THE BEST
SCIENCE FICTION
and FANTASY
OF THE YEAR
volume seven
Also Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)
Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005
Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1–7
Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volumes 1–4
The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows
Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier
Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron
Godlike Machines
Engineering Infinity
Edge of Infinity
Fearsome Journeys (forthcoming)
Reach for Infinity (forthcoming)
With Lou Anders
Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery
With Charles N. Brown
The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction
With Jeremy G. Byrne
The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volumes 1–2
Eidolon 1
With Jack Dann
Legends of Australian Fantasy
With Gardner Dozois
The New Space Opera
The New Space Opera 2
With Karen Haber
Science Fiction: Best of 2003
Science Fiction: Best of 2004
Fantasy: Best of 2004
With Marianne S. Jablon
Wings of Fire
THE BEST
SCIENCE FICTION
and FANTASY
OF THE YEAR
volume seven
edited by Jonathan Strahan
Night Shade Books
An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC
New York, New York
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven
© 2013 by Jonathan Strahan
This edition of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven
© 2013 by Night Shade Books
Cover art © 2012 by Sparth
Cover design by Claudia Noble
Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich
Introduction, story notes, and arrangement
© 2013 by Jonathan Strahan.
Pages 627-630 represent an extension of this copyright page.
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-460-8
Night Shade Books
www.nightshadebooks.com
For Marianne, with love.
Acknowledgements
This book has been one of the most challenging anthologies I’ve had to work on in my career. With ever more work published, and ever more demands on my time, I began to wonder if it would ever be complete. For that reason, I’d like to thank my wife and co-editor Marianne S. Jablon for her heroic work in helping me get this manuscript finished. Without her diligent, careful, and tireless efforts, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year would probably not have made it out this year and certainly would not be as good as it is. I’d also like to thank Gary K. Wolfe for his help in doing an emergency read and edit of the introduction after it was lost in a computer failure just before the book was due to be delivered. Thanks also to everyone at Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth, who helped keep me grounded and focussed in my reading during the year, and to all of the book’s contributors, who helped me get this year’s book together at the last. A special thanks, as always, to Liza Groen Trombi and all of my friends and colleagues at Locus, and to Ross E. Lockhart at Night Shade Books, who has been wonderful to work with year after year. And two special sets of thanks. As always, I’d like to thank my agent, the dapper and ever-reliable Howard Morhaim, whose annual parties are a highlight of the year. And finally, my extra, extra special thanks to my wife Marianne and my daughters Jessica and Sophie: every moment spent working on this book was stolen from them.
Contents
Introduction »» Jonathan Strahan
The Contrary Gardener »» Christopher Rowe
The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times »» Eleanor Arnason
Close Encounters »» Andy Duncan
Great-Grandmother in the Cellar »» Peter S. Beagle
The Easthound »» Nalo Hopkinson
Goggles (c. 1910) »» Caitlín R. Kiernan
Bricks, Sticks, Straw »» Gwyneth Jones
A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones »» Genevieve Valentine
The Grinnell Method »» Molly Gloss
Beautiful Boys »» Theodora Goss
The Education of a Witch »» Ellen Klages
Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione... »» Paul McAuley
What Did Tessimond Tell You? »» Adam Roberts
Adventure Story »» Neil Gaiman
Katabasis »» Robert Reed
Troll Blood »» Peter Dickinson
The Color Least Used by Nature »» Ted Kosmatka
Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls »» Rachel Pollack
Two Houses »» Kelly Link
Blood Drive »» Jeffrey Ford
Mantis Wives »» Kij Johnson
Immersion »» Aliette de Bodard
About Fairies »» Pat Murphy
Let Maps to Others »» K. J. Parker
Joke in Four Panels »» Robert Shearman
Reindeer Mountain »» Karin Tidbeck
Domestic Magic »» Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem
Swift, Brutal Retaliation »» Meghan McCarron
Nahiku West »» Linda Nagata
Fade to White »» Catherynne M. Valente
Significant Dust »» Margo Lanagan
Mono No Aware »» Ken Liu
Introduction
Jonathan Strahan
More than anything else 2012 was an interesting year for science fiction and fantasy. While people concerned with the business of the genre—publishers, editors, publicists—looked for ways to innovate and expand, to find new ways to get stories before the eyes of readers, those of us who are interested in the artistic health of the genre—writers, artists, critics, readers—were looking carefully at how things were proceeding as well.
