The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019 Edition Read online

  THE YEAR’S BEST

  SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY:

  2019 EDITION

  RICH HORTON

  To my son-in-law Joshua Whitman

  and my daughter-in-law Patricia Clarey Horton.

  Copyright © 2019 by Rich Horton.

  Cover art by Tithi Luadthong.

  Cover design by Stephen H. Segal & Sherin Nicole.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-534-5 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-531-4 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at [email protected].

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION by Rich Horton

  A WITCH’S GUIDE TO ESCAPE: A PRACTICAL COMPENDIUM OF PORTAL FANTASIES by Alix E. Harrow

  INTERVENTION by Kelly Robson

  THE DONNER PARTY by Dale Bailey

  HOW TO IDENTIFY AN ALIEN SHARK by Beth Goder

  THE TALE OF THE IVE-OJAN-AKHAR’s DEATH by Alex Jeffers73

  CAROUSELING by Rich Larson

  THE STARSHIP AND THE TEMPLE CAT by Yoon Ha Lee

  GRACE’S FAMILY by James Patrick Kelly

  THE COURT MAGICIAN by Sarah Pinsker

  THE PERSISTENCE OF BLOOD by Juliette Wade

  LIME AND THE ONE HUMAN by S. Woodson

  BUBBLE AND SQUEAK by David Gerrold & Ctein

  SOUR MILK GIRLS by Erin Roberts

  THE UNNECESSARY PARTS OF THE STORY by Adam-Troy Castro

  THE TEMPORARY SUICIDES OF GOLDFISH by Octavia Cade

  THE GIFT by Julia Nováková

  THE BURIED GIANT by Lavie Tidhar

  JUMP by Cadwell Turnbell

  UMBERNIGHT by Carolyn Ives Gilman

  TODAY IS TODAY by Rick Wilber

  THE HEART OF OWL ABBAS by Kathleen Jennings

  The SPIRES by Alec Nevala-Lee

  THE HOUSE BY THE SEA by P H Lee

  FOXY AND TIGGS by Justina Robson

  BEAUTIFUL by Juliet Marillier

  DAYENU by James Sallis

  FIRELIGHT by Ursula K. Le Guin

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  RECOMMENDED READING

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Where to Find the Great SF & Fantasy short fiction?

  Rich Horton

  The State of the Art

  There are a lot of Best of the Year volumes in our field, and frankly I recommend them all. One of the features of SF in 2018 is how much of it there is. There’s enough short fiction that the Hugo shortlist can very nearly ignore men, and still be mostly full of strong stories. (There are a couple of duds, but so it always was.) There’s enough that both the Hugo and Nebula shortlists can completely ignore the traditional print SF magazines (F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Interzone, let’s say), and still be mostly full of strong stories. How then to resolve that issue? Read as many of the Best of the Year volumes as you can, I say! (And, hey, why not subscribe to one of the print magazines, if that’s possible? And try some original anthologies as well.)

  The main distinction, of course, for each of these books is the editor’s individual tastes. (Or so Hannibal Lecter tells us . . . ) We all read a lot of short SF, and have for a long time. And when I see the table of content pages of the other books they are stuffed with stories I almost took for this book (and a couple of overlaps)—so I know that my fellow editors have good taste! Thus part of the equation is: which editor’s taste aligns with yours? But, I’d suggest, if you can, read more—because reading stuff that you didn’t know you’d like is one of the truest joys of reading.

  If I think my book is the best—and I do!—it’s for the obvious reason that my personal taste aligns pretty closely with the editor’s! But that said, I am abashed year after year to realize that Jonathan or Ellen or Neil or one of the other editors, (or, sigh, Gardner!), has chosen a gem or two I really should have taken myself.

