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

  THE BEST

  SCIENCE FICTION

  and FANTASY

  OF THE YEAR

  volume eight

  edited by Jonathan Strahan

  An Imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd

  First published 2014 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  US ISBN 978 1 78108 216 4

  UK ISBN 978 1 78108 215 7

  Cover by Dominic Harman

  Selection and "Introduction" by Jonathan Strahan.

  Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Strahan.

  Pages 615-618 represent an extension of this copyright page

  The right of the authors to be identified as the authors

  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.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Designed & typeset by Rebellion Publishing

  Printed in the US

  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 1–8

  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

  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

  For Bill Schafer, friend and maker of wonderful books…

  Acknowledgements

  Editing this Year’s book has been a special pleasure and I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in compiling it, from the publishers and writers who have sent me their work, to the authors who generously allow their stories to appear here. Some people deserve special thanks, though. I feel very fortunate that the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year has found a new home at Solaris, and I’d like to thank my new editor, Jonathan Oliver, for bringing his editorial skill to the book: he has been consistently terrific to deal with, especially when issues arose. I’d also like to thank Ben Smith, Michael Molcher, David Moore and the entire Solaris team. Special thanks, too, to my brilliant 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

  Some Desperado »» Joe Abercrombie

  Zero for Conduct »» Greg Egan

  Effigy Nights »» Yoon Ha Lee

  Rosary and Goldenstar »» Geoff Ryman

  The Sleeper and the Spindle »» Neil Gaiman

  Cave and Julia »» M. John Harrison

  The Herons of Mer de l’Ouest »» M. Bennardo

  Water »» Ramez Naam

  The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling »» Ted Chiang

  The Ink Readers of Doi Saket »» Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  Cherry Blossoms on the River of Souls »» Richard Parks

  Rag and Bone »» Priya Sharma

  The Book Seller »» Lavie Tidhar

  The Sun and I »» K J Parker

  The Promise of Space »» James Patrick Kelly

  The Master Conjurer »» Charlie Jane Anders

  The Pilgrim and the Angel »» E. Lily Yu

  Entangled »» Ian R Macleod

  Fade to Gold »» Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Selkie Stories Are for Losers »» Sofia Samatar

  In Metal, In Bone »» An Owomoyela

  Kormak the Lucky »» Eleanor Arnason

  Sing »» Karin Tidbeck

  Social Services »» Madeline Ashby

  The Road of Needles »» Caitlín R Kiernan

  Mystic Falls »» Robert Reed

  The Queen of Night’s Aria »» Ian McDonald

  The Irish Astronaut »» Val Nolan

  THE BEST

  SCIENCE FICTION

  and FANTASY

  OF THE YEAR

  volume eight

  Introduction

  Jonathan Strahan

  Welcome to The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Sixty-five years ago two readers, Everett Bleiler and Ted Dikty, assembled the first science fiction ‘best of the year’ annual. It collected a dozen stories from Astounding Science Fiction, Planet Stories and other magazines of the time, a number of which, like Ray Bradbury’s “Mars is Heaven!”, went on to become classics and are now part of the SF canon.

  That book, The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, was the first annual snapshot of the SF field, and it appeared at an interesting time. Up until 1950 SF had been published almost exclusively in pulp magazines. Pulp magazines were published on cheap paper in enormous numbers, often with huge print runs. They were low-cost productions with bright, garish covers and lurid sensationalistic contents. The first SF pulp, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, appeared in 1926 and was followed by magazines with titles like Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fantastic Adventures, and, most notably, Astounding Science Fiction.

  Campbell took on the editorship of Astounding in 1937 and under his guidance it became the flagship publication of the first ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’. Campbell preferred and promoted a particular sort of writing: hard SF stories with linear narratives where protagonists, almost exclusively white males, solved problems or countered threats often using technological or engineering solutions. It was a period that established many of the most enduring tropes of the field, and it was almost exclusively told in short stories in pulp magazines.

  By the time Bleiler & Dikty assembled their book, though, that era was almost over. World War 2 paper shortages had a devastating effect on pulp magazine production, and there seemed to be a push for SF to grow up and move on. Robert Silverberg argued in a recent essay for the Library of America that the true Golden Age of SF was the 1950s, saying that, “Until the decade of the fifties there was essentially no market for SF books at all” and that the 1950s saw “a spectacular outpouring of stories and novels that quickly
surpassed both in quantity and quality the considerable achievement of the Campbellian golden age.”