Probably the single most interesting discussion of science fiction and fantasy during the year was prompted by “The Widening Gyre,” a fascinating and worthwhile review essay by UK critic Paul Kincaid published in the LA Review of Books where he examined a handful of “best of the year” anthologies like this one. In his essay Kincaid raised the question of whether science fiction had grown “exhausted,” not in the sense of becoming tired or rundown, but rather of having run short on compelling ideas, possibly having lost faith in or connection to the future.
In the extensive online discussions that followed, this sense of “exhaustion” seemed to be prompted by a number of recent works that could be said to be nostalgic, hearkening back to the way the future was, rather than attempting to engage meaningfully with the world we live in today, with all of its economic, climatic, and political upheavals and radical scientific discoveries. If a central mission of science fiction is to connect our world to meaningful believable futures, Kincaid and others asked, are too few writers currently addressing that mission? Kincaid also raised the question of whether fantasy might be losing touch with its mission as well. Touching on stories like K. J. Parker’s excellent novella “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong”—which went on to win the World Fantasy Award in November—Kincaid asked in what sense such works, with no overtly fantastical events or beings at all, were in any sense even “fant
asy.” Couldn’t such a tale be transplanted into a historical setting with little apparent change?
I do think science fiction—at least at the experimental/developmental end of the spectrum—is in a period of self-examination. Some of this is just our field’s constant navel gazing, but some is a deliberate attempt to find a way to imagine any kind of science fictional future at all. It is certainly imaginatively less innovative to revisit 1940s-style SF adventures, with those bright futures that now seem to have failed us, than to try to envision another kind of future from our own less optimistic age. And yet that is the challenge, surely. Not to imagine the way the future was, but the way the future might be. While I don’t think answers to this exist yet, I do think you can see the beginnings of attempts to find them.
The fantasy question vexes me a little more. I am not attracted to litmus tests and lab results for genre, but I do understand and accept the need to be able to meaningfully connect slipstream works to the field, to explain how quasi-historical fiction like that by, say, Guy Gavriel Kay or K. J. Parker belongs in fantasy at all. Discussing his novel Some Kind of Fairy Tale on The Coode Street Podcast recently, Graham Joyce talked about how he used the intrusion of the fantastic into our own world as a tool to interrogate our world, the people and relationships within it. Similarly, Kay has often claimed that placing historical events and people in a secondary world, as he does in major works like Tigana and Under Heaven, allows him to interrogate those events in new and worthwhile ways. I find myself convinced by this and, while I agree with Kincaid that it is valuable to have some idea of what fantasy is and what its mission might be, it’s equally valuable to be able to use it in the ways it has been by Kay, Parker, Joyce, and many others.
As always is the case each year, I couldn’t help but observe a number of interesting and encouraging trends. In 2012 science fiction and fantasy continued to move slowly but hopefully away from the white male Anglo Saxon Mayberry of its youth and towards a more mature, diverse, and inclusive future. This trend was nowhere better evidenced than in the brace of strong original anthologies that focused on fiction from other points of view. The best of these included Nick Mamatas & Matsumi Washington’s The Future Is Japanese, Anil Menon & Vandana Singh’s Breaking the Bow, Eduardo Jiménez Mayo & Chris N. Brown’s Three Messages and a Warning, Ivor Hartmann’s AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Lavie Tidhar’s The Apex Book of World SF, and Brit Mandelo’s Beyond Binary. While “Mono No Aware” by Ken Liu, included here, was originally from The Future Is Japanese, it was only one of many on a fairly long shortlist of stories from these books that were actively considered for this book. The fact that these books were published and discussed during the last twelve months shows that, if nothing else, science fiction and fantasy is looking to become more inclusive, something which is long past due, even if there is still a long way to go.
The other trend I noticed was that writers, editors, and publishers, attempting to come to terms with the ever changing face of publishing today, looked to some interesting and slightly different ways to get their stories into the hands of readers. During the year David Hartwell and Tor.com published a short ebook-only anthology, The Palencar Project, that featured five stories based on a painting by John Jude Palencar. The stories were also offered free of charge on Tor.com. At around the same time Solaris Books in the UK published Solaris Rising 1.5, an ebook only anthology that was positioned as a “bridge” volume between the first and second books in the Ian Whates edited series. Finally, award-winning editor Gardner Dozois published Rip-Offs!, a very strong audio-only anthology which came out at the very end of the year, something John Scalzi did successfully several years ago with METAtropolis. While none of these approaches were new—and they stand in for countless similar examples—they nonetheless demonstrate creative ways of addressing an increasingly volatile and multifaceted market.
