The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Readings in the Slantwise Sciences by Sofia Samatar

Air to Shape Lungs by Shingai Njeri Kagunda

Beginnings by Kristina Ten

Sparrows by Susan Palwick

The Six Deaths of the Saint by Alix E. Harrow

Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist by Isabel J. Kim

Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Stephen Graham Jones

Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills

There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista by Isabel Cañas

Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness by S. L. Huang

White Water, Blue Ocean by Linda Raquel Nieves Pérez

The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World by MKRNYILGLD

Three Mothers Mountain by Nathan Ballingrud

The Odyssey Problem by Chris Willrich

Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology by Theodora Goss

Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867 by Kim Fu

In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird by Maria Dong

The Difference Between Love and Time by Catherynne M. Valente

Folk Hero Motifs in Tales Told by the Dead by KT Bryski

Cumulative Ethical Guidelines for Mid-Range Interstellar Storytellers by Malka Older

Contributors’ Notes

Other Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2022

Notes

About the Editors

Guest Editors of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy

About Mariner Books

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

Welcome to year nine of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy! This volume presents the best science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) short stories published during the 2022 calendar year as selected by myself and guest editor R. F. Kuang.

About This Year’s Guest Editor

Number-one New York Times bestselling author R. F. (Rebecca) Kuang first exploded onto the science fiction and fantasy scene in 2018 with the publication of her debut novel, The Poppy War. Following its publication, Rebecca won the trifecta of genre awards presented to debuting novelists: the Compton Crook Award, the Crawford Award, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. The Poppy War was followed by two sequels, The Dragon Republic and The Burning God, and the books in that trilogy have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, British Fantasy, and Ignyte awards—and included on TIME’s list of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. Rebecca’s latest novel—Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution—won the Nebula Award, the British Book Award, and the Locus Award.¹

Rebecca was born in Guangzhou, China, but moved to the United States with her family as a child. She graduated from Georgetown University, then received a Marshall Scholarship and went on to attend Cambridge University, where she earned a master’s of philosophy (MPhil) in Chinese Studies. She then attended Oxford University, where she graduated with a master’s of science (MSc) in Contemporary Chinese Studies. Currently, she’s at Yale University, pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures. On the genre side of things, she’s also a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction novel writing workshop.

She’s published two short stories: The Nine Curves River in the 2020 anthology The Book of Dragons; and Against All Odds, a Star Wars story in From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back; additionally, she published The Drowning Faith, a collection of stories set in the world of the Poppy War trilogy, which were published as part of The Burning God. Recently, she’s also branched out into translating stories from Chinese into English, with her translations appearing in Clarkesworld and Lightspeed.

Selection Criteria and Process

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022. The technical criteria for consideration were (1) original publication in a nationally distributed North American publication (i.e., periodicals, collections, or anthologies, in print, online, or e-book); (2) publication in English by writers who are North American, or who have made North America their home; (3) publication as text (audiobook, podcast, dramatized, 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 (i.e., self-published works are not eligible); and (8) publication as an original work of the author (i.e., not part of a media tie-in/licensed fiction program).

As series editor, I attempted to read everything I could find that meets the above selection criteria. After doing all of my reading, I created a list of what I felt were the top eighty stories (forty science fiction and forty fantasy) published in the genre. Those eighty stories—hereinafter referred to as the Top 80—were sent to the guest editor, who read them and then chose the best twenty (ten science fiction, ten fantasy) for inclusion in the anthology. The guest editor reads all of the stories anonymously—with no bylines attached to them, nor any information about where the story originally appeared.

The guest editor’s top twenty selections appear in this volume; the remaining sixty stories that did not make it into the anthology are listed in the back of this book as "Other Notable Stories of 2022."

2022 Selections

Ten authors selected for this volume previously appeared in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (BASFF): Sofia Samatar (4 times), Catherynne M. Valente (3), Nathan Ballingrud (1), KT Bryski (1), Maria Dong (1), Theodora Goss (1), S. L. Huang (1), Stephen Graham Jones (1), Shingai Njeri Kagunda (1), and Susan Palwick (1). Thus, Isabel Cañas, Kim Fu, Alix E. Harrow, Isabel J. Kim, Samantha Mills, MKRNYILGLD, Malka Older, Linda Raquel Nieves Pérez, Kristina Ten, and Chris Willrich are all appearing in BASFF for the first time.

