After I wrote this story, though, I was sort of at a loss for what to do with it. It didn’t seem to fit any of the SF/F markets out there, and I didn’t feel like it was literary enough to try that route. I knew it was a good story. It was just doing its own thang, not slotting neatly into any particular kind of category. That happens sometimes. So I set it aside until a place appeared for it or until I could make a place for it—which happened when I published a short story collection. Nice to see my patience pay off!
Usman Malik is a Pakistani writer who divides his life between Florida and Lahore. He has won the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Awards and been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and storySouth Million Writers Awards. His stories have been reprinted in several best-of-the-year anthologies. In his spare time Usman likes to run distance. You can find him on Twitter @usmantm.
▪ As a child I was fascinated by snakes. I used to dream about having a snake as a best friend—weird, I know, but you have to understand I grew up watching movies about shape-shifting serpents and reading stories about the naag mani, the subcontinental version of the philosopher’s stone that the oldest and wisest of king cobras is said to possess. In 2013 I was crossing a rain-thrashed street in Florida when a black eastern racer sped past me, scaring the crap out of me (I didn’t realize until later what the species was). That was when I finally decided to put my pen to paper.
The idea of the child bride and the nomads of Thal and Rajasthan came from my memories of Pakistan and my wonderment at what a relationship between a man who raises a girl to marry and his bound protégé must be like. I have known such families in Pakistani villages and small towns, and are those not the stories we must tell, no matter how unseemly?
The most challenging thing about this story was the voice. I had to get it just right, because the narrator is an addict and I had to make sure he would ramble but just enough not to impede the flow of the story. That took patience and a lot of time—commodities I find in short supply in my life these days.
Theodore McCombs is a 2017 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in San Diego. His stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Guernica, Lightspeed Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Nightmare Magazine, among others. He lives with his partner and his cat in San Diego.
▪ Peter Wilson’s Twentieth Century Hangings suggested the formal conceit for this story—an execution registry, with the convicts’ crimes, motives, and last words drily noted—and supplied the white-hot rage that powered me through the writing of it. Because of course, most of the original crimes were against women. The execution registry, with its radically compressive form, juxtaposes these atrocities with the pathos of the men’s executions and their wretched life circumstances; that juxtaposition seemed important to writing about capital punishment and to writing about misogyny. Sometimes when male authors write violence against women, even when it’s properly treated as horrific and wrong, there’s a tinge of indulgence to it. The diabolical super-rapist and the foregone victim is still a fantasy of male power over women, even if that power is finally rejected or restrained. In “Six Hangings . . .” the men are hopelessly outclassed, their power limited and provisional, and yet their violence still does lasting, bitter harm. That seems truer to my experience.
The story’s other major influence is Henry James’s Boston. I’d just finished The Portrait of a Lady, which I loved—those wily purple sentences belong to a brilliant old queen—but in retrospect I was responding to The Bostonians, which I had long ago given up on, with its ugly satire of nineteenth-century suffragism. So I suppose one can look at this story as my weirdest, grisliest, tardiest hot take on The Bostonians, if that seems fun.
Seanan McGuire is the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Alex Award–winning author of more than forty novels, starting with 2009’s Rosemary and Rue and extending through this year’s The Unkindest Tide. Seanan has written for the Alien and Predator franchises and has written comics for Marvel Comics, including Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, and Ghost Spider. Her short fiction has appeared in collections published around the world. Seanan doesn’t sleep very much and can be bribed into sitting still with offerings of Disney memorabilia, horror movies, and cold Diet Dr Pepper. When not writing, she can be found at Disney parks and in that one haunted cornfield where all those people disappeared last October. Where the corn is, Seanan can be found. Seanan lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she shares an idiosyncratic old house with her abnormally large, fluffy cats and several axolotls and spends her days writing too many words, pretending to catch up on her email, and reading comic books.
▪ Everyone makes big assumptions about monsters. Including what does and does not deserve the label. As someone who’s worked in wildlife rescue and conservation, I am far too aware that sometimes the difference between “monster” and “magnificent” is just a matter of having soft-looking fur and big dewy eyes. Charismatic megafauna gets all the good press, even when it isn’t deserved.
“What Everyone Knows” came from the questions of how monsters are labeled and how many of the things we view as monstrous are simply natural behaviors of creatures that deserve to be left alone. I have big feelings about reptile rescue and conservation. Some of those big feelings leak out in this story.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist who writes science fiction. Founder of the website io9, she is the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize in science. Her first novel, Autonomous, won the Lambda Literary Award, and her latest novel is The Future of Another Timeline. She is currently at work on a nonfiction book about archaeology and ancient abandoned cities. She cohosts the sci-fi podcast Our Opinions Are Correct and writes regularly about science and tech for New Scientist, the New York Times, Slate, and other publications.
