord with me, as I wrote about the state of the science fiction field. It seemed quite clear to me that the reviewers, editors and commentators I’d read in my youth – from James Blish to Terry Carr to Charles N. Brown – were the sort of cultural Brahmins who argued for and helped with the formation of a science fiction canon. Best of the Year annuals, like those edited by Donald Wolheim or Harry Harrison or Gardner Dozois, lists of award nominees and winners, and assorted end of year round-ups, are all part of the discussion that leads to a consensus view, one that needs constantly to be built up and torn down as science fiction evolves and changes.

  And the SF field is changing in interesting and exciting ways. Where it once presented an almost wholly white male worldview pretty much exclusively sourced from North America and the United Kingdom, it is now increasingly diverse and varied. Fiction from China, India, Africa, and South America is slowly (too slowly!) becoming available, as is work in English translation thanks to the work of Ken Liu and others, and we are seeing fiction written by and from the viewpoint of non-white, non-male, non-cisgendered people become more widely published and more widely read than ever before. This diversity of writers and of perspectives comes at a time when SF needs a fresh influx of ideas and perspectives to rejuvenate itself.

  While diversity is to be nurtured and encouraged and is enriching our field, I suspect that the conversation around it is yet to reach the stage where we see taste groups break down and new consensuses emerge about what the SF canon should and should not be for the coming years. But I can see that time coming.

  When I entered SF back in the mid-1980s I heard a lot about that ‘conversation’, the dialogue between individual works of science fiction and fantasy and between readers and commentators on the field who were engaged in identifying the SF/F literary ‘canon’. I also rather absorbed the compelling narrative that sees SF start in the ‘Golden Age of SF’ with Hugo Gernsback, glance off Heinlein and Campbell, and make its way to the present with a ricochet here and there off the New Wave and Cyberpunk. I certainly didn’t think much about what happened outside that narrative, or how that narrative itself might change, or how it needed to be challenged from time to time. That came later.

  Looking around the field now, it seems to me that we are at as stage where the evolution of that main conversation – the discussion of where SF comes from, where it is today and where it’s going tomorrow – is being set to one side as discrete taste groups form, evolve and change, a process greatly assisted by changes to publishing and distribution that have empowered new voices and alternate viewpoints and reduced the influence of traditional elites. Discussions are going on within those groups about what is and is not excellent, and those discussions are perhaps not yet completely ready to move outwards to change the field at large. It certainly seems to me that at the same time the field is becoming more diverse, the barriers of cost and access to the means of publication have been removed, and as a result fiction is being published in ever increasing quantity. That means it’s more and more possible to read within a taste group, and to not engage with the wider field. This atomizing of the field seems to me to be a natural part of the cycle of forming a new consensus view of SF. The SF conversation I loved when I became active in the field is only enriched when more people take part, and when it is fully open to others taking part. I’m optimistic that will happen more in coming years.

  I believe that a small part of the process of moving to a broader more inclusive conversation of SF and fantasy is the regular inclusion of new voices in best-of-the-year annuals like this one. With so much work being published in some many different places and in such quantity it can be challenging for casual readers to find interesting work and to see how the consensus is evolving on what is and is not of interest. Books like this one, and the valuable ones compiled by my colleagues Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Stephen Jones, Nisi Shawl and others, become important simply because they present manageable selections to be consumed, considered and both argued with and applauded.

  As to the short fiction market, it was a difficult year. Unless something changes, it seems destined for a niche status. A lot of what happened was familiar, with magazines opening and closing, new editors being appointed and old editors retiring, but some markets looked better than others.