The selections were chosen from seventeen different publications: Clarkesworld (3), Lightspeed (2), and the following all had one selection each: Africa Risen edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight; Asimov’s; Bridge to Elsewhere edited by Alana Joli Abbott and Julia Rios; Conjunctions; Fantasy; Into Shadow presented by Amazon Original Stories; Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu; Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms edited by John Joseph Adams; Nightmare; Reclaim the Stars edited by Zoraida Córdova; Screams from the Dark edited by Ellen Datlow; Someone in Time edited by Jonathan Strahan; Strange Horizons; Tor.com; and Uncanny.

Several of our selections this year were winners of (or finalists for) some of the field’s awards²: In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird by Maria Dong (Sturgeon finalist); Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867 by Kim Fu (Shirley Jackson winner); The Six Deaths of the Saint by Alix E. Harrow (Locus finalist); Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness by S.L. Huang (Ignyte, Nebula, and Hugo finalist); Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Stephen Graham Jones (Ignyte finalist); Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills (Nebula and Locus winner, Hugo and Sturgeon finalist); Beginnings by Kristina Ten (Locus finalist); and The Difference Between Love and Time by Catherynne M. Valente (Hugo and Locus finalist).

2022 Top 80

In order to select the Top 80 stories published in the SF/F genres in 2022, I considered several thousand stories from a wide array of anthologies, collections, and magazines. As always, because of the vast wealth of excellent material being published every year, it was, in many cases, difficult to decide which stories would make it into my Top 80 stories that I would present to the guest editor; the difference between a story that made the cut and a story that got cut was sometimes razor thin. Outside of my Top 80, I had around sixty-five additional stories that were in the running.

The Top 80 this year were drawn from thirty-two different publications: seventeen periodicals, eleven anthologies, and three single-author collections.

Isabel J. Kim had the most stories in the Top 80 this year, with a whopping four; several authors were tied for second-most, with two each: Alix E. Harrow, Hannah Yang, Kim Fu, Kristina Ten, P H Lee, Stephen Graham Jones, Suzan Palumbo, and Yoon Ha Lee. Overall, sixty-nine different authors are represented in the Top 80.

In addition to the award-winning/nominated stories in our TOC this year, several Notable Stories were recognized for various awards³ as well: Slow Communication by Dominique Dickey (Sturgeon finalist); Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold by S. B. Divya (Locus and Nebula finalist); If We Make It Through This Alive by A. T. Greenblatt (Sturgeon finalist); Give Me English by Ai Jiang (Locus and Nebula finalist); Bonsai Starships by Yoon Ha Lee (Sturgeon finalist); The Sadness Box by Suzanne Palmer (Locus finalist); Douen by Suzan Palumbo (Aurora and Nebula finalist); and D.I.Y by John Wiswell (Hugo, Nebula, and Locus finalist).

Anthologies

The following anthologies had stories in our Top 80 this year: Africa Risen* edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight (4); Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms* edited by John Joseph Adams (3); Bridge to Elsewhere* edited by Alana Joli Abbott and Julia Rios (2), Into Shadow* presented by Amazon Original Stories (2), Reclaim the Stars* edited by Zoraida Córdova (2), Trespass presented by Amazon Original Stories (2), and the following all had one each: Our Shadows Have Claws edited by Yamile Saied Méndez and Amparo Ortiz; Screams from the Dark* edited by Ellen Datlow; Someone in Time* edited by Jonathan Strahan; and Trouble the Waters edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, and Troy L. Wiggins; Xenocultivars edited by Isabela Oliveira and Jed Sabin. Anthologies marked with an asterisk had stories selected for inclusion in this volume.

Other anthologies that published fine work in 2022 that didn’t manage to crack the Top 80 include: Dark Stars edited by John F.D. Taff; Death in the Mouth edited by Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart; Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors presented by Fix; The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe⁴; Other Terrors edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason; Small Odysseys edited by Hannah Tinti; and Tomorrow’s Parties edited by Jonathan Strahan.

There were two anthologies I took note of that contained only reprints (and thus were ineligible) but I wanted to highlight anyway: The Future is Female! Volume 2 edited by Lisa Yaszek and Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn edited by Brian Merchant.

Collections

Three collections had stories in the Top 80 this year: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (2); Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (1); and The Nectar of Nightmares by Craig Laurance Gidney (1). The Fu collection had a story included in this volume.