  Bleiler & Dikty’s annual, the first of six they’d produce covering the first half of the 1950s, was an important part of that second Golden Age. Their books, and books like them that began to appear through the decade, provided the useful service to readers of presenting a selection of the ‘best’ and hopefully most enjoyable new stories, while also making an argument for what good SF was and what it might be. I also suspect that they were a symptom of a new self-awareness in SF, as it began to look back critically on its short history and forward to what it might become.

  Bleiler & Dikty were followed by Judith Merril, who between 1956 and 1967 edited a series of annuals that deliberately pushed the boundaries of what was considered to be SF, reading widely and presenting stories that promoted higher literary standards in a series that actively worked to break down the barriers between SF and the mainstream. Edmund Crispin performed an equally vital role at a similar time in the UK. They, in turn, were followed in the mid-1960s by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, Lester Del Rey, Arthur Saha, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, and others.

  These books, these annual reports from one reader to the SF world, became a feature of the field, entertaining and rewarding readers and both arguing for a particular kind of SF (or fantasy) and reflecting the SF of the day. The most significant best of the year annuals of the modern era, the enormous books edited by Gardner Dozois, define the period from the mid-1980s through to the end of the 1990s, and continue to the present day. Dozois, a fine and literary writer and editor, assembled a series of books that were definitive and all-encompassing, but very much aimed at what he considered ‘core SF’. David G. Hartwell, editor of the other major SF annual anthology series of the time, often discussed in his annuals how he was deliberately attempting to shape the SF field by presenting a selection of stories that clearly belonged within the bounds of genre.

  When I began this series in 2007 I hoped to steer a path between Judith Merril and David G. Hartwell, to assemble a book that was broad and wide-ranging, but didn’t lose sight of science fiction’s history or its core. It’s an awareness that I hope you will find reflected in this latest volume of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year where stories like Geoff Ryman’s “Rosary and Goldenstar”, an alternate history that sits on the boundaries of SF sits alongside a space opera like Yoon Ha Lee’s “Effigy Nights” and the networked future of Ramez Naam’s “Water”, and where a slipstream fantasy like M. John Harrison’s “Cave and Julia” is in the same volume as a Neil Gaiman fairy tale retelling in “The Sleeper and the Spindle” or Priya Sharma’s powerful “Rag and Bone”. I have restricted this book to stories that I believe are definitely SF or fantasy in some way. That’s the contract I have with you, the reader, so some stories that I loved this year aren’t here because I couldn’t convince myself they belonged (the best example of this is Karen Joy Fowler’s wonderful “The Science of Herself” which has a science fictional worldview, but isn’t really SF at all), while the stories you’re about to encounter will hopefully delight and entertain while providing a view of what SF was about in 2013.

  I’m often asked, was this a good year? The stories in this book come from a 365 day period during which thousands of stories appeared in magazines, in anthologies and collections, shoehorned into the back of novels and downloaded as giveaways, featured on websites and sent as email. So many stories were published, and often on such short turnarounds, that I was still being sent new ones as I sat down to write this introduction. Was it a good year? Well, it depended what you stumbled upon. I think you could have had a great reading year, or a pretty ordinary one, based on nothing more than luck. It was certainly an interesting one. I was encouraged by the way SF stories in books like Twelve Tomorrows, An Aura of Familiarity, and We See a Different Tomorrow engaged with the world in a way SF sometimes manages to avoid, while I felt the fantasy in books like Rags and Bones and Once Upon a Time helped to push the boundaries of fantasy. It was a good year for me, and I think you’ll see that as you read through this book.

  Were there stories I’d like to have included that aren’t here? Certainly. A handful of stories eluded me for contractual and other reasons, and practical limitations meant that I avoided really long stories. If I could encourage you to seek out one story that’s not in this book (if I could sneak one more in) it would be Caitlín R. Kiernan’s extraordinary and hallucinatory SF novella “Black Helicopters”, which deserves to be here and to be seen as one of the best stories of the year.