  It seemed to me that anthologies were the most reliable source of good original short fiction this year, something that’s not always true, with a strong diverse set of books being published. Certainly Hieroglyph, Monstrous Affections, Rogues, Kaleidoscope, Upgrade, Long Hidden, Twelve Tomorrows, and others stood out. Print magazines, which featured a lot of good work, were less impressive than usual. Asimov’s was the best out there, but seemed a little weaker to me than in recent years. Analog continued to deliver its particular brand of hard SF to a dedicated readership, but encouragingly continued to change under the editorial direction of Trevor Quachri. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, once the gold standard for SF/F short fiction but somewhat disappointing of late, had a solid but unremarkable year. Interestingly publisher Gordon Van Gelder announced the appointment of a new editor at year’s end and I wish Charles Coleman Finlay great success with rejuvenating this well-loved and muchrespected publication.

  Tor.com published a wide variety of excellent short fiction and was the best of the online magazines this year. While it doesn’t have a clear focus, and while I couldn’t tell you what makes a Tor.com story a ‘Tor.com story’, it’s always worth reading. Subterranean, which sadly closed at the end of the year ending a seven year run, published some very fine work during 2014, including major novellas by KJ Parker, Rachel Swirsky, and others. It will be missed. Both Clarkesworld and Lightspeed also had good years, but were a little indistinguishable from one another at a story level. Newly launched Uncanny seems promising, but is yet to really establish a personality. Also of interest were Terraform, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Apex.

  And now, it’s time for me to step out of the way and let you get to the stars of this show: the stories. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I have, and that at the end of it, you’ll have a bit of an idea of the year that was. And, of course, I’m already reading for next year and hope you’ll join me when volume ten hits the shelves. Till then, enjoy!

  Jonathan Strahan

  Perth, Western Australia

  January 2015

  SLIPPING

  Lauren Beukes

  Lauren Beukes (www.laurenbeukes.com) is an award-winning, best-selling novelist who also writes comics, screenplays, TV shows and, occasionally, journalism. She is the author of Broken Monsters, The Shining Girls, Zoo City, Moxyland, Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past and the graphic novel, Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom with Inaki Miranda. As a screenwriter, she is currently adapting Zoo City for South African producer Helena Spring. She’s worked on the satirical political puppet show, Z News, and the travelogue of Archbishop Desmond Tutu: The South African Story, and written on kids shows for Disney, including Mouk and Florrie’s Dragons and was the showrunner on South Africa’s animated TV series, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika, which ran for 104 episodes from 2006-2009. In 2010, she directed the documentary Glitterboys & Ganglands, about Cape Town’s biggest female impersonation beauty pageant. The film won Best LGBT film at the San Diego Black Film Festival.

  1. High Life

  THE HEAT PRESSES against the cab, trying to find a way in past the sealed windows and the rattling air-conditioning. Narrow apartment blocks swo
op past on either side of the dual carriageway, occasionally broken up by a warehouse megastore. It could be Cape Town, Pearl thinks. It could be anywhere. Twenty-three hours’ travel so far. She has never been on a plane before.

  “So what’s the best part about Karachi?” Tomislav says, trying to break the oppressive silence in the back – the three of them dazed by the journey, the girl, her promoter, and the surgeon, who has not looked up from his phone since they got in the car, because he is trying to get a meeting.

  The driver thinks about it, tugging at the little hairs of his beard. “One thing is that this is a really good road. Sharah e Faisal. There’s hardly ever a traffic jam and if it rains, the road never drowns.”

  “Excellent.” Tomislav leans back, defeated. He gives Pearl an encouraging smile, but she is not encouraged. She watched the World Cup and the Olympics on TV; she knows how it is supposed to be. She stares out the window, refusing to blink in case the tears come.

  The road narrows into the city and the traffic thickens, hooting trucks and bakkies and rickshaws covered in reflecting stickers like disco balls, twinkling in the sun. They pass through the old city, with its big crumbling buildings from long ago, and into the warren of Saddar’s slums, with concrete lean-tos muscling in on each other. Kachi abaadi, the driver tells them, and Pearl sounds it out under her breath. At least the shacks are not tin and that’s one difference.

  Tomislav points out the loops of graffiti in another alphabet and taps her plastic knee. “Gang signs. Just like the Cape Flats.”