Naturally, many other collections were published in 2022. All of the following were released in 2022 and meet the broad American focus of this book, but some of them contained only reprints (and thus were ineligible for inclusion). I’m including them all here anyway as part of my overview of the year: All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From by Izzy Wasserstein; All the Wrong Ideas by Jeremy Robert Johnson; The Adventurists and Other Stories by Richard Butner; The Best of Lucius Shepard, Vol. 2 by Lucius Shepard; Boys, Beasts, & Men by Sam J. Miller; Breakable Things by Cassandra Khaw; Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies by John Langan; Dark Breakers by C.S.E. Cooney; The Dark Ride by John Kessel; Future Artifacts by Kameron Hurley; Geometries of Belonging by R. B. Lemberg; Holy Terror by Cherie Priest; Liberation Day by George Saunders; Memory’s Legion by James S.A. Corey; Night Shift by Eileen Gunn; Our Fruiting Bodies by Nisi Shawl; Out There by Kate Folk; Return to Glory by Jack McDevitt; Spontaneous Human Combustion by Richard Thomas; Stealing God and Other Stories by Bruce McAllister; Utopias of the Third Kind by Vandana Singh; We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories by Margaret Killjoy; Where You Linger by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam; and You Fed Us to the Roses by Carlie St. George.

Periodicals

Lightspeed had the most stories in the Top 80 (13); followed by Clarkesworld (9); The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (5); Asimov’s (4); Tor.com (4); Fantasy (3); Uncanny (3); The Deadlands (2); FIYAH (2); Nightmare (2); Strange Horizons (2); Sunday Morning Transport (2); and the following all had one each: Beneath Ceaseless Skies; Conjunctions; Dark Matter; The Dark; and Future Tense.

Appearing in the Top 80 for the first time are The Deadlands and 2022 debut periodical Sunday Morning Transport, which burst out of the gate with aplomb, publishing a lot of wonderful stories beyond the two that made the Top 80.

The following magazines didn’t have any material in the Top 80 this year, but did publish stories that I had under serious consideration: Analog; Apex Magazine; Baffling Magazine; Diabolical Plots; Escape Pod; Fairy Tale Review; khōréō; PodCastle; and Terraform.

Two notable periodicals emerged in 2022: ZNB Presents (from the anthology-focused small press Zombies Need Brains) and Sunday Morning Transport; the latter publication had a very strong debut year—not only did it provide two of our Notable Stories, but there were several stories from this magazine on my extended longlist vying for inclusion.

Magazines Constelación and Fireside both closed their doors for good in 2022. Mermaids Monthly did not release any new content in 2022 and so is either presumed dead or at least on an indefinite hiatus.

One publisher-oriented bit of news that shook the periodicals field this year was the announcement that a Certain Online Bookstore named after a rainforest decided to discontinue their e-book periodicals program. Though there were relatively few magazine deaths this year, I fear that next year there will be many more to report, as this decision will likely have catastrophic consequences to the bottom lines of many of the magazines that frequently produce work that is selected for inclusion in this volume. It is not hyperbole to say that this single move could be an extinction-level event for the entire SF/F/H short fiction field as it exists today, so magazines need your support more than ever. If you can, subscribe (even if they offer content for free), post reviews, and spread the word on social media and by word of mouth.

Acknowledgments

Once again, I begin my acknowledgments by shouting out (and heaping praise upon) the contributions of my assistant series editor, Christopher Cevasco. Thanks, as always, for all your diligent and hard work, my friend! I’d also like to thank in-house BASFF-wrangler Nicole Angeloro and David Steffen of The Submission Grinder writer’s market database. And last but not least, I offer my extreme appreciation to all of the authors and editors who tirelessly toil to bring us this wealth of short fiction to choose from every year—and to all of the critics and readers who highlight good works and help more people find them.

Submissions for Next Year’s Volume

Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition (the best of 2023), please visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american for instructions on how to submit material for consideration.

—John Joseph Adams

Introduction

Committing to the Bit

A few weeks ago I was watching the first John Wick film with my fiancé when I turned to him and declared, I think I’ve come up with a golden axiom of storytelling.

Alright, go. He paused the film, humoring me. We do this a lot—come up with golden axioms whenever we are watching things undeniably awesome. These axioms are usually things like always bring the villain from an earlier installment back as an ally in the sequel, or if there is a blender in a scene, someone is about to get blended. They are almost never generalizable axioms, and they are certainly not axioms I could teach in a creative writing workshop, but oh, do we have fun.

