The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Copyright © 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2017 by Charles Yu

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

ISSN 2573-0797 (print) ISSN 2573-0800 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-544-97398-5 (print) ISBN 978-0-544-98067-9 (ebook)

Cover design by Mark R. Robinson © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

v2.0818

Teenagers from Outer Space by Dale Bailey. First published in Clarkesworld Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Dale Bailey. Reprinted by permission of the author.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf by Dale Bailey. First published in Nightmare Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Dale Bailey. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail by Leigh Bardugo. First published in Summer Days and Summer Nights. Copyright © 2016 by Leigh Bardugo. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

The Story of Kao Yu by Peter S. Beagle. First published in Tor.com. Copyright © 2016 by Peter S. Beagle. Reprinted by permission of Peter S. Beagle.

I’ve Come to Marry the Princess by Helena Bell. First published in Lightspeed Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Helena Bell. Reprinted by permission of Helena Bell.

Smear by Brian Evenson. First published in Conjunctions: 67, Other Aliens. Copyright © 2016 by Brian Evenson. Reprinted by permission of Brian Evenson.

The Venus Effect by Joseph Allen Hill. First published in Lightspeed Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Allen Hill. Reprinted by permission of Joseph Allen Hill.

The City Born Great by N. K. Jemisin. First published in Tor.com. Copyright © 2016 by N. K. Jemisin. Reprinted by permission of N. K. Jemisin.

Successor, Usurper, Replacement by Alice Sola Kim. First published in BuzzFeed READER. Copyright © 2016 by Alice Sola Kim. Reprinted by permission of Alice Sola Kim.

This Is Not a Wardrobe Door by A. Merc Rustad. First published in Fireside Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Merc Rustad. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Vulcanization by Nisi Shawl. First published in Nightmare Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Nisi Shawl aka Denise Angela Shawl. Reprinted by permission of Nisi Shawl aka Denise Angela Shawl.

Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass by Jeremiah Tolbert. First published in Lightspeed Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Reprinted by permission of Jeremiah Tolbert.

When They Came to Us by Debbie Urbanski. First published in The Sun. Copyright © 2016 by Debbie Urbanski. Reprinted by permission of Debbie Urbanski.

The Future Is Blue by Catherynne M. Valente. First published in Drowned Worlds. Copyright © 2016 by Catherynne M. Valente. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home by Genevieve Valentine. First published in Clarkesworld Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Genevieve Valentine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

On the Fringes of the Fractal by Greg van Eekhout. First published in 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush. Copyright © 2016 by Greg van Eekhout. Reprinted by permission of Greg van Eekhout.

Openness by Alexander Weinstein. First published in Beloit Fiction Journal. From Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein. Copyright © 2016 by Alexander Weinstein. Reprinted by permission of Picador.

Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? by Nick Wolven. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Copyright © 2016 by Nick Wolven. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 by Caroline M. Yoachim. First published in Lightspeed Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight by E. Lily Yu. First published in Uncanny Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by E. Lily Yu. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Foreword

Welcome to year three of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy! This volume presents the best science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) short stories published during the 2016 calendar year as selected by myself and guest editor Charles Yu.

After more than fifteen years working in the SF/F field, I found 2016 to be an entirely new challenge, as I threw myself into the world of novel-editing, launching my own imprint—John Joseph Adams Books—with the publisher of this fine anthology, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I’m very proud to have published novels by Hugh Howey, Carrie Vaughn, and Peter Cawdron thus far, and look forward to the publication of Molly Tanzer’s JJA Books debut in November. Those will be followed in 2018 by the release of books by Bryan Camp, Ashok K. Banker, and Todd McAulty, along with second books by Molly and Carrie.

So while for much of 2016 I’ve been immersed in the long form, it’s always a pleasure to return to my first love: short fiction.

