The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020

by John Joseph Adams

  He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio, with his wife and two daughters. He can be found online at TobiasBuckell.com and is also an instructor at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program.

  ■ A couple years ago I was lucky enough to be a guest of a book festival in the Bahamas. I took a day to go gawp at a megaresort there and meet a friend working there. I said to someone it was the “Death Star” of a complex. When I flew back home I kept mulling over the concept of tourism as an industrial complex, similar to what Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his famous speech when he coined the term “military-industrial complex.” Since then, I started talking about the tourist industrial complex and looking for patterns in how it works transnationally across the globe. I used the term and added “Galactic” while looking for a title for this story, as I was trying to model what that tourist industrial complex felt like in a science fictional way.

  Christopher Caldwell’s fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and FIYAH, among others. He attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop and was awarded the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship by the Carl Brandon Society. He works in supported accommodation with vulnerable, homeless youth. Californian by birth, Louisianan by culture, he lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with his partner, Alice.

  ■ When I first moved to Glasgow from the United States, I lived in a part of town called Merchant City. All the streets are named either after the “Tobacco Lords”—wealthy merchants who built their fortunes in the 1700s through a booming trade in tobacco from British colonies—or after the colonies themselves (Virginia Street and Jamaica Street). One of the Tobacco Lords built a grand mansion in neoclassical style; Glasgow has since repurposed this house to serve as its Gallery of Modern Art. On a rainy afternoon, I visited the Gallery of Modern Art and there was an exhibit on Glasgow’s history of slavery. There were artifacts: rusted manacles, woodcuts displaying bucolic scenes of plantation life, a long length of chain. There was a model of a Glaswegian’s ship packed to the brim with tiny figurines of people who undoubtedly looked like my ancestors. This exhibit caused some discomfort among locals and disrupted the prevailing narrative that Scotland was an early opponent of chattel slavery. There was never a large population of enslaved people in Scotland, but all those Tobacco Lords whose names are recalled in Glasgow thoroughfares relied on slave labor to harvest the tobacco from their plantations, and many of them traded goods to Africa for humans to brutalize and subjugate to keep their profits high. I began to think about the actual costs of prosperity, and how easy it is to erase our own complicity in others’ oppression. This was one of the sparks to writing “Canst Thou Draw Out the Leviathan.”

  The other spark came years later. I was researching how the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 impacted the movement of both escaped and manumitted enslaved people and discovered that it was not uncommon for both freedmen and runaways to take refuge among whaling ships, where long voyages and distant ports reduced the chances of their return to bondage. That ships not much different to ones that a generation before had meant terror, destruction, and loss of humanity could mean to the same people freedom, flight, and dignity was a seductive one. I was also mindful of the fact that the wealth that came from whaling—oil for lamps and soaps, whalebone for corsets and buggy whips, ambergris for perfumes—was inherently exploitative; the seas have not recovered from our plunder.

  Adam-Troy Castro made his first nonfiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel and Other Stories, which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the recent stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife, Judi, and a trio of infidel cats.

  ■ With the rest of the stories sight unseen, I suspect that my contribution this time out will wind up being the most traditional science fiction story in this anthology. It’s a puzzle piece, set in an interstellar future, with a protagonist trapped in a box by a powerful computer intelligence and challenged to find her way out. By plot outline alone, it could have been published seventy years ago, with little in the way of alteration for the sensibilities of the time. I cheerfully admit this.

  Its genesis was as the next-logical question of a series of stories I’ve been writing since the late 1990s, umbrella title “The AIsource Infection,” that has included all three novels in my Andrea Cort series, all three novellas in the Minnie and Earl series, and multiple novellas in the Draiken series. The AIsource are ancient software intelligences who pop up here and there in that future history, sometimes centrally, and so it must be said that this story began with more contemplation about what mischief they might be getting up to next, than what might happen to some poor human being in their power; Sacrid Henn, or “Sacred Hen,” arrived only afterward and surprised this author by shining through despite mostly existing as a presence being addressed by the inhuman narrator. This is one of those odd things that happens, and has led to my thus-far unfocused conviction that she must appear again, some time in the near future; and someday, when this collection is not only published and read but a dusty display on home bookshelves alongside other BASFF collections published before and since, readers will either possess the memory of me following through or the awareness that it was another vague authorial promise destined to be left unfulfilled in the wake of newer and more pressing ideas. We shall see.