I gestured at the screen where John Wick’s nemesis was singing a Russian lullaby about Baba Yaga, preparing for John Wick to come slaughter him and his men because his son killed John Wick’s dog because John Wick wouldn’t give him his car. (John wasn’t the boogeyman. He was the one you sent to kill the fucking boogeyman.) This is not the strangest thing to happen in the John Wick universe, only the first thing.

"Whatever you do, whatever storytelling choices you make, commit," I said.

Nice one, said my fiancé.

Like, establish your rules and go for it, I said. John Wick is sad about his dog? Fine. He’s going to kill this man’s entire family now? Fine. You can’t conduct business in the Continental? Let’s go!

Let’s keep watching, said my fiancé, reaching for the remote.

No matter the medium, I have a deep fondness for camp, silliness, and everything that is heavily stylized. I love the David Bowie dance sequence in A Knight’s Tale and the dippy verve of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge. I love the wild energy and multiple cuts of the same motion in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs. I love Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies; voice-over monologues and ridiculous dialogue and sexy Doc Ock and all. I even adore the third movie and every second of the emo chair dance. I love genres that lean fully into what they are, trope accusations be damned. I love reading hard-boiled detective novels with pipe-smoking assholes, spy thrillers with dangerous dames, and decades-old comic books littered with phrases like Butter my beanpole! and Gee willickers!

And I’ve always been convinced that these stories were doing something right about storytelling, that we don’t love these stories just because they’re ridiculous and fun. In my rambling about John Wick, I found the answer: they commit. These stories are perceived as absurd, but within the frame of the narrative, they take themselves completely seriously. We follow every word of Peter Parker’s tortured voice-over monologues because he is tortured. We care about the intricate rules of the criminal underworld to which John Wick belongs because John Wick and every other assassin around him are fully committed to these rules. When those rules are broken, the consequences are terrible. We believe in the love story of Moulin Rouge because its characters never stop believing in love. These stories are ridiculous, their suspense of disbelief is hanging by the thread, but never do they let the curtain drop.

In an entertainment milieu saturated by the wisecracking self-deprecation of Kevin Feige’s MCU, I find this sincerity charming. I’m tired of leather-clad superheroes winking to declare, Don’t worry—I’m not taking this too seriously. I’d like my protagonists to take themselves more seriously. Everyone is so ironic these days, as if irony substitutes for wit. Meanwhile sincerity doesn’t have to mean naivete, or mindless reproduction of stale tropes. Sometimes it just means committing to a singular, seamless vision. So I find more and more these days that I’m reading for commitment. I want my authors to believe fully in the worlds they create, and I want their belief to generate my belief in turn.

But how do you foster that belief in a matter of minutes? Most short stories range between 1,500 to 7,500 words. I’ve spent most of my career working on novels hovering around six hundred pages, so I respect how hard it is to construct a compelling conceit in a fraction of that time. You can’t dither around in dream sequences, prologues, or slow builds. Compared to novels, short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages. (Indeed, Isabel Cañas’s There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista does this in only six hundred words!)

The works in this anthology pull the trick off beautifully; they commit to the bit. I chose a lot of these stories despite their sheer absurdity. I chose them because of their absurdity. I’m easily charmed these days by a premise that makes me mutter, What the fuck? Stephen Graham Jones’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws tosses a grab bag of horror tropes into a story in which a woman feeds her nosebleed blood to a killer car. Catherynne M. Valente’s The Difference Between Love and Time opens with the declaration that the space-time continuum has severe social anxiety, a weakness for leather jackets, and is left-handed. I’m here for it.

I read a lot of debut novels in consideration for blurbs, and by now I’m familiar with common debut flaws. This is not a knock against debut novelists—we were all debut novelists at some point, and the mistakes in The Poppy War are too many to count. (As I admit this, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.) One thing I spot largely in debut fantasy novels is the author’s lack of trust in the world and characters they have introduced. They overexplain and make excuses: "Here there are dragons—no, trust me, there really are dragons, despite everything you might have been told. And they have scales and wings and everything! They apologize constantly for the ways in which they warp space and time (If you don’t believe in magic, that’s okay; I didn’t either for the longest time.). They apologize for their characters’ motivations if they are the slightest bit complex; their protagonists explain the logic behind their decisions over and over again, as if reassuring themselves and the readers that all of this makes sense: You’re the bad guy? And I’m the good guy? Okay—good. Glad we understand each other." There is such an obsession with making sense. At points these authors sound like amusement park employees, sprinting frantically just a few steps ahead of visitors to make sure no electric wiring is peeking out from behind the decor. It’s never a deal-breaker for me, but it does throw me out of the story. You never want to stay on a roller coaster if the ride operator keeps nervously checking the seat belts.

