The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II Read online

  The Best Science Fiction

  and Fantasy of the Year:

  Volume Two

  Jonathan Strahan

  Copyright © 2007 by Jonathan Strahan

  This edition of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two © 2008

  by Night Shade Books

  Cover art © 2008 by John Berkey

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

  Introduction, story notes and arrangement © 2008 by Jonathan Strahan.

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  "The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics," by Daniel Abraham. © 2007 Daniel Abraham. Originally published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (Bantam Spectra), John Klima ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Last Contact," by Stephen Baxter © 2007 by Stephen Baxter. Originally published in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction (Solaris Books), George Mann ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Last And Only, or Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French," by Peter S. Beagle. © 2007 Peter S. Beagle. Originally published in Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Night Shade), Jonathan Strahan ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Orm the Beautiful," by Elizabeth Bear. © 2007 Elizabeth Bear. Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 4, January 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Coat of Stars," by Holly Black. © 2007 Holly Black. Originally published in So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction (Haworth), Steve Berman ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," by Ted Chiang. © 2007 Ted Chiang. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Valley of the Gardens," by Tony Daniel. © 2007 Tony Daniel. Originally published in The New Space Opera (HarperCollins Publishers), Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Glory," by Greg Egan. © 2007 Greg Egan. Originally published in The New Space Opera (HarperCollins Publishers), Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Dreaming Wind," by Jeffrey Ford. © 2007 Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (Viking Children's), Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Witch's Headstone," by Neil Gaiman. © 2007 Neil Gaiman. Originally published in Wizards: Magical Tales from Masters of Modern Fantasy (Berkeley), Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Singing of Mount Abora," by Theodora Goss. © 2007 Theodora Goss. Originally published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (Bantam Spectra), John Klima ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Dead Horse Point," by Daryl Gregory. © 2007 Daryl Gregory. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Winter's Wife," by Elizabeth Hand. © 2007 Elizabeth Hand. Originally published in Wizards: Magical Tales from Masters of Modern Fantasy (Berkeley), Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Wizard's Six," by Alex Irvine. © 2007 Alex Irvine. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Prophet of Flores," by Ted Kosmatka. © 2007 Ted Kosmatka. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "By Fools Like Me," by Nancy Kress. © 2007 Nancy Kress. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Constable of Abal," by Kelly Link. © 2007 Kelly Link. Originally published in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (Viking Children's), Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Jesus Christ, Reanimator," by Ken Macleod. © 2007 Ken Macleod. Originally published in Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge (Pyr), Lou Anders ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Sorrel's Heart," by Susan Palwick. © 2007 Susan Palwick. Originally published in The Fate of Mice (Tachyon Publications). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Holiday," by M. Rickert. © 2007 M. Rickert. Originally published in Subterranean #7, Ellen Datlow guest ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small," by Chris Roberson. © 2007 Chris Roberson. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Kiosk," by Bruce Sterling. © 2007 Bruce Sterling. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Trunk and Disorderly," by Charles Stross. © 2007 Charles Stross. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Urdumheim," by Michael Swanwick. © 2007 by Michael Swanwick. Originally published in The Dog Said Bow-wow (Tachyon Publications). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  For Sean Williams, teller of tales,

  builder of paper spaceships, and dear

  friend for these many years.

  Acknowledgements

  Each year the list of people who need to be thanked for their support in producing this preposterously complicated book grows and grows. This year I'm going to try to keep it as tight as possible. I'd especially like to thank Gary K. Wolfe and Charles N. Brown for sharing their friendship and wisdom while I was assembling this book; Nick Gevers, who has been generous discussing the best fiction of the year; and everyone at Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth, especially Alisa Krasnostein and Ben Payne, who were kind and helpful when things got wobbly. I'd also like to thank Howard Morhaim; Justin Ackroyd; Jack Dann; Brian Bieniowski; and Gordon Van Gelder. Thanks also to the following good friends and colleagues without whom this book would have been much poorer, and much less fun to do: Lou Anders, Deborah Biancotti, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Sean Williams, and all of the book's contributors.

  As always, my biggest thanks go to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie. Every moment spent working on this book was a moment stolen from them. I only hope I can repay them.

