“Things You Can Buy for a Penny” was a strangely easy story to tell myself. I wrote the opening first, starting from a simple joke and progressing to a simple setup: Timmy would go to the well, and the well is not a good place. Although, I confess, I’m not sure where the wet gentleman actually came from. Was “a gentleman” a convenient vessel for a creature of rules, or was he always waiting? Then I wrote (out of order) the interactions between my victims and the wet gentleman—between people struggling with rules both real and imagined and a creature required absolutely to abide by a set of rules. The rest only took a nudge to fill itself in around those vignettes.
This story appeared in a night, and the only real changes I made to that first draft were to the ending. I realized that the objects of desire had not yet had a chance to speak, to have their own desires recognized. And that’s how the wet gentleman got his wish.
Kelly Link is the author of four collections, most recently Get in Trouble (2015). With Gavin J. Grant, she runs Small Beer Press. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. If you want to know anything else, you can ask her at twitter.com/haszombiesinit.
• I’ve been thinking about this story for over ten years now. For a long time, the first sentence was “The vampires were conjugating in the courtyard.” But I never got any further than that, until deciding that what I really wanted was to write something in the same genre as Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. I owe thanks to Cassandra Clare, who supplied a swimming pool that I could swim in whenever I got stuck. (A swimming pool is about as close as I ever want to get to outer space.) I’d also like to thank Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Joshua Lewis, and also Richard Butner and the Sycamore Hill workshop, which took a good, hard look at this. I didn’t take all of the suggestions, but I liked every single one of them.
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and the Minnesota Review, among others. His first book, a young adult science fiction novel called The Art of Starving, will be published in 2017. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards; he’s also a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and this story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. He lives in New York City and at www.samjmiller.com.
• The seed of “The Heat of Us” was planted on the night Donna Summer died. I was walking home from work, feeling pretty blue—I think “Bad Girls” is probably the second-best album of all time—looking across at the sad lonely lights of the city coming on, all those people by themselves, all the separate sadness that a certain group of people would be feeling. And I remembered that the Stonewall Uprising happened on the night that Judy Garland died. And I thought “revolutions are born on nights like this.” But that seed didn’t break into blossom until I attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and I saw how exponentially my writing improved through being part of a community of writers and readers, how I could share their strengths and (hopefully) lend them mine. So this is a story about community—about how people are stronger together than separate, and how when we work together we can achieve things so incredible they’re indistinguishable from magic.
Dexter Palmer is the author of two novels, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010) and Version Control (2016). He holds a PhD in English literature from Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
• Though I’ve published two novels, I rarely write short stories. “The Daydreamer by Proxy” was part of The Bestiary, an anthology of original material edited by Ann VanderMeer and published by Cheeky Frawg Books/Centipede Press. The premise of the anthology was that each of the invited writers was given a letter of the alphabet and asked to write a story that described a fictional creature whose name began with that letter. Thank goodness I was assigned the letter D: not too common; not too unusual; perfectly acceptable to work with.
The composition of the story was influenced by the fact that I knew the hardcover edition of the anthology would be illustrated. What sort of odd thing did I want to see someone try to draw? How much descriptive detail would be enough, without being so much that it would constrain the artist and bore the reader? The illustrator, Ivica Stevanovic, did a great job: his drawings are uniquely imaginative while being faithful to their source material and are just as unsettling as I’d hoped they’d be.
All of the anthology’s contributors were also asked to provide short accompanying author’s notes: the assignment was to “reimagine yourself as a fantastical beast.” This was mine: The Dexter Palmer lives in the darkened corners of libraries, dining on ink and wood pulp. Its gestation period is unpredictably long; its offspring are unnatural, no two of them alike.
Salman Rushdie is the author of twelve novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across the Line—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and The Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of the PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.
• I’ve long been interested in the jinn, and also in the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës), in honor of whom my father renamed our family. They come together in this story, forming a union of reason and fantasy, as Francisco Goya recommended. Eventually, this story grew into the novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which carries the love story of the jinnia princess Dunia and Ibn Rushd forward into the present day, or something like it.
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria (2013) and The Winged Histories (2016). Her work has received the John W. Campbell Award, the William L. Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
• “Meet Me in Iram” grew out of my interest in the intersection of speculative fiction and autobiography. Every word of it is true.