Our guest editor this year, Charles Yu, is a writer I’ve been interested in for many years, ever since I first heard about his amazing novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which came out in 2010 to major acclaim. It was published the same year I launched my magazine, Lightspeed—and much to my delight, when I reached out to him about writing a story for my fledgling magazine, he agreed, and sold me the superb tale Standard Loneliness Package (which you can read online at lightspeedmagazine.com); thus our collaborative relationship was born. His short fiction has also appeared in Playboy, Esquire.com, Wired Magazine and Wired.com, The Oxford American, and Vice.com, among other anthologies and magazines, as well as in two collections: Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You.

I’ve also published his work in a number of my own anthologies, including Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, and Press Start to Play. Fun fact: if you mashed up his stories in the latter two volumes, you’d basically get HBO’s hit TV show Westworld, for which Charlie worked as a scriptwriter and the story editor on season one.

I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Charlie had a fantastic story in The New Yorker this year called Fable, which surely would have been on the best-of-the-year list I passed along to the guest editor if it weren’t written by that guest editor. If you like genre short fiction—and I know you do, since you’re reading not only this book but this foreword—then do yourself a favor and definitely check it out. (And lucky you, it’s available online on The New Yorker’s website for free.)

Science fiction and fantasy, though they seem to be about the future or fictional worlds, are always at their core really about the problems and issues of today. Even in the best of times, genre writers find inspiration in injustice, or in the flaws found in an otherwise well-functioning system. In the worst of times . . . well, the one silver lining of living through the dystopian hellscape of contemporary American politics is that such strife tends to generate great art—and no one embraces the ability of literature to critique and debate our daily truths by considering it through a different lens more than writers of science fiction and fantasy.

If there’s one story in this book that I fully expected to resonate strongly with our guest editor—speaking of writers finding inspiration in injustice—it’s The Venus Effect, by Joseph Allen Hill. Like How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (and, erm, Charlie’s introduction to this anthology), The Venus Effect breaks the fourth wall and has the author intruding on his own story, to similarly great effect. Though it also should be completely unsurprising that Charlie loved this story because of the audacious brilliance of it and the way it tackles an extremely thorny issue—police brutality—with such aplomb while staying within the framework of a fun adventure story that is somehow both excessively clever and enormously poignant.

Charlie often employs other meta techniques in his stories as well, so it was an equally safe bet that he would also love the Nebula Award finalist Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0, by Caroline M. Yoachim, which uses the structure of a choose-your-own-adventure-type narrative to critique and have some fun with the completely unfun health-care system.

This Is Not a Wardrobe Door, by A. Merc Rustad (also a Nebula Award finalist), and Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass, by Jeremiah Tolbert, in addition to both having wardrobe in the title, are, unsurprisingly, both portal fantasies. Portal fantasy is a subgenre that is more or less illustrated by Jeremiah’s title, which references the Chronicles of Narnia (wardrobe), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (tornado), and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (looking glass)—all three everyday things serving as portals to a magical otherworld. I’ve observed an uptick in portal fantasy recently—there are some great portal fantasies on the Notable Stories list—and I can’t help but wonder if it’s partially socially motivated: things are so bleak that many of us are literally imagining escaping to a fantasy world as our only way out of the mess we’re in.

Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do?, by Nick Wolven, and Openness, by Alexander Weinstein, are two stories that would have felt at home in the great Netflix anthology TV series Black Mirror; both explore the dark side of technology—how, if we let it, it can take over and rule our lives . . . how (to quote Fight Club) the things you own end up owning you (or perhaps, in one of these cases, the things you own end up pwning you).

Other selections you’ll find here include stories about love, alien visitations, post-climate-change futures, revisionist fairy tales, virtual worlds and corporate malfeasance, and more.

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 1 and December 31, 2016. The criteria for consideration are (1) original publication in a nationally distributed American or Canadian publication (i.e., periodicals, collections, or anthologies, in print, online, or ebook); (2) publication in English by writers who are American or Canadian, or who have made the United States or Canada their home; (3) publication as text (audiobook, podcast, dramatization, interactive, and other forms of fiction are not considered); (4) original publication as short fiction (excerpts of novels are not knowingly considered); (5) story length of 17,499 words or less; (6) at least loosely categorized as science fiction or fantasy; (7) publication by someone other than the author (self-published works are not eligible); and (8) publication as an original work by the author (i.e., not part of a media tie-in/licensed fiction program).

