The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition Read online

  THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY: 2020 EDITION

  RICH HORTON

  Copyright © 2020 by Rich Horton.

  Cover art by Argus.

  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: 978-1-60701-542-0 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-538-3 (trade paperback)

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  Science Fiction in a Time of Plague (and Protest and Climate Change and Political Reform . . . )

  by Rich Horton

  I write this as a worldwide pandemic nears a year since patient zero, ten months since social distancing and other somewhat inconsistent measures to control it have been in place in the US. Well over three hundred thousand people in the US, well over a million people in the world, have died. Surely this is part of a dystopic future? And if it is, has science fiction predicted such a future?

  The short answer, of course, is yes, many times . . . there are many examples in the field’s history of plague-ridden or plague-threatened futures. Among the most prominent are George Stewart’s Earth Abides, Stephen King’s The Stand, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, and Algis Budrys’ Some Will Not Die. James Tiptree, Jr.’s first great short story, “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” involves a plague that will cleanse the Earth of humanity . . . a later short story example is Tananarive Due’s “Patient Zero.” And, indeed, in this very volume there is a story set in a disease-drenched future, Andy Dudak’s “Love in the Time of Immuno-sharing.”

  These stories posit many differing causes for their pandemics . . . often they are human-caused (and sometimes caused by hostile aliens)—indeed sometimes regarded as a blessing. And they portray many different responses. But if the truth be told, they rarely directly address the situation we currently face. And that leads to an age-old question: is it the job of science fiction to predict the future? Or, even, to tell us how to live in different futures?

  In reality I don’t really think it is the “job” of any fiction to “tell us how to live”—and when a writer thinks that is their job they usually ruin their fiction! But it is the job of all of us to learn how to live, by whatever means we have to hand, and great fiction—or good fiction—can help us. And much fiction—certainly science fiction—can teach us about the world we live in, even if it’s set one thousand years in the future on a distant planet, or in an alternate history, or (if fantasy) in a world where magic works.

  It has been said often that there is a “real time period” of any science fiction story—usually roughly the time at which the story was written. The idea is that the story reflects the writer’s concerns, or at least a view of the audience’s concerns. This needn’t mean, at all, that the “future” being depicted is just a version of the writer’s present (thought that certainly happens.) It may also mean that the future being depicted represents either contemporary people’s fears, or hopes.

  The danger of this is that such stories often date quickly. A trivial example is stories that predicted things like the first moon landing—how interesting are those after the real thing happens? And many science fiction stories from the past are actually set in the past of 2020—so it can be odd to read about all those flying cars that were supposed to crowd our skies in the year 2000! And even a far future story that is allegorizing the ’50s—or that is showing how the future may have solved or worsened a ’50s problem—might seem lame by now. And certainly many such stories have become dated—but take a classic counterexample, Isaac Asimov’s early story “Trends,” which is not concerned with the act of exploring the moon, nor the science behind it, but rather with the social reaction to moon exploration. The story’s ideas remain interesting (though its execution is sometimes clumsy, not surprising as it was only Asimov’s third sale.)

  These thoughts came to focus again in recent discussions I’ve had about two outstanding science fiction books of the early 1950s: Edgar Pangborn’s A Mirror for Observers and Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. Pangborn’s novel—an excellent book that deserves a much wider readership—concerns among other things a decaying US society in which political divisions are exacerbated by a loutish nativist politician planning an authoritarian takeover. There’s little doubt that Joe McCarthy was the politician on Pangborn’s mind at the time of writing—but reading it as I did recently I obviously thought of someone else! Granted that there’s a lot more going on in the book, and most readers remember the Martian Observers or the brilliant children Angelo and Sharon more than they remember the politician Joseph Max, the book still speaks directly to tensions of our time, even if it was written about tensions of the 1950s. Likewise, The Space Merchants, allegedly taking place a few centuries in the future, features most prominently advertising dominating society, and a fixation on consumption, that read today can seem to resonate with contemporary critics of capitalism, with the likes of Thomas Piketty perhaps? There is also the silly seeming furniture in the book—pedal-driven cabs, say, or at a larger scale the implausible scheme for colonizing Venus—but the central social concerns still speak to today’s readers. (And I thank Mark Tiedemann for bringing these points to my mind.)

  What does this mean for this book, or any anthology assembled now? I confess my first concern in choosing stories for any book is “did I like the story?”—that is, how did it affect me, one reader, when I read it at this time. It’s hard to deny that some stories that I liked in 2020 might possibly seem dated in 2040, or 2100! So it has always been. But I do feel that many of the qualities that give a story staying power are detectable at initial reading. Some of these are separate from the science fictional or fantastical values—surely excellent prose (granting that tastes in prose do change!) and fully realized living characters are features that will matter to readers for a long time. But even the extrapolative and imaginative aspects matter.