Vandana Singh was born and raised in New Delhi, India, and has been a denizen of the Greater Boston area for over ten years, where she is also a physics professor at a small and lively state university. Her short stories have been published in numerous best-of-the-year volumes and most recently include a novella, Of Wind and Fire, in an anthology about women scientists (To Shape the Dark, ed. Athena Andreadis). She is a winner of the Parallax Award and a Tiptree Honor, was a participant in Arizona State University’s Project Hieroglyph, and was a guest of honor at the Science Fiction Research Association annual conference in 2015. Her work includes a short story collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (New Delhi), reprinted in 2013, as well as an ALA Notable children’s book, Younguncle Comes to Town.
• When a young friend told me of a dream he had about a strange machine, it occurred to me to conjure up a lexicon of impossible devices. The first story in the triptych is embroidered around the possibility suggested by the machine in the dream—thank you, JLH! When the dust had settled after the first story, it suggested something, a pattern in the sand that took me to another place, another story, and a quite different machine. That in turn provoked the third story. But it wasn’t a linear process because as I wrote one story, I necessarily had to change the others until they were braided together in a way that made literary topological sense. Yet they remained disparate until I found the context that knitted them into a canvas: a space—the greater space of impossible machines where perhaps we might bridge the gulf between human and machine. Yearnings, longings, separations, distances both literal and of the heart, the way that the physical and psychological subtexts
of the world inform each other—these are the things that move me and move the story.
Julian Mortimer Smith has published more than a dozen short stories in some of the top speculative fiction magazines, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Terraform, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review. He’s also written nonfiction articles about such topics as the North American Conker Championship and the Shag Harbour UFO Incident. He has worked as an editor for a romance publisher, as a copywriter for a Web design company, and as a clarinetist for an army. He currently resides in a small lobstering town in southwest Nova Scotia but has lived in various cities across Canada and the UK. He is working on a novel for young adults.
• When I was in university, I went to see a talk by Professor Barbie Zelizer on how photojournalists depict war. She pointed out that we rarely see photographs of dead bodies in newspapers. The images we see of war are often highly aestheticized, sanitized for consumption around the breakfast table. When images of death do appear in newspapers, they provoke strong reactions—outrage, letters to the editor, canceled subscriptions. They are sometimes even shocking enough to galvanize peace movements.
In “Headshot,” I tried to imagine how our appetite for war might change if ordinary civilians had to give their consent and bear witness to each act of killing. I set out to write a hopeful story, to imagine a world in which we weren’t allowed to look away. But I think it turned into something of a bitter satire. You be the judge.
Rachel Swirsky is a short story writer living in Bakersfield, California. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She’s twice won the Nebula Award, in 2010 for her novella The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window and in 2014 for her short story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2008 and Clarion West in 2005. She once played the Mock Turtle in a children’s production of Alice in Wonderland.
• Alice in Wonderland is one of my father’s favorite books. It was always part of my life. When I started working on this story, my father gave me a worn, annotated copy that’s about as old as he is. I love the derangement of Alice in Wonderland. The odd images and strange characters are disconcerting in the best possible way. Unlike a lot of other children’s books, the novel holds up well to adult rereading. Clever prose and insight keeps it sharp.
Retellings fascinate me. I’m endlessly intrigued by the ways people can recombine characters, plots, and imagery. I wrote a scrap of the first hatter/hare scene on a whim and then set it aside, but found myself coming back to it over several years.
The story didn’t develop in a linear way. I played with quotes; I shuffled passages; I didn’t know what would happen next. A surprising amount of text came about almost by coincidence. I’d sit down to write a parody of one of the poems from the original, and how it came out shaped the way the story moved. Quotes steered conversations here and there of their own accord. I chased after tidbits and irony.
I don’t know if I could set out to write another story like this one because the process was so idiosyncratic. But I really loved the way it turned out and am gratified that others have enjoyed it, too.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times–bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
• The seed of “Planet Lion” was an idle joke about “psychic lions” made one late night around the house. The idea sort of took hold, and I could not let go of the image of a planet of psychically networked large carnivores. I wanted to contrast the immediate, first-person experience of this alien animal consciousness wakening within a technology matrix that they couldn’t fully understand and had to translate into a language meaningful to their experience, with a traditional military science fiction story of space warfare and its repercussions. It’s a story, ultimately, of colonization, careless colonization, and how a technologically superior force can take much more than just territory. It can take the very minds and memories of its victims and replace these with something in its own image. This process is essentially the core goal of any imperial project—to copy and paste itself into every cell in the universe.