  There is one final thing I should mention here. This year sees The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year moving to a new home. After seven years in sunny California, the book now comes to you from Solaris Books in what sounds like an almost perpetually rainy part of England. I’d like to thank Jonathan Oliver (a talented anthologist in his own right and, very happily for me, my editor), Ben Smith and the Solaris crew for making me and the series feel so welcome and for doing such an incredible job on it. I’d also like to thank you for picking up this book. If you’re a long-time reader: welcome back. If you’re new to the series: pull up a chair, I think you’re going to enjoy yourself.

  Jonathan Strahan

  Perth, Western Australia

  January 2014

  SOME DESPERADO

  Joe Abercrombie

  Joe Abercrombie (www.joeabercrombie.com) attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Manchester University, where he studied psychology. He moved into television production before taking up a career as a freelance film editor. His first novel, The Blade Itself, was published in 2004, and was followed by sequels Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings, and standalone novels Best Served Cold, The Heroes, and Red Country. His next book is young adult fantasy novel Half a King. Joe lives in Bath with his wife, Lou, and his daughters, Grace and Eve, and his son Teddy. He still occasionally edits concerts and music festivals for TV, but spends most of his time writing edgy yet humorous fantasy novels.

  Shy gave the horse her heels, its forelegs buckled and, before she had a notion what was happening, she and her saddle had bid each other a sad farewell.

  She was given a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Not a good one at a brief assay, and the impending earth gave her no time for a longer. She did her best to roll with the fall – as she tried to do with most of her many misfortunes – but the ground soon uncurled her, gave her a fair roughing up and tossed her flopping into a patch of sun-shrivelled scrub.

  Dust settled.

  She stole a moment just to get some breath in. Then one to groan while the world stopped rolling. Then another to shift gingerly an arm and a leg, waiting for that sick jolt of pain that meant something was broke and her miserable shadow of a life would soon be lost in the dusk. She would've welcomed it, if it meant she could stretch out and not have to run no more. But the pain didn't come. Not outside of the usual compass, leastways. As far as her miserable shadow of a life went, she was still awaiting judgement.

  Shy dragged herself up, scratched and scuffed, caked in dust and spitting out grit. She'd taken too many mouthfuls of sand the last few months but she'd a dismal premonition there'd be more. Her horse lay a few strides distant, one foamed-up flank heaving, forelegs black with blood. Neary's arrow had snagged it in the shoulder, not deep enough to kill or even slow it right off, but deep enough to make it bleed at a good pace. With her hard riding that had killed it just as dead as a shaft in the heart.

  There'd been a time Shy had got attached to horses. A time – despite reckoning herself hard with people and being mostly right – she'd been uncommon soft about animals. But that time was a long time gone. There wasn't much soft on Shy these days, body or mind. So she left her mount to its final red-frothed breaths without the solace of her calming hand and ran for the town, tottering some at first but quickly warming to the exercise. At running she'd a heap of practice.

  Town was perhaps a
n overstatement. It was six buildings and calling them buildings was being generous to two or three. All rough lumber and an entire stranger to straight angles, sun-baked, rain-peeled and dust-blasted, huddled about a dirt square and a crumbling well.

  The biggest building had the look of tavern or brothel or trading post or more likely all three amalgamated. A rickety sign still clung to the boards above the doorway but the name had been rubbed by the wind to just a few pale streaks in the grain. Nothing, nowhere, was all its proclamation now. Up the steps two by two, bare feet making the old boards wheeze, thoughts boiling away at how she'd play it when she got inside, what truths she'd season with what lies for the most likely recipe.

  There's men chasing me! Gulping breath in the doorway and doing her best to look beyond desperate – no mighty effort of acting at that moment, or any occupying the last twelve months, indeed.

  Three of the bastards! Then – provided no one recognised her from all the bills for her arrest – They tried to rob me! A fact. No need to add she'd good and robbed the money herself from the new bank in Hommenaw in the company of those three worthies plus another since caught and hung by the authorities.

  They killed my brother! They're drunk on blood! Her brother was safe at home where she wished she was and if her pursuers were drunk it would likely be on cheap spirits as usual, but she'd shriek it with that little warble in her throat. Shy could do quite a warble when she needed one, she'd practiced it 'til it was something to hear. She pictured the patrons springing to their feet in their eagerness to aid a woman in distress. They shot my horse! She had to admit it didn't seem overpowering likely that anyone hard-bitten enough to live out here would be getting into a sweat of chivalry but maybe fate would deal her a winning hand for once.