  But to return to the wealth of good fiction in the field, let’s take a closer look at the venues in which to find it. I’ve already expressed a wish for more attention to be paid to the print magazines, so I’ll start there. The oldest magazines in the field are Weird Tales, first published in 1923, and Amazing Stories, first published in 1926. Both have undergone numerous deaths and resurrections over the decades. Weird Tales’ last issue appeared in 2014, but rumors of another resurrection have surfaced. More happily, Amazing Stories was revived by publisher Steve Davidson in 2018, and what I’ve seen so far is promising—and I very nearly took Kameron Hurley’s “Sister Solveig and Mr. Denial” for this volume.

  Then there is Analog, known for an emphasis on “hard SF,” founded in 1930 as Astounding Stories, and published continuously since that time. Trevor Quachri is the current editor, and I’ve liked his work with the magazine—this year we feature two stories from them, each from one of the best of their regular contributors: Alec Nevala-Lee’s “The Spires”, and Adam-Troy Castro’s “The Unnecessary Parts of the Story.” (And no, despite the fact that a previous Analog story in these pages was by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, it’s not true that a first name starting with A and a hyphenation are requirements for Analog publication.) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which dates to 1949, has, as its title implies, shows long featured a roughly 50/50 split between those two modes. The editor is C. C. Finlay, and this year we have chosen a remarkable bit of cold-blooded SF horror, “The Donner Party” by Dale Bailey.

  More recent but still venerable magazines include Asimov’s Science Fiction (founded 1976, now edited by Sheila Williams) and the leading UK magazine, Interzone (founded 1982, now edited by Andy Cox.) Asimov’s (like Analog and F&SF) remains hospitable to novellas, and this year we taken from there a very exciting and very long story, “Bubble and Squeak” by David Gerrold & Ctein; as well as “The Gift” by Julia Nováková. From Interzone I came very close to choosing Ryan Row’s “Superbright” and Samantha Murray’s “Singles’ Day.”

  It would be fair to say that most of the magazines in the field founded more recently are online, but there are exceptions. Perhaps most remarkable of these is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, a modestly produced—but always attractive—saddle-stapled magazine from Gavin Grant and Kelly Link’s wonderful Small Beer Press. Thirty-nine issues have appeared since 1996, and the fiction is always lively and original, as evidenced by the two very different stories we chose for this volume: “Lime and the One Human” by S. Woodson, and “Dayenu” by James Sallis. Even more recent is Fireside Magazine, which is a sort of hybrid of electronic and print publication—it began in 2012 as a print magazine, and now, under editor Julia Rios, publishes regular electronic issues and quarterly print issues. I don’t know to what extent the contents are the same, but I do know they publish some outstanding stuff, including Beth Goder’s “How to Identify an Alien Shark” in this book, and P. Djeli Clark’s Nebula and Hugo nominee “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington.” In this context I ought also to mention Galaxy’s Edge, which has been producing regular bimonthly issues since 2013. From 2018, I thought Gregory Benford’s “A Waltz in Eternity” particularly strong—another story that came within a whisker of appearing here.

  Not all the magazines I canvas for stories are SF magazines—you can find wonderful fantastical stories in the traditional “little” magazi
nes, and in wide circulation places like The New Yorker. From there, I’d have liked to use Karen Russell’s “Orange World.” From the Paris Review, I’m thrilled to have one of the late great Ursula K. Le Guin’s last stories, “Firelight”, and from the Stonecoast Review I’m likewise delighted to be able to reprint Rick Wilber’s “Today is Today.” I also saw super stuff from Jess Row in Granta, from Gregory Norman Bossert and many others in Conjunctions, and strong work from Josh Pearce and M. C. Williams in a slim magazine I’m not sure how to characterize, Bourbon Penn.