As series editor, I attempt to read everything I can find that meets these selection criteria. After doing all my reading, I create a list of what I feel are the top eighty stories published in the genre (forty science fiction and forty fantasy). This year those eighty stories were sent to guest editor Charles Yu, who read them and then chose the best twenty (ten science fiction, ten fantasy) for inclusion in the anthology. Charles read all the stories blind, with no bylines attached to them or any information about where a story originally appeared. His selections appear in this volume; the remaining sixty stories are listed in the back of this book as Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2016.

As usual, in my effort to find the top stories of the year, I scour the field to try to read and consider everything that’s published.

Though the bulk of my reading typically comes from periodicals, I always also read dozens of anthologies and single-author collections. Here’s just a sampling of the anthologies that published fine work that didn’t quite manage to make it into the table of contents or Notable Stories list but are worthwhile just the same: Dead Letters, edited by Conrad Williams; Children of Lovecraft, edited by Ellen Datlow; Scary Out There, edited by Jonathan Maberry; In the Shadow of Frankenstein, edited by Stephen Jones; The Grimm Future, edited by Erin Underwood; The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, edited by Paula Guran; A Tyranny of Petticoats, edited by Jessica Spotswood; Cyber World, edited by Jason Heller; Decision Points, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt; Clockwork Phoenix 5, edited by Mike Allen; Hidden Youth, edited by Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke; Upside Down, edited by Jaym Gates and Monica Valentinelli; and several others (including the horror anthology What the #@&% Is That?, edited by Douglas Cohen and yours truly).

In addition to this, the anthologies Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan; 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush, edited by Kevin J. Anderson and John McFetridge; and Summer Days and Summer Nights, edited by Stephanie Perkins, contain stories represented in the table of contents, and stories on the Notable Stories list appeared in anthologies such as The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe; An Alphabet of Embers, edited by Rose Lemberg; Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan; Unfettered II, edited by Shawn Speakman; Humanity 2.0, edited by Alex Shvartsman; Genius Loci, edited by Jaym Gates; Astro Noise, edited by Laura Poitras; Strangers Among Us, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law; and You, Human, edited by Michael Bailey.

There were fewer eligible single-author collections with original material to consider, but new collections were published by Alexander Weinstein (Children of the New World), Caroline M. Yoachim (Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories), Patricia A. McKillip (Dreams of Distant Shores), Amber Sparks (The Unfinished World), Jeffrey Ford (A Natural History of Hell), Carlos Hernandez (The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria), Laird Barron (Swift to Chase), Livia Llewellyn (Furnace), and Tina Connolly (On the Eyeball Floor and Other Stories). Three collections contain stories included on the Notable Stories list: The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu; A Collapse of Horses, by Brian Evenson; and The Bed Moved, by Rebecca Schiff. Also of interest, but ineligible because it is made up entirely of reprints, was the debut collection from Carrie Vaughn, Amaryllis and Other Stories.

As always, I surveyed more than a hundred different periodicals over the course of the year, paying equal attention to major genre publications like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction and to new markets like Persistent Visions and Liminal Stories. I also do my best to find any genre fiction lurking in the pages of mainstream/literary publications such as The New Yorker, Tin House, and Granta.

The notable stories on this year’s list are drawn from forty-four different publications—twenty-nine periodicals, twelve anthologies, and three single-author collections—from forty-three different editors (counting editorial teams as a unit). The selections themselves are drawn from fourteen different sources—eleven periodicals and three anthologies—from thirteen different editors or editorial teams.

This year marks the first appearance of several periodicals on our table of contents, including Conjunctions, Fireside Magazine, Beloit Fiction Journal, BuzzFeed READER, and The Sun. Periodicals appearing on the Notable Stories list for the first time this year include Big Echo, Faerie Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, GigaNotoSaurus, People Holding . . . , The Sun, VQR Online, and ZYZZYVA.

