The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  THE YEAR’S BEST

  SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY:

  2013 EDITION

  RICH HORTON

  To the supportive and very patient Locus editorial team, particularly my editor Jonathan Strahan, and website editor (and my predecessor as short fiction reviewer), Mark Kelly, who brought me into the fold.

  Copyright © 2013 by Rich Horton.

  Cover art by Dymtro Tolokonov.

  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: 978-1-60701-413-3 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-392-1 (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 prime@prime-books.com.

  Contents

  Introduction— Rich Horton

  Nahiku West— Linda Nagata

  The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring— Genevieve Valentine

  Under the Eaves— Lavie Tidhar

  Honey Bear— Sofia Samatar

  One Day in Time City— David Ira Cleary

  The Black Feminist’s Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing— Sandra McDonald

  The Governess and the Lobster— Margaret Ronald

  Swift, Brutal Retaliation— Meghan McCarron

  Scattered Along the River of Heaven— Aliette de Bodard

  Four Kinds of Cargo— Leonard Richardson

  Elementals— Ursula K. Le Guin

  Prayer— Robert Reed

  Scrap Dragon— Naomi Kritzer

  The Contrary Gardener— Christopher Rowe

  The Castle that Jack Built— Emily Gilman

  In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal burns— Elizabeth Bear

  The Philosophy of Ships— Caroline M. Yoachim

  The Keats Variation— K.M. Ferebee

  Fireborn— Robert Charles Wilson

  One Breath, One Stroke— Catherynne M. Valente

  The Bernoulli War— Gord Sellar

  Things Greater Than Love— Kate Bachus

  A Murmuration of Starlings— Joe Pitkin

  Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream— Maria Dahvana Headley

  Arbeitskraft— Nick Mamatas

  A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight— Xia Jia

  Heaven Under Earth— Aliette de Bodard

  Sunshine— Nina Allan

  Uncle Flower’s Homecoming Waltz— Marissa K. Lingen

  The Magician’s Apprentice— Tamsyn Muir

  Twenty-Two and You— Michael Blumlein

  Two Houses— Kelly Link

  The Weight of History, The Lightness of the Future— Jay Lake

  Biographies

  Recommended Reading

  Publication History

  About the Editor

  The Year in Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2013

  Rich Horton

  Is Science Fiction Exhausted?

  It is a truism that for an author (or an editor, in this case) to respond to a review is a mistake. But I find myself convinced that Paul Kincaid’s review of last year’s edition of this book (along with Gardner Dozois’s similar volume, and the Nebula Awards volume) was at the same time sufficiently notorious, and sufficiently well-argued, that it deserves engagement. (For that matter, Kincaid’s history as a critic is enough itself to inspire respect and to insist on engagement with his work.) Kincaid’s review (in the L.A. Review of Books) opened: “The overwhelming sense one gets, working through so many stories that are presented as the very best that science fiction and fantasy have to offer, is exhaustion. . . . it is more as though the genres of the fantastic themselves have reached a state of exhaustion. . . . the genre has become a set of tropes to be repeated and repeated until all meaning has been drained from them.”

  He’s got a point, really. I wouldn’t go so far—I don’t think that “all meaning has been drained from” the tropes we use, but I do think they are becoming overfamiliar. And I do think that the field of science fiction has to a considerable extent become enamored with explicitly backward-looking ideas, most obviously steampunk, but also alternate-history in general, and, too, stories that overtly refer to earlier stories. Kincaid also complains about the recent tendency for science fiction stories to look like fantasy—I think this is indeed a trend, but I’m not so sure it’s a problem. If I say any more I will probably distort his argument (I probably have already), so I will just conclude by suggesting that, even though it’s not exactly a positive review of my book (nor of Dozois’), it’s well worth finding on the web.

  (Kincaid also suggests that this problem of “exhaustion” is more evident in short fiction than in novels—and I would respond that a look at the Hugo nominees for this year might disabuse one of that notion—a generally enjoyable set of books, but hardly cutting edge in form or subject matter.)

  So naturally I can’t help looking at the contents this year through a sort of Kincaidian lens. Is there steampunk here? Check—Nick Mamatas’s “Arbeitskraft” is even from an anthology called The Mammoth Book of Steampunk)—but is it exhausted? I don’t think so—to me it’s as fresh and as politically engaged as anyone could wish. Is there science fiction hard to distinguish from fantasy? Well, there’s Gord Sellar’s “The Bernoulli War,” which isn’t fantasy by any reasonable measurement, but which does present a posthuman future nearly incomprehensible (to my mind) in contemporary terms. I think that’s rather the point (though at the same time I take Kincaid’s point that such estrangement speaks to a certain lack of confidence in the future, or in our ability to engage with it). Is there fairly traditional science fiction, reworking old tropes? I guess there is—Kate Bachus’ “Things Greater Than Love,” an alien planet mountain climbing story, with its main theme concerning understanding an alien intelligence, is hardly “new,” though it’s lovely and effective. Likewise Linda Nagata’s “Nahiku West” concerns asteroid habitats, matter transmission, and genetic modification—not exactly tired tropes, but not new ones either. But I still found it striking and honest and fresh (even as its plot is rooted in traditional the hard-boiled mystery). Are there stories harkening explicitly to old science fiction—indeed, old TV or film science fiction? Yes, indeed—Sandra McDonald’s “The Black Feminist’s Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing” is in part a paean to an science fiction film never made based on an science fiction story (The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett) that was consciously old-fashioned on its first publication decades ago. Leonard Richardson’s “Four Kinds of Cargo” is about an alien ship captain who is trying to emulate the heroes of movies “she” adores. Never mind that the movies are made by aliens—the echoes here are overtly of Star Trek and Galaxy Quest. In these two cases I must simply plead “Guilty!” But I still think they are damned fine stories—and at their heart the appeal is not nostalgia, but the use of nostalgia to affect more fundamental human concerns. And is there a vampire story? Well, yes again—but I think Nina Allan’s “Sunshine” is as pure an antidote to vampire cliches as one could ask for.