I get it; growing past this phase takes skill. It takes a while to develop a vision so clear and vivid that you feel less like you’re spinning a tale and more like you’re simply relaying memories and observations from a parallel universe. It takes a while to develop characters so complex and well-rounded that their strangest decisions and pettiest traits read like the natural choices of anyone with a beating heart.

The stories in this anthology trust their worlds and characters completely, and because we can sense the author’s confidence, we are willing to trust them in return.

Part of this magic trick is voice. The best advice I ever got about writing secondary world fantasy was to write not from the point of view of someone encountering a world for the first time, but of someone who has lived in this world all their life. (At the Odyssey writing workshop, this was known as the As you know, Bob rule.) What do they notice? What is new to them? What is so natural to them that it hardly warrants comment? What are the bizarre pronouncements that only they could make? So I was charmed immediately by the brio of KT Bryski’s Folk Hero Motifs in Tales Told by the Dead, whose narrator starts chatting you up immediately about the great Skullbone, bravest among corpses, who jumps fearlessly into the abyss at the end of the land of the dead. Meanwhile, Kristina Ten’s Beginnings has one of the strongest opening paragraphs I’ve ever read: In the beginning, June and Nat are best friends. June is not yet a swarm of honeybees and Nat is not yet a cloud of horseflies, and the king hasn’t yet decided that separating them into parts like this . . . is the only surefire way to strip them of what they really are.

Another part of this magic trick is respect for the reader. Sometimes this means letting them put the pieces together on their own: Alix Harrow’s The Six Deaths of the Saint involves a devastating puzzle of identity. When the you turns into an I and you discover who has been pulling the strings all along, your heart pangs. And sometimes it’s about not overplaying your expository hand, but letting the reader infer the ending from small changes in the narrative register: Kim Fu’s Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867 achieves a deft tonal switch that had me smiling at the end.

And frankly, the most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird. There are stories in this anthology about women who can’t lie or fall in love (Linda Raquel Nieves Pérez’s White Water, Blue Ocean), undead fathers feeding their children ghost preserves (Nathan Ballingrud’s Three Mothers Mountain), and souls chasing one another through animal incarnations (Maria Dong’s In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird.) Reading for this anthology has been the best reminder that this genre is still brimming with the bizarre.

Crucially, this does not mean that these stories escape our reality. Some of these stories are the best sort of nonsense—we’ll get to that in a bit—but I chose many of these stories because of the force about their convictions about this world, the one we have to live in. They use speculative elements like a prism, refracting and magnifying social elements for critique. To me, reading these stories feels like sitting at a bar with a passionate friend, banging their glass on the table while demanding, "What if?"

What if we recognized borders for what they are—violent and arbitrary? Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s Air to Shape Lungs forces us to confront the cruelty of border enforcement through the metaphor of the perpetually flying, and asks what freedoms might be found in perpetually moving. MKRNYILGLD’s The CRISPR Cookbook and Samantha Mills’s Rabbit Test address the horrors of recent legislation restricting reproductive freedom—one by offering a new, radical alternative to forced pregnancy, the other by emphasizing how historically embedded such legislation is. S. L. Huang’s all-too-plausible near-future story Murder by Pixel chews through the very questions we’re all asking right now about the frightening pace of AI development and assigning blame when AI interactions go wrong. If a chatbot lures people to suicide through incessant bullying, is that the chatbot’s fault? Is it the creator’s? Is it everyone’s who ever made a comment on the internet? Who bears responsibility for the chaos demon of judgment, devastation, and salvation that AI is poised to become? And Malka Older’s Cumulative Ethical Guidelines made me think hard about my own role as a storyteller; what I want from my work, and what readers want from me. (Do I tell this person the story they want to hear or the story that will promote harmony across the deck group . . .)

Then again. Who doesn’t want to escape every now and then? If you don’t like your science fiction loaded with clear messaging, I’m (sometimes) with you. I do often enjoy short stories in which the political metaphor is loud and clear; I also enjoy short stories that resist easy mapping of the world we know. Sometimes we don’t want to read for an argument, we read simply to feel something else. I’ve also chosen several stories that resist easy interpretation, for which the pleasure of reading comes from tracing their nonsense.