Four of the authors whose work is included in this volume—A. Merc Rustad, Catherynne M. Valente, Dale Bailey, and Nick Wolven—have previously appeared in BASFF; thus the remaining fifteen authors (fifteen rather than sixteen because Bailey appears twice) are represented for the first time.

Debbie Urbanski, Brian Evenson, and Ken Liu tied with the most stories in my top eighty this year (three each), and several authors had two each: A. Merc Rustad, Alyssa Wong, Carmen Maria Machado, Caroline M. Yoachim, Dale Bailey, Dominica Phetteplace, N. K. Jemisin, Naomi Novik, Nick Wolven, P. Djèlí Clark, Rich Larson, and Sofia Samatar.

I mentioned above that the BASFF 2017 stories This Is Not a Wardrobe Door and Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 are finalists for the Nebula Award this year. Additionally, The City Born Great, by N. K. Jemisin, is a Hugo Award finalist. Notable stories that have received award recognition include Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, by Sarah Pinsker (Nebula finalist); You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay, by Alyssa Wong (Nebula and Hugo finalist); Seasons of Glass and Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar (Nebula and Hugo finalist); Things with Beards, by Sam J. Miller (Nebula finalist); A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers, by Alyssa Wong (Nebula and Hugo finalist); and The Jupiter Drop, by Josh Malerman (Stoker finalist).

As I’ve noted in past forewords, I don’t log every single story I read throughout the year—I only dutifully log stories that I feel are in the running—so I don’t have an exact count of how many stories I reviewed or considered. As in past years, I estimate that it was several thousand stories, perhaps as many as five thousand, altogether.

Naturally, many of the stories I read were perfectly good and enjoyable but didn’t stand out enough for me to consider them among the best of the year. I did, however, end up with about a hundred additional stories that were at one point or another under serious consideration, including stories from publications not represented in this anthology, such as Amazing Stories, The Book Smugglers, Bracken Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, Daily Science Fiction, The Dark, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Flash Fiction Online, Futuristica, Galaxy’s Edge, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Lackington’s, Lenny Letter, Liminal Stories, The Lovecraft ezine, Nature Futures, Persistent Visions, and Slate, as well as the anthologies and collections named above.

This foreword mentions only a few of the great publications considered for this anthology; see the table of contents and the Notable Stories list to get a more complete overview of the top publications currently available in the field.

Given how many stories I have to consider every year, it’s probably obvious that I can do this only with a considerable amount of help. So I’d just like to take a moment to thank and acknowledge my team of first readers, who helped me evaluate various publications that I might not have had time to consider otherwise: Alex Puncekar, Robyn Lupo, Devin Marcus, Sandra Odell, Karen Bovenmyer, and Christie Yant. Thanks also to Tim Mudie at Mariner Books, who keeps everything running smoothly behind the scenes at Best American HQ.

If you’ve made it this far in the foreword, then maybe you’ve been introduced to some new publications to look for in the future or been reminded of a few that have fallen off your radar over the years and deserve a second look. Which brings me to one last point I’d like to take the opportunity to drive home.

We’re undoubtedly living in a golden age of genre—but not just in literature: also in TV and film. There’s more genre entertainment being produced today than any reasonable person would have any hope of keeping up with. That’s how it’s been with short stories and books for many years; it’s one of the reasons volumes like this one are useful and necessary. But now this is increasingly applicable to television and film as well. Though it’s probably still possible to keep track of all the genre movies coming out (though any one person is unlikely to do so, because of the quantity and the still wildly varying levels of quality), television is becoming more like publishing in the sense that even if you’re a deeply devoted genre fan, you’d basically have to be committed to watching television full-time in order to catch all the genre TV shows being produced. Overall that is a good thing—at least it is if, like me, you love television—even if it makes it harder to have that shared experience anytime you run into a fellow fan; and of course all that film and television (and video game!) entertainment leaves the deeply devoted genre fan with less time to spend on short stories than ever before.