I could also point out how, with more and more venues for short fiction appearing, and others just a Kickstarter away, we continue to live through an extraordinary time for short story collections, with books like Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot Palace, Margo Lanagan’s Cracklescape, Lucius Shepard’s The Dragon Griaule, Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry and Andy Duncan’s The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, all able to stand with the very best the field has produced. I could also touch on how, despite strong books like Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s After and Ann VanderMeer’s Steampunk III: Steampunk Reloaded, it struck me as a weaker year for original anthologies. The short fiction scene also continues its inevitable change, with the distinction between print and online publication become more and more meaningless, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Subterranean Magazine establishing themselves as the new Big Four magazines to watch, although Beneath Ceaseless Skies was easily the most improved venue of 2012 and is nipping at their heels along with GigaNotoSaurus and others.
I think further evidence of ongoing vitality can be found in some of the fine novels I managed to read—among so many, many short stories—like Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s sprawling 2312—all very different works from different corners of our field.
Despite all of the challenges this field may face, despite its occasional failings, if work like this and much of the other work I saw during 2012 was anything to go by, science fiction and fantasy are in pretty good shape. As always, more good, interesting work was published than any one person could hope to read, let alone collect in a volume such as this, and as always, more was just around the corner. Some of that bounty is presented here. And to close, if there is value to be had from volumes like this one, and in discussions like the one that followed Paul Kincaid’s essay, it is that they prove there is still a lot to say about our field, and still enough people interested in having that conversation. I’ll be fascinated to see what discussions this book, and the ones that will follow it in coming years, might start.
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
December 2012
The Contrary Gardener
Christopher Rowe
Christopher Rowe [christopherrowe.typepad.com] has published more than twenty short stories, and has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon awards. Frequently reprinted, his work has been translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and has been praised by the New York Times Book Review. His story “Another Word For Map Is Faith” made the long list in the 2007 Best American Short Stories volume, and his early fiction was collected in a chapbook, Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, by Small Beer Press. His “Forgotten Realms” novel, Sandstorm, was published in 2010 by Wizards of the Coast. He is currently pursuing an MFA in writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio of Eastern Kentucky University and is hard at work on Sarah Across America, a new novel about maps, megafauna, and other obsessions. He lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife, novelist Gwenda Bond, and their pets.
Kay Lynne wandered up and down the aisles of the seed library dug out beneath the county extension office. Some of the rows were marked with glowing orange off-limits fungus, warning the unwary away from spores and thistles that required special equipment to handle, which Kay Lynne didn’t have, and special permission to access, which she would never have, if her father had anything to say about it, and he did.
It was the last Friday before the first Saturday in May, the day before Derby Day and so a week from planting day, and Kay Lynne had few ideas and less time for her Victory Garden planning. Last year she had grown a half-dozen varieties of tomatoes, three for eating and three for blood transfusions, but she didn’t like to repeat herself. Given that she tended to mumble when she talked, not liking to repeat herself made Kay Lynne a quiet gardener.
She paused before a container of bright pink corn kernels, their pre-programmed
color coming from insecticides and fertilizers and not from any varietal ancestry. Kay Lynne didn’t like to grow corn. It grew so high that it cast her little cottage in shadow if she planted it on the side of the house that would see it grow at all. Besides, corn was cheap, and more than that, easy—just about any gardener could grow corn and a lot of them did.
There were always root vegetables. A lot of utility to those, certainly, and excellent trade goods for the army supply clerks who would start combing the markets as soon as the earliest spring greens were in. Rootwork was complicated, and meant having nothing to market through the whole long summer, which in turn meant not having to go to the markets for months yet, which was a good thing in Kay Lynne’s view.
She considered the efficacy of beets and potatoes, and the various powers carrots held when they were imaginatively programmed and carefully grown. Rootwork had been a particular specialty of her run-off mother, and so would have the added benefit of warding her father away from the cottage, which he visited entirely too often for Kay Lynne’s comfort.
It would be hard work. That spoke for the idea, too.
She strode over to the information kiosk and picked up the speaking tube that led to the desks of the agents upstairs.
“I need someone to let me into the root cellars,” she said.
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