  That’s enough, though. I think the stories we’ve collected here are a grand mix—some do, to some extent, look backward. Other are, as they say, ripped from today
’s headlines (or advertisements, as with Michael Blumlein’s “Twenty-Two and You.” Science fiction is, these days, a genre established in not just the imaginations of fans but in the general populace, and as such many of its tropes are familiar. And, perhaps more seriously, the entire world is at the same time engaged with the future, confused by it, and afraid of it. Science fiction has possibly failed to engage with the near future as rigorously as we might hope. Much of this book engages with a farther future, or with an altered past. (And much of course is fantasy, for which I make no apology.) I still find it exciting, and I hope you do, too.

  One other point Kincaid made was that much of the more exciting new science fiction was by writers not necessarily entrenched in the American/British tradition. I definitely agree. And again in this book we feature, amid many US or UK writers, a number of writers who were either raised entirely in non-Anglophone cultures (as with the French-Vietnamese writer Aliette de Bodard) or who,even if British or American, have spent much of their life elsewhere (as with Jay Lake or Lavie Tidhar). Here we also feature a translated story by Chinese writer Xia Jia; and a story by Sofia Samatar, a Somali-American writer who has spent considerable time in Sudan.

  Other breakdowns? Nearly two-thirds of the stories are by women, a very high total in historical terms, but reflective of a continuing increase in the involvement and acceptance of women writers in the field, especially (one hopes) in science fiction (as opposed to fantasy). I usually strive for a roughly even balance of science fiction and fantasy in this book, but this year, by my count, less than a third of the stories are fantasy. (To be sure, a couple I’ve put in the science fiction columns are ambiguous.) I think this is a year-to-year anomaly—this year was simply a better year for short science fiction than for short fantasy. Online publications are more and more central to the field—this year fifteen stories, just less than half, are from online sources. (Notably, several of these sources began in print, such as Eclipse Online (originally the Eclipse series of anthologies) and Electric Velocipede (a fine small press ’zine that just recently migrated online).) Only five stories come from original anthologies, and only one story is from a magazine nominally devoted to “mainstream” fiction.

  I’ll for the most part bypass a broader survey of the field this time around, if only to avoid what Kincaid calls “the traditional threnody of woe” that runs through Gardner Dozois’s exhaustive summary of closing markets each year. (With the exception of the loss of Eclipse as an original anthology market (alas, followed by the closing of Eclipse Online early in 2013), the news in 2012 wasn’t really all that bad—though I do regret the closing of a nice newish online site, Redstone Science Fiction.) Perhaps the biggest news was the announced retirement of Stanley Schmidt from Analog (after roughly as long a career at the helm of that magazine as John W. Campbell). Two promising new online magazines debuted: Arc in the UK, and the horror-oriented Nightmare (companion to Lightspeed) in the US. On the whole, I’d characterize it as a year of “holding patterns.” I think more and more short fiction will be found online (after all, even the major print magazines have a large fraction of their distribution in electronic form). But, even if from a certain angle evidence of “exhaustion” can be found, I think the best short science fiction and fantasy remains inspiring and vigorous in 2013.

  Nahiku West

  Linda Nagata

  A railcar was ferrying Key Lu across the tether linking Nahiku East and West when a micrometeor popped through the car’s canopy, leaving two neat holes that vented the cabin to hard vacuum within seconds. The car continued on the track, but it took over a minute for it to reach the gel lock at Nahiku West and pass through into atmosphere. No one expected to find Key Lu alive, but as soon as the car re-pressurized, he woke up.

  Sometimes, it’s a crime not to die.

  I stepped into the interrogation chamber. Key had been sitting on one of two padded couches, but when he saw me he bolted to his feet. I stood very still, hearing the door lock behind me. Nothing in Key’s background indicated he was a violent man, but prisoners sometimes panic. I raised my hand slightly, as a gel ribbon armed with a paralytic spray slid from my forearm to my palm, ready for use if it came to that.

  “Please,” I said, keeping the ribbon carefully concealed. “Sit down.”

  Key slowly subsided onto the couch, never taking his frightened eyes off me.