  Original anthologies have been an important source of new short fiction since at least Frederik Pohl’s Star Science Fiction in the 1950s, and that remains true today. Perhaps the single best anthologist now—along with Ellen Datlow—is Jonathan Strahan, and in 2018 he concluded a brilliant series of anthologies, the Infinity Series, with Infinity’s End, which gave me two stories in the book, by Justina Robson and Kelly Robson (no relation, and the stories are “Foxy and Tiggs” and “Intervention”) and I could have taken two or three more easily. It’s more common these days to see themed anthologies, and this year I took stories from Robots Vs. Fairies (Lavie Tidhar’s “The Buried Giant”) and Aurum, an anniversary anthology of sorts from the Australian publisher Ticonderoga (“Beautiful” by Judith Marillier). Other anthologies of particular note include the latest in the ongoing series of near future-oriented stories from MIT Technology Review’s publishing arm, Twelve Tomorrows, as well as Shades Within Us, Mothers of Invention, Speculative Japan 4 (a selection of fantastical work from Japan), and what might be, alas, Gardner Dozois’ last anthology, The Book of Magic.

  And then there are the novellas—one of the really enjoyable fairly recent trends is the availability of novellas as standalone slim books. I’ve long felt that the novella is a particularly good length for SF, but a hard one to publish in magazines, where they take up so much room. So the recent bloom is welcome. Mind you, most of these books aren’t available for reprint, and many are too long for a book like this. But they deserve your attention. Tor.com Publishing is noted as a leader in this area, and they didn’t disappoint this year with books like Ian McDonald’s Time Was and Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. But there are many other houses publishing such books: this year I was impressed by The Freeze-Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts, from Tachyon; The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum, by Cynthia Ward, from Aqueduct; and The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard, from Subterranean.

  Now it would be disingenuous of me to fail to mention the numerous online sources of short SF. After all, while I do feel that print sources are shortchanged in award nominations (for simple to understand reasons), the online world is full of really outstanding work. Full disclosure—I’m the reprint editor for Lightspeed, and I think we publish great stuff. So too do our fellow recent winners of the Best Semiprozine Hugo, Clarkesworld and Uncanny. And of course Tor.com is absolutely an outstanding site. Beyond those, I’d like to highlight the other online sites I’ve taken stories from this year (and these by no means exhaust the great places to find short SF online): Beneath Ceaseless Skies (which focusses on “literary adventure fantasy”), Giganotosaurus (which tends to publish longer pieces), Apex (which had its origin as a print magazine with a tropism towards horror, but which publishes a very wide range these days), and Kaleidotrope, a magazine I’ve loved since its early days as a saddle-stitched print magazine. I don’t have space to list everything from those places in this introduction (check the acknowledgements page).

  When I was just starting to read adult short SF, I checked the acknowledgements pages for the anthologies I read, and that’s where I learned about Analog and Galaxy and F&SF and Fantastic and New Worlds, etc. And it was a delight to find some of them on my local newsstand. Nowadays it’s pretty easy to find a lot of them on the internet—and one certainly should. But I’ll suggest again that looking in bookstores for anthologies and magazines, or online for how to subscribe to them, or in the local library, is also rewarding—and, I do think, important to the health of the science fiction field—indeed, to the entire literary world.

  A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies

  Alix E. Harrow

  You’d think it would make us happy when a kid checks out the same book a zillion times in a row, but actually it just keeps us up at night.

  The Runaway Prince is one of those low-budget young adult fantasies from the mid-nineties, before J.K. Rowling arrived to tell everyone that magic was cool, printed on brittle yellow paper. It’s about a lonely boy who runs away and discovers a Magical Portal into another world where he has Medieval Adventures, but honestly there are so many typos most people give up before he even finds the portal.

  Not this kid, though. He pulled it off the shelf and sat cross-legged in the juvenile fiction section with his grimy red backpack clutched to his chest. He didn’t move for hours. Other patrons were forced to double-back in the aisle, shooting suspicious, you-don’t-belong-here looks behind them as if wondering what a skinny black teenager was really up to while pretending to read a fantasy book. He ignored them.

  The books above him rustled and quivered; that kind of attention flatters them.

  He took The Runaway Prince home and renewed it twice online, at which point a gray pop-up box that looks like an emissary from 1995 tells you, “the renewal limit for this item has been reached.” You can almost feel the disapproving eyes of a librarian glaring at you through the screen.