▪ I first started thinking about “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” while I was visiting an archaeological dig at Cahokia, an ancient indigenous city that’s just outside East St. Louis. Though nobody is sure why it was abandoned, we know Cahokia probably had a population of over 30,000 people a millennium ago—making it bigger than Paris at the time. All that remains of it today are massive earthen mounds, one of which has a footprint the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza. It’s huge, and you can still climb it today. The rest of the city lies under at least two feet of earth. I spent two summers in a row visiting the dig and talking to the archaeologists working on it, who told me a lot about how the city changed over the three to four hundred years it was occupied. Cities are not static; Cahokia went through many different configurations and political structures before the last urbanites left in the 1400s. East St. Louis is actually built on top of a Cahokian neighborhood, as is St. Louis. So there is an ancient metropolis buried under the modern cities in the area, and that got me thinking about what would be built on top of East St. Louis eventually. I think of this story as taking place at the very beginning of a new kind of world that might replace our own. And who knows? Maybe it will have more in common with Cahokia than it will with East St. Louis.
Silvia Park’s stories have appeared in Tor.com, Joyland Magazine, and The Margins (Transpacific Literary Project) and won the 2018 Fiction Prize from Sonora Review. Silvia is a graduate of the NYU MFA program and the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She’s working on a novel about robotics in postwar Korea.
▪ When the Asian American Writers’ Workshop released a call for submissions on the theme of plastic, I knew how this story would end.
Last year I read a news article about the vaquita, a deathly endangered porpoise with a beatific smile. A rescue team of veterinarians hauled in a rare female in the hopes of saving the species, which has fewer than thirty left in the wild. Placed in a sea pen, she deteriorated rapidly. They rushed to release her back into the ocean, but by then it was too late.
There is something immensely poignant about our e
fforts to salvage what we’ve ruined and destroyed.
I wanted to apply this earnest, flawed lens to a mermaid species, who look so eerily human it’s tempting to think we understand them. Written in a gaze that is all too limited, this is a story that mourns and scolds and celebrates our unceasing attempts at empathy, restitution, and conservation—even if it’s too late.
Brenda Peynado has been awarded an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, and other prizes. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Sun, Southern Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. She’s currently writing a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who can tell all possible futures, and she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
▪ This story came out of me in a sleepless twenty-four hours, all in one go. This happens for me when the story comes from an emotional outcry. It started with a vision of deep longing and pain for a lost world—that was the first image of the story, all those dragonflies crying out when looking up at kites. That emotion, that irreparable sense of loss, gradually mixed with the yearning of the narrator.
After that it was the feeling of guilt and responsibility that the narrator had for atrocities she could never take back that took over the story. Some readers have paid attention most to the neo-Nazis in the story, but what I wanted to explore was white and white-passing guilt, complicity in acts of hatred and misunderstanding that we regret. The narrator keeps continuing to cause harm in ways that are less obvious than those of the neo-Nazis, which means they’re easier for her not to acknowledge, easier for her to cloak under the guise of trying to right her wrongs. She wants to be forgiven so badly, but the easy way. I wanted to explore more than the black-and-white good and evil that is so easy to fall into when writing dystopias. Yes, the system has codified so much wrong, but so can human nature, our best intentions, our need to call ourselves good.
Kelly Robson is an award-winning short fiction writer. In 2018 her story “A Human Stain” won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and in 2016 her novella Waters of Versailles won the Aurora Award. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, and Sunburst Awards. In 2018 her time-travel adventure Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach debuted to high critical praise. After twenty-two years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A. M. Dellamonica, now live in downtown Toronto.
▪ “What Gentle Women Dare” was a hell of a hard story to write. It went through nine versions over three years, all starkly different, though they all dealt with Liverpool sex workers in the 1700s. What was the problem? Overambitiousness, mostly. I was trying to encompass the entire history of violence against women—it’s what the story demanded.
Nothing worked until I—quite incoherently—whined about the story to my friend Dominik Parisien, coeditor of Uncanny Magazine’s “Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction” special issue. He said, “Why don’t you think about ‘The Screwfly Solution’?” James Tiptree, Jr., is a huge influence on my work, and it turns out that that suggestion was exactly what I needed to dig the story out of its hole.