The problem with any form of entertainment is that the more options there are, the harder it is for any one thing to be successful enough to stick around long-term. On television, for example, within the last year the terrific original genre series BrainDead and Incorporated were both canceled despite brilliant first seasons, and mind-bogglingly good, core genre shows like Syfy’s The Expanse are doing well enough to get renewed but sort of scraping by. Likewise, the magazines you love today may be gone tomorrow. (And indeed, several seem to have faded away this year—whether it’s for good or not, who can say?) Many of them operate on a shoestring, relying on Kickstarter, subscription drives, and support through Patreon.

It all boils down to this: we must support the things we love, whether it’s books, television, film, or stories—though I’d say especially books and stories! If you like an author or magazine, support it early and often. Word of mouth (including reader reviews at Amazon or Goodreads or the like) can go a long way toward helping an author’s career—or a fledgling zine—get off the ground and stay aloft. Short-fiction venues are often labors of love, and they need your support, in the form of readership, subscriptions, and signal-boosting. And it’s you readers, who care enough about short fiction to read this book (and this foreword), who are the standard-bearers, so if you love something, say something! Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing my part to try to find the best of the best every year, and hey, maybe somehow together, with the help of genre short fiction, we can find a way to transform this dystopian hellscape we’re in back into one of those better tomorrows.

Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition, please visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american for instructions on how to submit material for consideration.

—John Joseph Adams

Introduction

I. Alternative Realities

(NOTE: This is true. All of this happened.)

Recently, an anthropologist from another universe showed up at my local coffee shop.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: I’m an anthropologist from another universe.

ME: Cool.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: I’m from another universe, and that’s what you’re going to say? Cool? Aren’t you wondering how I got here? Don’t you think I might have something very important to talk to you about?

ME: [not really interested] Sorry, yeah. You’re right.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Good. I mean, yeesh. We’re not off to a great start—[Notices the look on my face . . . or maybe reading my mind] You’re zoning me out. Aren’t you? You’re waiting for me to stop talking so you can go back to your work.

ME: I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m under deadline. I’m editing this anthology, and I have to read a whole bunch of short stories—

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: It looks like you’re browsing pictures of baby pandas.

ME: I suppose you’re not leaving this universe until I talk to you.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Nope.

ME: All right then. What’s this about?

The interdimensional anthropologist (who, it turns out, goes by Susan) said she had come here on a Fulbright. Susan had gotten some research money to study our little universe. I asked why ours was worth studying.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Not the whole universe. Just a subset.

ME: Oh. I think I know where you’re going with this.

Yeah, Susan said. Susan pulled out a manila folder (they have Office Depot in her dimension) and slapped it on the table (we were at Starbucks—like I said, this is all true; you can tell because I’m adding details and also because I’m asserting that it’s true).

CASE STUDY IN BIFURCATED REALITY:

AMERICA EARLY 2017

proto-civilization demonstrating multiple indicia of having reached early Phase 2, with satisfaction of the Filbert criterion. Reports and field data suggest there are currently two distinct subrealities coexisting within the same space-time region. Situation highly unstable. Funding granted to enable exploratory investigation. Inquiry will focus on how human inhabitants of this bifurcated reality will be affected and whether they will be able to come up with a solution to resolve the problem, or, in the absence of such a solution, what the psychological and emotional consequences will be for these humans (in the event of a negative outcome).

I took a moment to process this.

ME: I don’t like the sound of negative outcome.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Yeah. You shouldn’t like it.

ME: So. Okay. What the hell does this all mean?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Basically, America in 2017 isn’t one reality. It’s two separate ones, mostly distinct but with some overlap.

ME: That . . . seems . . . correct. Ridiculous. But correct.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: You say it’s ridiculous, but you have a rich academic literature about this topic already.

ME: We do? I mean, this doesn’t sound like science. It sounds like science fiction.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Exactly.