  I opened by discussing the pandemic that dominates much of our attention as I write. But there are other front page issues . . . the political divisions in the US (also noticeable in much of the rest of the world), the ongoing failure of the US to successfully address the legacy of slavery and the continuing issue of racism, the terrible stresses on our environment, the problems of endemic inequality (and the concern than some solutions for that seem likely to level peoples’ status at the lowest tier), etc. etc. Of course most of these problems, in one form or another, have been problems for a very long time. But it is easy to see that some contemporary science fiction is responding directly to contemporary problems. And some of that seemed to me, on reading some stories, to be dated almost on publication. But the best stories, I trust, will continue to transcend 2020’s concerns.

  Thus, this book contains several stories involved with contemporary issues. Radical income inequality—or, I suppose, just the crimes of the rich—is a subject in each of E. Lily Yu’s “Green Glass: A Love Story” and Michael Swanwick’s “Cloud.” Race, and in particular the US’ torn history, is treated in John Kessel’s gleefully nasty “Fix That House!” and in Maurice Broaddus’ soaring “The Migration Suite: A Study in C Sharp Minor.” Environmental decay is not obviously the driver behind any of these stories, though perhaps it explains the situation in Alec Nevala-Lee’s
“At the Fall.” The dark legacy of colonialism is the engine driving the rage in Shiv Ramdas’ “And Now His Lordship is Laughing.” Debbie Urbanski’s “How to Kiss a Hojacki” is a complex story raising many questions, but surely the sometimes terrible gulf between men and women, and the failure of some men to even acknowledge a woman’s agency, is central.

  And then—and then there are a great many stories that aren’t ripped from the headlines! That doesn’t mean they aren’t stories of our day—of course they are! And all of these stories are about real people—no matter their shape, or home planet, or even their biology or lack thereof! And when good writers write about real people, their themes will be, if not timeless, certainly comprehensible to readers of all time. This is science fiction and fantasy, as well, and the stories are often about “ideas”—cool ideas, like the nature of AI in “Empty Box,” or colonizing the Neptune system in “Cloud-Born” or reliving your life in “Anosognosia”—and it matters that those ideas are intriguingly examined—while it also matters that the prose and images are lovely and the people are real and the plots are gripping.

  I don’t know if these stories will still be read in a century—but I hope they will, and I think they will deserve it. And maybe it doesn’t matter as much as my belief that you readers, here in 2020 or 2021, will definitely appreciate this work.

  Green Glass: A Love Story

  by E. Lily Yu

  The silver necklace that Richard Hart Laverton III presented to Clarissa Odessa Bell on the occasion of her thirtieth birthday, four months after their engagement and six months before their wedding date, was strung with an irregular green glass bead that he had sent for all the way from the lunar surface. A robot had shot to the moon in a rocket, sifted the dust for a handful of green glass spheres, then fired the capsule to Earth in a much smaller rocket. The glass melted and ran in the heat of re-entry, becoming a single thumb-sized drop before its capsule was retrieved from the South China Sea. The sifter itself remained on the moon, as a symbol, Clarissa thought, of their eternal union.

  For her thirtieth birthday, they ate lab-raised shrimp and two halves of a peach that had somehow ripened without beetle or worm, bought that morning at auction, the maître d’ informed them, for a staggering sum. Once the last scrap of peach skin had vanished down Clarissa’s throat, Richard produced the necklace in its velvet box. He fumbled with the catch as she cooed and cried, stroking the green glass. The waiters, a warm, murmuring mass of gray, applauded softly and admiringly.

  Clarissa and Richard had known each other since the respective ages of six and five, when Clarissa had poured her orange juice down the fresh white front of Richard’s shirt. This had been two decades before the citrus blight that spoiled groves from SoCal to Florida, Clarissa always added when she told this story, before eyebrows slammed down like guillotines.

  They had attended elementary, middle, and high school together, hanging out in VR worlds after school. Clarissa rode dragons, and Richard fought them, or sometimes it was the other way round, and this taught them grammar and geometry. Sometimes Clarissa designed scenarios for herself in which she saved islands from flooding or villages from disease. She played these alone, while Richard shot aliens.

  These intersections were hardly coincidental. In all of Manhattan there were only three elementary schools, four middle schools, and two high schools that anybody who was anybody would consider for their children.

  College was where their paths diverged: Richard to a school in Boston, Clarissa to Princeton, with its rows and ranks of men in blistering orange. She sampled the courses, tried the men, and found all of it uninspiring.

  The working boys she dated, who earned sandwich money in libraries and dining halls, exuded fear from every pore. There was no room for her on the hard road beside them, Clarissa could tell; they were destined for struggle, and perhaps someday, greatness. The children of lawyers, engineers, and surgeons opened any conversation with comments on estate planning and prenups, the number of children they wanted, and the qualities of their ideal wives, which Clarissa found embarrassingly gauche. And those scions of real power and money danced, drank, and pilled away the hours: good fun for a night but soon tedious.