  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: Volume One

  Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy

  The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows

  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 Terry Dowling

  The Jack Vance Treasury

  The Jack Vance Reader

  With Gardner Dozois

  The New Space Opera

  With Karen Haber

  Science Fiction: Best of 2003

  Science Fiction: Best of 2004

  Fantasy: Best of 2004

  Introduction

  Jonathan Strahan

  I started reading science fiction (SF) when I was quite young. Like many readers, I discovered the magic and wonder of distant stars and epic voyages on the shelves of my local public library where Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess
of Mars, and so many others awaited me. I was, perhaps, seven.

  My earliest recollections of reading involve SF and fantasy and, as far as I can remember, it made up the majority of my reading through my youth and on through my days at university. It was only when I hit my twenties, though, that I began to identify myself as an "SF reader." This may not seem a particularly important realization, but it was at that point—around the same time that I first encountered trade journal Locus—that I became aware that SF was a genre with a history and a body of canonical work.

  More importantly, there was this idea that works of SF were in dialogue with one another; that writers read the major works of SF being published and wrote new work in response. For example, clearly Joe Haldeman's classic 1974 novel The Forever War was, at least in part, a response to Robert Heinlein's 1959 Hugo Award-winning novel Starship Troopers. This kind of ongoing dialogue gave SF a sense of development, of evolution. A reader could see that modern SF started with something like E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space but progressed to Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space, then to Heinlein's classics and on through the work of Larry Niven, John Varley, Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, and now writers like Ted Kosmatka and Daryl Gregory.

  This idea that SF is in dialogue with itself, that it in some sense progresses and evolves, is an important one. It's what gives readers the sense that SF has an evolutionary centre, a core. In SF this dialogue centers on ideas or concepts, and is reflected in how those ideas or concepts are handled in the fiction itself. A good recent example of this is the way that the Vingean singularity has become a commonplace in the field. It is harder to see this kind of dialogue occurring in fantasy. I suspect that there are several reasons for this. First, and most importantly, historically the SF field has involved a small, discrete community of writers who knew one another and discussed their works and ideas regularly. On the surface of it, this seems to have been much less common in fantasy. Secondly, there are definitional problems. Put simply, it's easier to say what SF is and what it's doing, than it is to say what fantasy is and what it's doing. That said, a convincing argument could be made that there is a much less intense and direct dialogue at play, with vampire stories influencing vampire stories, ghost stories influencing ghost stories, and so on.

  How does this apply to the book you're now holding? Well, a year's best volume like this one is an attempt by one informed reader to identify the best work published in the field in a given year, to put it in context, and to sketch out where SF and fantasy might be going. There are any number of other ways that the best work in the field can be identified and put in context—through reviews in the pages of magazines like Locus, through awards, and through readers' dialogue with one another—but books like this one are an important part of that process.

  Each year, starting in the summer of 2003, I have attempted to read every new SF and fantasy short story published in the English language. I have failed. Locus suggests that there are around 3,000 new stories published every year. I've read close to that number, but each year it has been increasingly clear to me that this only represents a small percentage of the stories being published that could be considered to be SF and fantasy. If you include all of the stories published in books, magazines, newspapers, online, and as audio or visual recordings, there is simply too much material to count, much less consume. This, of course, is not a new observation. It's one I've made myself in introductions to earlier year's best volumes. The real question now is what does that mean for SF or for fantasy? And, how has that enormous increase in the quantity and variety of work being published impacted the book you now hold?

  I believe that the flood of new SF and fantasy that has been published over the past decade has played a part in changing the mechanism that allowed SF's dialogue with itself to continue. The enormous volume of work published makes it impossible for a professional writer to keep up with, never mind comment on, the best work in the field. The enormous variety of work being published means that work, no matter how good, is often only relevant to a small part of the work published before it. In effect, the direct dialogue from old to new works has been disrupted, and the nature of the dialogue has broadened enormously. As critic Gary K. Wolfe pointed out to me in conversation last year, there was a time when a novel like Orson Scott Card's Empire would have inspired or provoked any number of works in response. While still a relatively new novel, and while it's still possible that dialogue may still occur, it seems much more likely that it won't. What this means for SF, and to a lesser extent fantasy, is that the centre as we know it can not hold. SF and fantasy are broadening, changing, diverging. I suspect that many of the new movements identified in SF and fantasy over the past few years—steampunk, new space opera, the new weird, and so on—are at least in part a side effect of this.