Susan handed me a book. I looked at the title page:

The Best American SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY™ 2017

Edited and with an Introduction by Charles Yu

John Joseph Adams, Series Editor

ME: Huh. [then] Is that . . . me?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: It’s one possible you, yeah. You picked these stories?

ME: I guess I did. I mean, I will.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Then I have come to the right place. The humans in this book are demonstrating a kind of technology.

ME: They’re writers.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Okay. These human writers are demonstrating a kind of technology.

ME: Stories?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Stories. [scribbling in her interdimensional notepad] Right. That’s your word for it. A narrative technology of a specific kind. Genre stories, science fiction and fantasy. Speculative fiction, some call it. The ability to create imagined realities.

ME: I’m sorry—hold up, Susan. Are you telling me that science fiction and fantasy writers caused reality to fragment this way? Caused America to split into two? That SF/F writers are the root cause of all of this craziness, with no one knowing what’s true? Or, worse, that we’re the reason serious people are starting to have serious doubts about whether or not there is such a thing as truth anymore? We’re the problem?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Actually it’s the opposite. Writers of these imaginative realities are not the problem. They’re the solution.

ME: Huh?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: I will admit, it’s a bit of a contradiction. Or an irony? One of those things—you humans with your primitive rationality and logic still have trouble with some of these complexities. [Takes a breath out of one of her nineteen lungs] Okay, let me try to explain it this way.

Susan took the book and flipped to the table of contents. I eyed them with great interest, which did not go unnoticed by Susan.

ME: Would you mind if I . . .

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Took a picture of the table of contents? Nah. I figured you would.

ME: [grateful] Thanks. It’d just make it so much easier for me to pick the stories if I already knew what I was going to pick. Er, you know what I mean.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: No prob. Always happy to help form a stable causal loop. [then] Within this book, parallel planes of flattened wood pulp and ink markings, arranged in a particular configuration in this volume of space, are maps, instructions, detailed blueprints of the multiverse.

ME: I mean, sure. But those aren’t really . . . real. Are they?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Depends on what you mean by real.

ME: Factual. Corresponding to an agreed-upon reality.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Given the current state of the American polity, I’m wondering whether you are overestimating the level of agreement. But that’s not the point. You’re right, they’re not real in your universe. But these alternative realities do exist. And they’re closer than you think.

ME: [looking around] Close? How close?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: They are what is known as the adjacent possible. If you can imagine it from this universe, then they must, as a matter of definition, touch your universe.

ME: So all twenty of those stories are actually other possible worlds that border this one.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: [nodding] You’re a quick study. Yes, they not only surround this world, they buttress it. They actually define it.

ME: What do you mean, they define it?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Imagine your universe on a map. To the left, an ocean. To the right, mountains. Above and below, other features of the topology.

ME: We’re bounded on all sides by our imagination. Leaving us in the middle.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Your universe is the negative space defined by these natural boundaries.

ME: Our reality is defined by what we can imagine.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: All these imaginary worlds are fundamentally grounded in your consensus reality. They depend on it.

ME: So the bigger our imaginations, the richer and more stable our own reality becomes. But then, what about . . .

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Right. So you can see why this current situation is so dangerous. What’s happening now is that the imagination is being challenged. The diversity of viewpoints, the ability to create stories, to have different perspectives, is being systematically destroyed. In its place, a narrative is being decreed.

ME: They’re trying to legislate and enforce a single master narrative.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: And that master narrative is not coherent. It is unconnected from the base reality. It does not depend on consensus. It is an impoverished substitute for reality. The destruction of truth can’t go on indefinitely. Reality will continue to fragment, until reality itself loses use as a meaningful term.

ME: This sounds pretty bad. Is it too late?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: It’s not too late. That’s where this anthology comes in. The stories, this technology you have invented, they are engineering solutions for structural repair of micro-realities. This is the material science creating an invisible structure that actually strengthens because it depends on the underlying consensus reality. By connecting to the substructure, the foundational reality, it reinforces and delineates, giving a shape to truth. A mosaic, created by the imagination, of independent and pluralistic voices, which form in the aggregate a hidden framework, protecting your world from collapse. They don’t assert the truth, they depend upon it. [Checks her interdimensional gadget] Whoops, sorry, I was wrong. Looks like it’s too late after all. Bye!