  Several years after her graduation, her path crossed with Richard’s. Clarissa was making a name for herself as a lucky or savvy art investor, depending on whom you asked, with a specialty in buying, restoring, and selling deaccessioned and damaged art from storm-battered museums. She had been invited to a reception at a rooftop sculpture garden in lower Manhattan, where folk art from Kentucky was on display. Absorbed in the purple and orange spots of a painted pine leopard, she did not notice the man at her elbow until he coughed politely and familiarly. Then she saw him, truly saw him, and the art lost its allure.

  Holding their thin-stemmed wine glasses, they gazed down from the parapets at the gray slosh of water below. It was high tide, and the sea lapped the windows of pitch-coated taxis. Clarissa speculated on whether the flooded-out lower classes would switch entirely to paddleboats, lending New York City a Venetian air, and whether the rats in subways and ground-floor apartments had drowned in vast numbers or moved upwards in life. Richard suggested that they had instead learned to wear suits and to work in analysis in the finance sector. Then, delicately, with careful selections and excisions, they discussed the previous ten years of their lives.

  As servers in sagging uniforms slithered like eels throughout the crowd, distributing martinis and glasses of scotch, Clarissa and Richard discovered, with the faint ring of fatedness, that both were single, financially secure, possessed of life insurance, unopposed to prenuptial agreements, anxious to have one boy and one girl, and crackling with attraction toward each other.

  “I know it’s unethical to have children,” Clarissa said, twisting her fingers around her glass. “With the planet in the shape it’s in—”

  “You deserve them,” Richard said. “We deserve them. It’ll all be offset, one way or another. The proposed carbon tax—”

  His eyes were a clear, unpolluted blue. Clarissa fell into them, down and down.

  There was nothing for it but to take a private shell together. Giggling and shushing each other like teenagers—since Clarissa, after all, was supposed to be assessing the art, and Richard evaluating a candidate for his father’s new venture—they slipped toward the stairs.

  “Hush,” Clarissa said, as the bite of cigarette smoke reached her. Two servers were sneaking a break of their own, up on top of the fragile rooftop bar.

  “Poison tide today,” one said, “up from the canal. Don’t know how I’ll get home now.”

  “Book a cargo drone.”

  “That’s half our pay!”

  “Then swim.”

  “Are you swimming?”

  “I’m sleeping here. There’s a janitorial closet on—well, I’m not telling you which floor.”

  Clarissa eased the stairwell door shut behind her.

  As they descended to the hundredth level, where programmable plexiglass bubbles waited on their steel cables, Clarissa and Richard quietly congratulated each other on their expensive but toxin-free method of transport.

  The lights of the city glimmered around them as their clear shell slid through the electric night. One block from Richard’s building, just as Clarissa was beginning to distinguish the sphinxes and lions on its marble exterior, he covered her small, soft hand with his.

  Before long, they were dancing the usual dance: flights to Ibiza, Lima, São Paulo; volunteer trips to the famine-wracked heartlands of wherever; luncheons at Baccarat and dinners at Queen Alice; afternoons at the rum-smelling, dusty clubs that survived behind stone emblems and leaded windows. And one day, at a rooftop dessert bar overlooking the rooftop garden where the two of them had rediscovered each other, Richard presented Clarissa with the diamond ring that his great-grandmother, then grandmother, then aunt had worn.

  “It’s beautiful,” she breathed. All the servers around them smiled gapped or toothle
ss smiles. Other patrons clapped. How her happiness redounded, like light from the facets of a chandelier, giving others a taste of happiness as well!

  “Three generations of love and hard work,” Richard said, sliding the diamond over her knuckles. “Each one giving the best opportunities to their children. We’ll do that too. For Charles. For Chelsea.”

  Dimly Clarissa wondered when, exactly, they had discussed their future children’s names; but there was nothing wrong with Charles or Chelsea, which were perfectly respectable appellations, and now Richard’s fingers were creeping under the silk crepe of her skirt, up the inside of her stockinged thigh, and she couldn’t think.

  A week later all three pairs of parents held a war council, divided the wedding between them, and attacked their assignments with martial and marital efficiency. Clarissa submitted to a storm of taffeta and chiffon, peonies and napkins, rosewater and calligraphy. She was pinched and prodded and finally delivered to a French atelier, the kind that retains, no matter the hour, an unadulterated gloom that signifies artistry. Four glasses of champagne emerged, fuming like potions. A witchlike woman fitted Clarissa for the dress, muttering in Czech around a mouthful of pins.

  Then, of course, came the rocket, robot, and drone, and Richard’s green glass bead on its silver chain.

  And everything was perfect, except for one thing.

  A taste—a smell—a texture shimmered in Clarissa’s memory of childhood, cool and luminous and lunar beside the sunshine of orange juice.

  “Ice cream,” Clarissa said. “We’ll serve vanilla ice cream in the shape of the moon.”

  This was the first time Clarissa had spoken up, and her Mim, in whose queendom the wedding menu lay, caught her breath, while Kel, her father’s third wife, and Suzette, Richard’s mother, arched one elegant, symmetrical eyebrow apiece.