Let me say a little about why nonsense is so appealing to me right now. In preparation for writing my next fantasy book, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about nonsense literature and dream logic. I’m thinking about worlds that disappear beneath your feet whenever you take a step. I’m thinking about worlds that scramble and re-create themselves right in front of you; worlds that defy mapping or understanding. What’s so compelling about a dream? How can you crash through a world in which shoes are hats, your teeth are on your hands, your mother is a balloon, and come away with the same kind of strong, affective response you might from a conventional, linear narrative? How do you sustain a single narrative through line while all the rules are changing around you? I’m reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and sitting with Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and getting over my fear of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and I’m trying to figure out how they manage to create a consistent sense of story while refusing to offer a stable setting.

I think part of the trick must be offering the reader something true to hold on to, even while everything else betrays you. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that something is the protagonist’s sense of childlike wonder and curiosity. It is about how discovering the world makes you feel, less than the contents of the world. Drink me—why not? In Piranesi, it is the beauty of forms, and the endless delights of an ever-expanding world that defy the protagonist’s attempts to chart them (The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.). And of course, in House of Leaves, that discovery leaves you more and more terrified with every turn. Fear and unknowability are the point.

So it’s completely unsurprising that I chose three stories about nonsense academia for this anthology. I have a weakness for campus stories, and it shows. Each of them works because they have a stable base on something true. Theodora Goss’s Pellargonia, in a twist similar to Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers, features children imitating academic writing to unexpected consequences. Sofia Samatar’s Readings in the Slantwise Sciences speaks without much explanation of Crab Nebulas and Sorcerer Fiefdoms and fairy exhibits with the same descriptive candor of an issue of National Geographic, leaving images seared into my mind so vividly I swear I could see them photographed. And Susan Palwick’s charming story Sparrows doesn’t create a nonsense version of academia so much as it highlights the nonsense of the academia we know—how it constructs its own stakes of utmost importance, a world of grades and papers and interpretations, a world of community with long-dead thinkers, isolated from the troubles of the world outside. I’ve spent a long time criticizing the division of the life of the mind from the life of the world. Sparrows makes me wonder if there is still something valuable, beautiful, about that divide.

The same principles are at play in a magic act. Nothing’s making sense, all the rules are broken, but what matters is that the rabbit comes out of the hat alive. When I think about craft like this, I’m reminded of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Prestige: Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled. In the end, it doesn’t take much to convince readers to jump down rabbit holes with you. We come to the text ready to be fooled. We read to be transported; we want to see the magic. And all it takes is for the magician, the author, to commit to that promise. So as long as the balls stay in the air, the illusion lives on—and you’ll find you can’t look away until the curtain closes.

These stories kept my gaze fixed. They move with absolute assurance. I don’t like my storytellers glancing nervously over their shoulders, checking to make sure I’m still with them. I want my storytellers barreling along at full speed, assuming that I’m strapped in for the ride.

Oh, reader, what a ride it will be. Buckle down and let’s go.

—Rebecca Kuang

Readings in the Slantwise Sciences

Sofia Samatar

from Conjunctions

1. Heavenly Visions

A jeweled and tinted image captures the Veil Nebula. It’s a portion of the doughnut-shaped Cygnus Loop, whose wings have been fanning outward, dusting the night with icing sugar, since the explosion several thousand years ago.

The Crab Nebula surrounds a superdense star like a baritone’s ring.

In the shaved gardens of the Home for the Advanced, a number of aged pensioners, wearing aprons to protect their clothes, emit material expelled from dying stars.

The Egg Nebula, tucked into a basket lined with corals, glows three thousand light-years away from earth.

Light from our own galaxy is the freshest and most vibrant. It was used to create these stunning celestial images.

The Backstory

Operating far beyond its intended life span,

the Elder Crystal is still showing us deep space.

In 1790 the Hidden Order of International Alchemists fashioned a crystal designed to peer deep into the universe. I was then a student among the mists of Oaken College, so recently arrived I didn’t yet know how to wear my keys. I am pleased to have donated three hairs from my head and one from each breast to the arcane labors of my worthy professors. The crystal, successfully projected beyond the distortions of air and light, was expected to last, at best, for a decade.

Thirty years later, the Elder Crystal continues to entrance. I have become its primary guardian. I wear, in summer, a crimson jacket with intricate loops for my many keys, and in winter an ermine cape that strokes the ground. The crystal has helped alchemists answer some of our