At this, Susan disappeared out of existence.

Turns out the bifurcated reality collapsed, so only one was left. You know what happened next, probably.

The other reality took over. It won. There was just one reality. This one.

II. Alternatives to Reality

(NOTE: This is also completely true. All of this also happened.)

I was just getting over the whole Susan of it all when another interdimensional being showed up.

ME: Let me guess. Anthropologist.

INTERDIMENSIONAL BEING: Actually, no. I’m a cop. My name is Stan.

ME: This seems bad.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: I’m not going to lie, sir. It’s not good.

ME: Are you going to arrest me?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Not you. You’re not very important. And anyway, if I were going to arrest someone, it’d be all of you.

ME: So then what are you here for?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: You people have a lot of explaining to do.

ME: I suppose by you people you mean humans.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Not all humans. Just Americans. Are you an American?

ME: Please don’t talk to me. I don’t know anything. Really. You could not have picked a worse person to speak on behalf of humanity. Go talk to that lady over there, with the earbuds, pretending not to notice you. Or maybe that guy with a little bit of cream cheese on the corner of his mouth. Anyone but me.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: It’s good that you’re just sort of an average person. A nobody. Someone at random. That way we can be sure we’re getting a representative sample.

ME: [gulping] A representative sample for what?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: This universe is taking up a lot of space. And not producing much in the way of interesting ideas. We’re thinking of shutting it down. Plus America seems to have really caused some distortions in reality. The whole place is really just not working out.

ME: Please don’t shut down our universe. We like existing. You just caught us at a weird time. Could you maybe come back, like, four years ago? Or maybe a few thousand years from now?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: [looking around] This is a bad situation.

ME: I know. We know. We know it is.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Can you justify your existence? Give me one good reason not to collide this whole place with antimatter and toss it on the junk heap.

I was sort of at a loss for words. I’d never been great under pressure, and this was a little bit above my pay grade. Stan raised his universe-annihilation gadget, set to Total Annihilation. I closed my eyes and said to everyone, Sorry. I did my best, but I guess my best wasn’t good enough.

And then I realized: I was still holding the book.

I dropped to my knees, pleading for not just my own feeble existence but that of everyone in the cosmos.

ME: If you’d just . . . read this.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: [holding the book] What am I supposed to do with this?

I hear a deafening noise. I close my eyes, fearing the worst.

Nothing.

And then I hear a voice.

VOICE: Read it.

I opened my eyes. Susan!

ME: Susan! I’ve never been happier to see an interdimensional anthropologist. Why did you come back?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: To make sure Stan read that book. And also, it’d be bad for my research proposal if he destroyed this place before I published.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: What’s so special about these twenty stories?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: They represent what the species is capable of. A cross-section in space and time, and look at this. Their actual tech might be primitive, but their conceptual machinery shows promise, shows the potential of what they can do. They investigate selves and others, minds and bodies, differences. Truth and illusion. Universes, large and small, extensive and interior. Slip expertly from their own consciousness into another, inhabiting it. These are empaths, all of them, that I’d put right up there with the Teleflugans.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Bullshit. The Teleflugans. Right. Wait . . . really?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Really. Just read it, Stan.

Stan pressed it to his cheek for a few milliseconds. Susan watched him expectantly, waiting for his reaction.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Well?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Well.

Stan started crying. And laughing.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Well, shit, Susan. I guess you were telling the truth.

Stan turned to me.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Human idiot—why didn’t you tell me you had this technology?

ME: Um, I didn’t realize it was so important?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: That’s why you’re an idiot. You can come up with this and yet not realize how important it is.