  Jaymee Goh is a writer, reviewer, editor, and essayist of science fiction and fantasy. Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have been published in a range of science fiction and fantasy magazines and journals, such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, and Science Fiction Studies. She wrote the blog Silver Goggles, an exploration of postcolonial theory through steampunk, and has contributed to Tor.com, Racialicious.com, and Beyond Victoriana. She graduated from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in 2016 and received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Riverside, where she dissertated on steampunk and whiteness. She is an editor for Tachyon Publications.

  ■ The bobbitt worm is an actual marine worm, and I was struck with horrified fascination when I first watched clips about its hunting technique. I am terrified by many-legged creepy-crawlies (I love earthworms and admire spiders, but anything over eight legs . . . no) and have always been wary of the sea, so the bobbitt worm seemed like an argument for never going back to the ocean. However, as we on Tumblr say, one way of dealing with the monsters under your bed is to invite them into bed, and I realized I could deal with the repulsiveness of the bobbitt worm by combining it with conventionally sexy things together: “bobbitt worm mermaids! Lesbian ones! That reproduce via vampirism!” Erotica is a secondary writing interest of mine; writing realistic sex and a terrifying nonhuman body was a challenge I couldn’t put down. I still struggled with the plot spanning three generations until I got to Clarion, where for some reason my cohort began to experiment with the triptych form. I researched marine-worm anatomy to write the story during the week horror master Victor LaValle (also in this volume!) taught Clarion, and sicced this on my unsuspecting classmates with fairly even reactions: all the cis boys (queer and straight) broke in various ways, and all the cis girls (queer and straight) plus the one genderqueer classmate raved about it. I like to think that says something about the story. After, I could think of no place to send it to, but Nisi Shawl asked me to submit to her invite-only anthology of speculative fiction by people of color, and where else might an anticolonial
misandrist Southeast Asian bobbitt worm mermaid story with fatal fellatio and carnivorous cunnilingus go?

  Gwendolyn Kiste is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Rust Maidens, the fiction collection And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, the dark fantasy novella Pretty Marys All in a Row, and the occult horror novelette The Invention of Ghosts. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, Tor’s Nightfire, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Unnerving Magazine, Interzone, and LampLight, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts.

  ■ Dracula was one of the first horror stories I ever discovered. It all started with an early viewing of the Universal film at the age of four or five, and was quickly followed up on some hallowed Saturday afternoon with the Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing classic, Horror of Dracula.

  Horror was always at the forefront of my childhood, since both my parents love the genre as well, and they soon told me about the novel Dracula. Back when I was still too young to read it, I remember asking about the female characters—as a child, I was always very concerned that there weren’t enough girls in stories—and I was told there were only really two women in Dracula: Mina and Lucy. I asked what happened to them, and I was told that Mina lived and Lucy died. This striking disparity between them always stuck with me, and I would lament over the years that Lucy deserved better. Finally, after yet another conversation about her unjust fate (this time, with my husband, who’s also a horror fan), I decided that as a writer, I could go ahead and do something about it.

  It took me nearly two years to figure out exactly how to tell this story, and it wasn’t until I settled on the list format that it finally emerged in a way that felt right to me. After a lifetime of wanting to know more about Lucy, I hope this story has given her a chance to tell everything from her side—and a chance for longtime Dracula fans to give a second thought to a great character who has too often fallen by the wayside.

  Victor LaValle is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling, and a comic book, Destroyer. He co-edited an anthology, A People’s Future of the United States, with John Joseph Adams. He teaches at Columbia University.

  ■ I received an email from Jonathan Maberry one day, stating that Weird Tales Magazine would be returning to print and he wondered if I had a story to share. I did not! But I had an idea: Weird Tales had been one of the magazines most famous for publishing the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whom I both adored and loathed. Publishing a story that wrestled with his legacy (as I had done in a novella, The Ballad of Black Tom) and doing it in the magazine that led to his fame seemed ideal. It would be like moving into his old home and conducting an exorcism. But then a funny thing happened: I included details from the life of Booker T. Washington, who was born into American slavery, and suddenly it was me who felt possessed. I had to get this story right because I was setting more than one record straight. Not just reimagining a Lovecraft tale, but etching the truth of my nation’s barbarity into the pages of that storied magazine. The horror! The horror! as Conrad wrote. By the time I was finished, I swore I whipped the devil. Who that devil is, I leave it up to you to decide.

  Ken Liu (http://​kenliu​.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. He has won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, as well as top genre honors in Japan, Spain, and France, among other countries.

  Liu’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, the Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers play the role of wizards. His debut collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, followed. He also wrote the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker. He has been involved in multiple media adaptations of his work. The most recent projects include The Message, under development by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment; “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in season one of Netflix’s breakout adult animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, which Craig Silverstein will executive produce, adapted from an interconnected series of short stories by Liu.

  Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, the history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise. Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  ■ Storytelling is the primary means by which we exercise that most valuable and undervalued human faculty: empathy.

  We make living bearable by telling ourselves stories that make sense of the randomness of the universe, attributing causes to effects, drawing plots from the vicissitudes of fortune, and crafting character arcs that explain who we are. We strive to understand the stories of other lives and hope that others, in turn, will make an effort to understand our story.

  Advancing technology has been intimately connected with advances in storytelling. Writing, printing, film, TV, the internet—each new medium has brought hope that there will be more and better stories, more and better understanding, more empathy. That hope, unfortunately, has been dashed again and again against the shoals of reality, as narratives can serve not only to elicit and nurture empathy, but also to murder it, and to cauterize the heart-soil so that it never sprouts again.

  Still, we can’t help but hope. Whether this is foolish or wise is not for us, mere mortals, to know.

  Anil Menon’s most recent work Half of What I Say was shortlisted for the 2016 Hindu Literary Award. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines including Albedo One, Interzone, Interfictions, Jaggery, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Strange Horizons. His stories have been translated into more than a dozen languages including Hebrew, Igbo, and Romanian. A forthcoming collection of speculative short stories will be published in India. He can be reached at iam@​anilmenon​.com.

  ■ I’d been reading anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated, which argues that our creations are designed to mediate the natural world for us. For example, fictions can be seen as a neural technology that mediates the world for us by shaping our emotions. We feel this or that about this or that because we’re “run,” so to speak, by this or that story. I also remember coming across Clifford Geertz’s essay “From the Native Point of View,” which describes how the concept of self is culture-specific and not universal. Geertz recounts meeting a Javanese man whose wife had died, suddenly and inexplicably, and watching him interact with guests with a calm formality and trying “. . . by mystical techniques, to flatten out, as he himself put it, the hills and valleys of his emotion into an even, level plain (‘That is what you have to do,’ he said to me, ‘be smooth inside and out’) . . .”

  Personally, I do not see the point of such a “smoothened” life. Of course, this desire for “the point,” the emotional value I attach to its presence or absence, the emotions I use in response, all these things too may be mediated by unknown stories. I started out writing the story of a man who’d lost his wife but somewhere along the way it became a story about a storytelling species.

  Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of two novels, and his short fiction has appeared in seven book collections. His science fiction novel After the Flare won a 2018 Philip K. Dick special citation; his first novel, Nigerians in Space, a thriller about brain drain from Africa, was published in 2014. He is a Future Tense Fellow at New America/Center for Science and Imagination and an attorney with a background in technology policy. He previously worked to defend persecuted writers around the world at PEN America in countries such as Myanmar, Haiti, and Nigeria, with support from the Ford Foundation.

  ■ Space exploration conjures up awe and excitement, but it’s also about making hard choices, espec
ially once we leave the solar system. That’s what I was exploring in “Between the Dark and the Dark.” Because of my human rights background, I was interested in knowing what our absolute redlines would be if we were trying to save our species from extinction. What would we agree never to do in deep space? What line would we never cross? So I told the story from the point of view of people who created the line, and those who were living on the other side of it. Here on Earth we decided that we would not tolerate certain acts. What will happen when we can move among the stars? Moreover, what if we have to leave Earth?

  Cannibalism is terrifying, especially when it’s related to sadistic pleasure. That perversity is why it’s the subject of so many television shows and movies. But if you dig a little deeper into history, you’ll see that it often cropped up in cultures around the world—from Europe to Asia to Africa and the Americas—not for titillation but for some religious or cultural importance. In a spacefaring culture where food and nutrients would be absolutely vital to survival of the entire crew, perhaps we’d find that the extreme isolation would awaken ancient modes of organizing our society. But mimicking the Aztecs or some other culture wouldn’t be realistic in a highly technical society. So I thought about what practices might evolve if you combined the two. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professors Steven Desch and Steve Ruff at Arizona State University, who helped me work through many of the technical details.

  Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times best-selling and Nebula, Hugo, Astounding, and Locus award-winning speculative fiction writer. Her novels include Trail of Lightning, Storm of Locusts (both part of the Sixth World series), Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, and the middle-grade novel Race to the Sun. Her short fiction can be found in Apex Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and various anthologies. She lives with her husband and daughter in northern New Mexico and can be found on Twitter at @RoanhorseBex. Her next novel is the epic fantasy Black Sun, coming fall 2020.