  Most of the celestial cities restrict the height and weight of residents to minimize the consumption of volatiles, but Commonwealth police officers are required to be taller and more muscular than the average citizen. I used to be a smaller man, but during my time at the academy adjustments were made. I faced Key Lu with a physical presence optimized to trigger a sense of intimidation in the back brain of a nervous suspect, an effect enhanced by the black fabric of my uniform. Its design was simple—shorts cuffed at the knees and a lightweight pullover with long sleeves that covered the small arsenal of chemical ribbons I carried on my forearms—but its light-swallowing color set me apart from the bright fashions of the celestial cities.

  I sat down on the couch opposite Key Lu. He was a well-designed man, nothing eccentric about him, just another good-looking citizen. His hair was presently blond, his eyebrows darker. His balanced face lacked strong features. The only thing notable about him was his injuries. Dark bruises surrounded his eyes and their whites had turned red from burst blood vessels. More bruises discolored swollen tissue beneath his coppery skin.

  We studied each other for several seconds, both knowing what was at stake. I was first to speak. “I’m Officer Zeke Choy—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “—of the Commonwealth Police, the watch officer here at Nahiku.”

  The oldest celestial cities orbited Earth, but Nahiku was newer. It was one in a cluster of three orbital habitats that circled the Sun together, just inside the procession of Venus.

  Key Lu addressed me again, with the polite insistence of a desperate man. “I didn’t know about the quirk, Officer Choy. I thought I was legal.”

  The machine voice of a Dull Intelligence whispered into my auditory nerve that he was lying. I already knew that, but I nodded anyway, pretending to believe him.

  The DI was housed within my atrium, a neural organ that served as an interface between mind and machine. Atriums are a legal enhancement—they don’t change human biology—but Key Lu’s quirked physiology that had allowed him to survive short-term exposure to hard vacuum was definitely not.

  I was sure his quirk had been done before the age of consent. He’d been born in the Far Reaches among the fragile holdings of the asteroid prospectors, where it must have looked like a reasonable gamble to bioengineer some insurance into his system. Years had passed since then; enforcement had grown stricter. Though Key Lu looked perfectly ordinary, by the law of the Commonwealth, he wasn’t even human.

  I met his gaze, hoping he was no fool. “Don’t tell me anything I don’t want to know,” I warned him.

  I let him consider this for several seconds before I went on. “Your enhancement is illegal under the statutes of the Commonwealth—”

  “I understand that, but I didn’t know about it.”

  I nodded my approval of this lie. I needed to maintain the fiction that he hadn’t known. It was the only way I could help him. “I’ll need your consent to remove it.”

  A spark of hope ignited in his blooded eyes. “Yes! Yes, of course.”

  “So recorded.” I stood, determined to get the quirk out of his system as soon as possible, before awkward questions could be asked. “Treatment can begin right—”

  The door to the interrogation room opened.

  I was so startled, I turned with my hand half raised, ready to trigger the ribbon of paralytic still hidden in my palm—only to see Magistrate Glory Mina walk in, flanked by two uniformed cops I’d never seen before.

  My DI sent the ribbon retreating back up my forearm while I greeted Glory with a scowl. Nahiku was my territory. I was the o
nly cop assigned to the little city and I was used to having my own way—but with the magistrate’s arrival I’d just been overridden.

  Goods travel on robotic ships between the celestial cities, but people rarely do. We ghost instead. A ghost—an electronic persona—moves between the data gates at the speed of light. Most ghosts are received on a machine grid or within the virtual reality of a host’s atrium, but every city keeps a cold-storage mausoleum. If you have the money—or if you’re a cop—you can grow a duplicate body in another city, fully replicated hard copy, ready to roll.

  Glory Mina presided over the circuit court based out of Red Star, the primary city in our little cluster. She would have had to put her Red Star body into cold storage before waking up the copy here at Nahiku, but that was hardly more than half an hour’s effort. From the eight cops who had husks stashed in the mausoleum, she’d probably pulled two at random to make up the officers for her court.

  I was supposed to get a notification anytime a husk in the mausoleum woke up, but obviously she’d overridden that too.

  Glory Mina was a small woman with skin the color of cinnamon, and thick, shiny black hair that she kept in a stubble cut. She looked at me curiously, her eyebrows arched. “Officer Choy, I saw the incident report, but I missed your request for a court.”

  The two cops had positioned themselves on either side of the door.

  “I didn’t file a request, Magistrate.”

  “And why not?”

  “This is not a criminal case.”

  No doubt her DI dutifully informed her I was lying—not that she couldn’t figure that out for herself. “I don’t think that’s been determined, Officer Choy. There are records that still need to be considered, which have not made their way into the case file.”

  I had looked into Key Lu’s background. I knew he never translated his persona into an electronic ghost. If he’d ever done so, his illegal quirk would have been detected when he passed through a data gate. I knew he’d never kept a backup record that could be used to restore his body in case of accident. Again, if he’d done so, his quirk would have been revealed. And he never, ever physically left Nahiku, because without a doubt he would have been exposed when he passed through a port gate. The court could use any one of those circumstances to justify interrogation under a coercive drug—which is why I hadn’t included any of it in the case file.