  (There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches).

  Our late fee is twenty-five cents per day or a can of non-perishable food during the summer food drive. By the time the boy finally slid The Runaway Prince into the return slot, he owed $4.75. I didn’t have to swipe his card to know; any good librarian (of the second kind) ought to be able to tell you the exact dollar amount of a patron’s bill just by the angle of their shoulders.

  “What’d you think?” I used my this-is-a-secret-between-us-pals voice, which works on teenagers about sixteen percent of the time.

  He shrugged. It has a lower success rate with black teenagers, because this is the rural South and they aren’t stupid enough to trust thirty-something white ladies no matter how many tattoos we have.

  “Didn’t finish it, huh?” I knew he’d finished it at least four times by the warm, well-oiled feel of the pages.

  “Yeah, I did.” His eyes flicked up. They were smoke-colored and long-lashed, with an achy, faraway expression, as if he knew there was something gleaming and forbidden just beneath the dull surfaces of things that he could never quite touch. They were the kinds of eyes that had belonged to sorcerers or soothsayers, in different times. “The ending sucked.”

  In the end, the Runaway Prince leaves Medieval Adventureland and closes the portal behind him before returning home to his family. It was supposed to be a happy ending.

  Which kind of tells you all you need to know about this kid’s life, doesn’t it?

  He left without checking anything else out.

  GARRISON, ALLEN B—THE TAVALARRIAN CHRONICLES

  —v. I-XVI—F GAR 1976

  LE GUIN, URSULA K—A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA

  —J FIC LEG 1968

  He returned four days later, sloping past a bright blue display titled THIS SUMMER, DIVE INTO READING! (who knows where they were supposed to swim; Ulysses County’s lone public pool had been filled with cement in the sixties rather than desegregate).

  Because I am a librarian of the second sort, I almost always know what kind of book a person wants. It’s like a very particular smell rising off them which is instantly recognizable as Murder mystery or Political biography or Something kind of trashy but ultimately life-affirming, preferably with lesbians.

  I do my best to give p
eople the books they need most. In grad school, they called it “ensuring readers have access to texts/materials that are engaging and emotionally rewarding,” and in my other kind of schooling, they called it “divining the unfilled spaces in their souls and filling them with stories and starshine,” but it comes to the same thing.

  I don’t bother with the people who have call numbers scribbled on their palms and titles rattling around in their skulls like bingo cards. They don’t need me. And you really can’t do anything for the people who only read Award-Winning Literature, who wear elbow patches and equate the popularity of Twilight with the death of the American intellect; their hearts are too closed-up for the new or secret or undiscovered.

  So, it’s only a certain kind of patron I pay attention to. The kind that let their eyes feather across the titles like trailing fingertips, heads cocked, with book-hunger rising off them like heatwaves from July pavement. The books bask in it, of course, even the really hopeless cases that haven’t been checked out since 1958 (there aren’t many of these; me and Agnes take turns carting home outdated astronomy textbooks that still think Pluto is a planet and cookbooks that call for lard, just to keep their spirits up). I choose one or two books and let their spines gleam and glimmer in the twilit stacks. People reach towards them without quite knowing why.

  The boy with the red backpack wasn’t an experienced aisle-wanderer. He prowled, moving too quickly to read the titles, hands hanging empty and uncertain at his sides. The sewing and pattern books (646.2) noted that his jeans were unlaundered and too small, and the neck of his t-shirt was stained grayish-yellow. The cookbooks (641.5) diagnosed a diet of frozen waffles and gas-station pizza. They tssked to themselves.

  I sat at the circulation desk, running returns beneath the blinky red scanner light, and breathed him in. I was expecting something like generic Arthurian retelling or maybe teen romance with sword-fighting, but instead I found a howling, clamoring mess of need.

  He smelled of a thousand secret worlds, of rabbit-holes and hidden doorways and platforms nine-and-three-quarters, of Wonderland and Oz and Narnia, of anyplace-but-here. He smelled of yearning.