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors, including the John W. Campbell Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.
▪ Of all the stories I’ve written, I find “Hard Mary” the spookiest. Like many disturbing things, it started out fun. One October night I was swapping stories with friends, and my husband’s cousin, who was raised Amish, shared some superstitions about Old Christmas that she remembered from childhood. I immediately wanted to put this stuff into a story, and when I did, I stumbled, just like my characters, onto a robot. At this point I was having a great time imagining this near-future or alternate-future community, filling it with surnames from my own Amish and Mennonite family tree and exploring the ways such a group might incorporate a new technology, as well as questions of personhood for robots and women. But soon another, weirder question began to assert itself, and this was the question of character. I became fascinated by the human desire for the almost-human: the way we consistently impose a humanlike character on our toys, domestic animals, cell phones, and, of course, the characters we write. Since these characters are only like humans and not actual people, our moral obligation to them is fuzzy. We’re often unmoved—even entertained—when bad things happen to them. This started to creep me out. I felt that when Lyddie, my main character (!), insisted that the robot was a person and not a machine, she was also defending herself. She was defending herself against me. Is it possible to see a literary character as kind of artificial intelligence? And if so, what do we owe them, and how should we treat them? In writing “Hard Mary,” I felt a character turn and look at me.
Adam R. Shannon is a career firefighter/paramedic and fiction writer. His work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Compelling Science Fiction, Every Day Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies. “On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog” was included in Locus Magazine’s recommended reading list and was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. Adam is a graduate of Clarion West 2017.
▪ I wrote this story at Clarion West in the summer of 2017. I had been planning a lighthearted piece with a dog as one of the characters. Then our dog Zeus became extremely ill, and we had to euthanize him. He was a gentle, deaf German shepherd with spinal problems; we had lowered our bed so he could get into it without falling. He understood a few hand-signed commands and liked to pretend he couldn’t see us when he didn’t feel like doing what we wanted. This story emerged like a cry of pain at his loss. A lot of people have said that it made them cry too—sometimes in places they didn’t plan to shed tears, like on the bus to work—and I can only hope that reading it was cathartic for them.
It can be agonizing to love something, or someone, when you know your lifespan will likely exceed theirs, and worse yet to know that you will probably be the one to make their end-of-life decisions. I hope this story reminds people to hold tight to the moment of committing yourself to another creature, no matter how time and events conspire to make the endings painful.
LaShawn M. Wanak lives in Wisconsin with her husband and son. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, FIYAH, and many others. She reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine and is a graduate of Viable Paradise. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.
▪ Back in 2015, I was struggling with a lot of things—grief over my miscarriage, turmoil at my day job, fear over the upcoming election. During this I discovered Sister Rosetta Tharpe and her gospel music, which I latched on to like a lifesaver. Her songs and exuberance made me want to dig deeper into the music of that time, so when I came across Memphis Minnie and her blues, I knew I had to get them in a story together.
This story allowed me to weather the storm of that turbulent time. I used it to wrestle with faith, to mourn over loss, and to speak when I couldn’t raise my voice. It gave me a chance to honor my past through the rich history of the South Side of Chicago. It connected me to my African American heritage of using music to uplift, encourage, and fight injustice. And while I can’t sing to save my life, writing this story became my own form of beautiful resistance.
Plus, come on. It’s a story about black women saving the world with the power of voice and guitars. That. Is. AWESOME.
Other Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2018
Selected by John Joseph Adams
Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame
The Era. Friday Black (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
&nb
sp; Zimmer Land. Friday Black (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Ashby, Madeline
Tierra y Libertad. MIT Technology Review, June
Baker, Celeste Rita
De MotherJumpers. Strange Horizons, October
Banker, Ashok K.
A Love Story Written on Water. Lightspeed Magazine, December
Barnhill, Kelly
Dreadful Young Ladies. Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories (Algonquin)
Bear, Elizabeth
Okay, Glory. Twelve Tomorrows, ed. Wade Roush (MIT Press)
She Still Loves the Dragon. Uncanny Magazine, January/February
Bolander, Brooke
The Only Harmless Great Thing. Tor.com, January
Buckell, Tobias S.
A World to Die For. Clarkesworld Magazine, January
Cargill, C. Robert
We Are Where the Nightmares Go. We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories (Harper Voyager)
Castro, Adam-Troy
The Last to Matter. Lightspeed Magazine, September
Red Rain. Nightmare Magazine, June
Clark, P. Djèlí
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Page 49