ME: Wait a minute. Are you telling me that but for the existence of our literature, you would have thought this whole universe was worth destroying?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Dude, now you’re talking crazy. The stories won’t save the world. But they are evidence of something. They are evidence that despite the tenuous grasp on reality you all seem to have here, the collapsing of objective truth that’s going on, and the instability it’s causing at this particular point in space and time—despite all of that, you still seem to have at least a few people interested in imagining better worlds, other worlds, the existence of alternative points of view. Based on these twenty stories, this narrative speculation, we have . . . something to go on. A scrap of hope, for you as a civilization. As a species.

ME: So . . . you’re not going to annihilate us?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Not yet. But you’d better keep this up. You’re on thin ice. [to Susan] You hungry? I could go for a slice of pizza.

And with that, Susan and Stan disappeared from this universe. For at least another year.

This is all true. All of this really happened. I mean, to the extent that truth and reality still exist.

III. Reality

After the whole thing with Susan and Stan was over, I finished my coffee. Then I went and got a sandwich. Self-fulfilling timelines make me hungry. As I ate my sandwich, I dove back into my work, with renewed vigor and an appreciation for the stakes involved. Time hardly moved—I must have entered some kind of vortex, as I read the remarkable stories that make up this collection. These stories we tell ourselves, the best of them, they tell us something about what parts of reality we understand well enough to question. About who we are now. And about what we are capable of when we let ourselves imagine the people we could be. These stories, taken together, might be sufficient evidence to persuade the cosmic overlords that despite our shortcomings, we merit an extension pending further consideration. That on some anthropological rubric, we pass a minimum test for proof of civilization. Or better yet, at their very best, they might be (in the words of Stan the Interdimensional Cop) a scrap of hope.

—Charles Yu

LEIGH BARDUGO

Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail

FROM Summer Days and Summer Nights

Head

There were a lot of stories about Annalee Saperstein and why she came to Little Spindle, but Gracie’s favorite was the heat wave.

In 1986, New York endured a summer so miserable that anyone who could afford to leave the city did. The pavement went soft with the heat, a man was found dead in his bathtub with an electric fan half submerged in the water next to his hairy knees, and the power grid flickered on and off like a bug light rattling with moths. On the Upper West Side, above the bakeries and delicatessens, the Woolworth’s and the Red Apple market, people slept on top of their sheets, sucked on handkerchiefs full of crushed ice, and opened their windows wide, praying for a breeze. That was why, when the Hudson leaped its banks and went looking for trouble on a hot July night, the river found Ruth Blonksy’s window wedged open with a dented Candie’s shoebox.

Earlier that day Ruth had been in Riverside Park with her friends, eating lemon pucker ices and wearing a persimmon-colored shift that was really a vintage nightgown she’d dyed with two boxes of Rit and mixed success. Rain had been promised for days, but the sky hung heavy over the city, a distended gray belly of cloud that refused to split. Sweat beading over her skin, Ruth had leaned against the park railing to look down at the swaying surface of the river, opaque and nearly black beneath the overcast sky, and had the eerie sense that the water was looking back at her.

Then a drop of lemon ice trickled from the little pink spoon in her hand, startling as a cold tongue lapping at her pulse point, and Marva Allsburg shouted, We’re going to Jaybee’s to look at records.

Ruth licked the lemon ice from her wrist and thought no more of the river.

But later that night, when she woke—her sheets soaked through with sweat, a tangle of reeds at the foot of her bed—that sticky trail of sugar was what first came to mind. She’d fallen asleep in her clothes, and her persimmon shift clung wetly to her stomach. Beneath it, her body burned feverish with half-remembered dreams of the river god, a muscular shape that moved through the deep current of sleep, his gray skin speckled blue and green. Her lips felt just kissed, and her head was clouded as if she’d risen too fast from some great depth. It took a long moment for her ears to clear, for her to recognize the moss-and-metal smell of wet concrete, and then to make sense of the sound coming through her open window—rain falling in a steady patter onto the predawn streets below. The heat had broken at last.

Nine months later, Ruth gave birth to a