  And you can see it in these pages. A story like Ted Chiang's masterful "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" sits at the boundaries of SF and fantasy. Written in a manner that recalls Scheherazade and her Arabian Nights, we nonetheless get a rigorous, well-thought-out tale of a science fictional device operating in a distant time. Similarly, Daniel Abraham deftly sketches a "fairy tale of economics" that is equally disciplined, while also possessing the stuff of magic, and Theodora Goss happily and effortlessly recasts Coleridge and Kublai Khan in "Singing of Mount Abora." These are stories where you can see the centre not holding, the field broadening.

  The purpose of a book like this one is to reflect that change, while also presenting the best in the field. This year's selection of stories covers everything from traditional fantasy with tales of witches, gods, and dragons—in Neil Gaiman's "The Witch's Headstone," Michael Swanwick's "Urdumheim," and Elizabeth Bear's "Orm the Beautiful"—to SF adventures with microcosmic spacecraft, enigmatic alien cultures, and complex personal puzzles—in Greg Egan's "Glory," Chris Roberson's "The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small," and Daryl Gregory's "Dead Horse Point." The stories are in turn dark, funny, adventurous, challenging, and consoling. They do what SF and fantasy are supposed to do.

  While I was reading for this book I began to wonder whether the times SF and fantasy are experiencing make The Best SF and Fantasy of the Year more or less relevant and important for readers, and for the field. After twelve months of reading, and far, far too many stories, I'm convinced more than ever than books like this one are important and necessary. Too few readers can afford to, are willing to, or are interested in reading everything published. It's too much, and too hard. But there are still great stories being published, and in these days of dissolution it's more important than ever to try to understand what is happening in the field.

  And should all that sound a bit academic, this book, more than anything else, is an attempt to entertain and to engage. The stories collected here are the ones that I enjoyed the most during the year, the best and most delightful. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

  Jonathan Strahan

  Perth, Western Australia

  October 2007

  The Merchant and the

  Alchemist's Gate

  Ted Chiang

  Ted Chiang published his first short story, "Tower of Babylon," in Omni magazine in 1990. The story won the Nebula Award, and has been followed by just nine more stories in the intervening sixteen years. All but two of those stories, which have won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Sidewise awards, are collected in Stories of Your Life and Others.

  More than any other story here, the elegant, masterful tale that follows is emblematic of everything this book stands for. Beautifully written, rigorously argued, it seamlessly combines science fiction and fantasy in a manner that makes clear how integral the one is to the other.

  O mighty Caliph and Commander of the Faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence; a man can hope for no greater blessing as long as he lives. The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one's eye, the marvel of its presentation wo
uld not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.

  My name is Fuwaad ibn Abbas, and I was born here in Baghdad, City of Peace. My father was a grain merchant, but for much of my life I have worked as a purveyor of fine fabrics, trading in silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco that are embroidered with gold. I was prosperous, but my heart was troubled, and neither the purchase of luxuries nor the giving of alms was able to soothe it. Now I stand before you without a single dirham in my purse, but I am at peace.

  Allah is the beginning of all things, but with Your Majesty's permission, I begin my story with the day I took a walk through the district of metalsmiths. I needed to purchase a gift for a man I had to do business with, and had been told he might appreciate a tray made of silver. After browsing for half an hour, I noticed that one of the largest shops in the market had been taken over by a new merchant. It was a prized location that must have been expensive to acquire, so I entered to peruse its wares.

  Never before had I seen such a marvelous assortment of goods. Near the entrance there was an astrolabe equipped with seven plates inlaid with silver, a water-clock that chimed on the hour, and a nightingale made of brass that sang when the wind blew. Farther inside there were even more ingenious mechanisms, and I stared at them the way a child watches a juggler, when an old man stepped out from a doorway in the back.