Nick Wolven’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, F&SF, Analog, Clarkesworld, and the New England Review, among other publications. His writing has been republished in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, edited by Neil Clarke, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. He lives in New York City.
• I can’t for the life of me remember what made me think it would be a good idea to write a science fiction story based on Eudora Welty’s classic meditation on middle-aged romance, “No Place for You, My Love.” Why mess with perfection? Why trivialize the sublime? Why invite invidious and unflattering comparisons by juxtaposing one’s own writing with a work that’s already unquestionably amazing? I can only say that at some point I found myself with a half-finished draft of this piece on my hands, and it seemed only right to finish it. And then, at a later point, I found myself with a contract to publish this story on my hands, and it seemed only right to take the money.
There must have been an earlier point at which I thought to myself, “Hmm, you know what would be cool—a satire of the modern dating scene that’s also a tribute to the great American genius of southern lyricism.” But one trick to the act of writing (if not the art of writing) is that you learn not to probe too deeply into the sources of your own inspiration.
At any rate, the Welty story is well worth a read, for those who haven’t heard of it. Of the contemporary dating scene, speaking as a New York denizen, I can only say: Beware!
After several years as a book agent in New York and then a film agent in Los Angeles, Liz Ziemska finally gathered together enough courage to try this writing thing herself, only to discover that it was much, much harder than it looked. Eventually, she completed an MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars. It was David Gates, her first teacher at Bennington, who told her to quit imitating (insert famous author) and let her voice be as strange as it wanted to be. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Interfictions:2, and Strange Horizons and has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award and longlisted in the Best American Nonrequired Reading. “The Mushroom Queen” won a Pushcart Prize.
• I’ve always been interested in science and have an undergraduate degree in biology, though I decided in my senior year not to go to medical school. When I became a literary agent, I loved scouring scientific trade magazines in the hopes of finding scientists who were also beautiful writers. A friend of mine directed a documentary about global warming. In the goody bag given out after the premiere party I found a book called Mycelium Running, by Paul Stamets. I put it on my bookshelf, promising to read it one day. When I started writing fiction, someone told me that I should try dream journaling to fight writer’s block. For years I would wake up, pull the journal from my nightstand, and scribble away until I got the dream down before it could evaporate. One night during a particularly bright moon, I woke up in the middle of the night and had a reverie of a woman, my putative twin, standing at the edge of the lawn next to the jade plant. I wrote that down and put it away. One day, while cleaning my bookshelf, I found the mushroom book and started reading. Then I knew exactly whom I had encountered on that moonlit night. A scientist I admire has a book out this year that asks the question “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” My story asks the question “Are we smart enough to know how smart fungi are?”
/> Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2015
Selected by John Joseph Adams
ANDERS, CHARLIE JANE
The Last Movie Ever Made. The End Has Come, ed. John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey (Broad Reach)
ARIMAH, LESLEY NNEKA
Who Will Greet You at Home. The New Yorker, October
BACIGALUPI, PAOLO
City of Ash. Matter, July
BAILEY, DALE
Snow. Nightmare, June
BEAR, ELIZABETH
The Heart’s Filthy Lesson. Old Venus, ed. George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Bantam)
BELL, HELENA
When We Were Giants. Lightspeed, November
BOLANDER, BROOKE
And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead. Lightspeed, February
BUCKELL, TOBIAS S.
Pale Blue Memories. Old Venus, ed. George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Bantam)
BUNKER, KARL
Caisson. Asimov’s Science Fiction, August
CATANEO, EMILY B.
The Emerald Coat and Other Wishes. Interfictions, November
CHAON, DAN, AND LYNDA BARRY
Mrs. Popkin. Seize the Night, ed. Christopher Golden (Gallery)
CHU, JOHN
Hold-Time Violations. Tor.com, October
勢孤取和 (Influence Isolated, Make Peace). Lightspeed, June (special issue: Queers Destroy Science Fiction!)
COREY, JAMES S. A.
Rates of Change. Meeting Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Solaris)
EL-MOHTAR, AMAL
Madeleine. Lightspeed, June (special issue: Queers Destroy Science Fiction!)
Pockets. Uncanny, January/February
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 35