The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2020 by Diana Gabaldon

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The Bookstore at the End of America by Charlie Jane Anders. First published in A People’s Future of the United States, Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2019 by Charlie Jane Anders. Reprinted by permission of Charlie Jane Anders.

Life Sentence by Matthew Baker. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, February 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Baker. Reprinted by permission of Matthew Baker.

Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters by Kelly Barnhill. First published in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Kelly Barnhill. Reprinted by permission of Kelly Barnhill.

Bullet Point by Elizabeth Bear. First published in Wastelands 3: The New Apocalypse, June 4, 2019.  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Wishnevsky Lynch. Reprinted by permission of Sarah Wishnevsky Lynch.

Erase, Erase, Erase by Elizabeth Bear. First published in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Wishnevsky Lynch. Reprinted by permission of Sarah Wishnevsky Lynch.

The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex by Tobias S. Buckell. First published in New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, ed. Nisi Shawl, Solaris Books. Copyright © 2019 by Tobias S. Buckell. Reprinted by permission of Tobias S. Buckell.

Canst Thou Draw Out the Leviathan by Christopher Caldwell. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 28, April 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Caldwell. Reprinted by permission of Christopher Caldwell.

Sacrid’s Pod by Adam-Troy Castro. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, September 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro. Reprinted by permission of Adam-Troy Castro.

The Freedom of the Shifting Sea by Jaymee Goh. First published in New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, ed. Nisi Shawl, Solaris Books. Copyright © 2019 by Jaymee Goh. Reprinted by permission of Jaymee Goh.

The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary) by Gwendolyn Kiste. First published in Nightmare Magazine, November 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Gwendolyn Kiste. Reprinted by permission of Gwendolyn Kiste.

Up from Slavery by Victor LaValle. First published in Weird Tales Magazine #363, August 28, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Victor LaValle. Reprinted by permission of Victor LaValle.

Thoughts and Prayers by Ken Liu. First published in Future Tense Fiction-Slate, January 26, 2019.  Copyright © 2019 by Ken Liu. Reprinted by permission of Ken Liu.

The Robots of Eden by Anil Menon. First published in New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, ed. Nisi Shawl, Solaris Books. Copyright © 2019 by Anil Menon. Reprinted by permission of Anil Menon.

Between the Dark and the Dark by Deji Bryce Olukotun. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 109, June 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Deji Bryce Olukotun. Reprinted by permission of Deji Bryce Olukotun.

A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy by Rebecca Roanhorse. First published in The Mythic Dream, September 17, 2019. From Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Roanhorse. Reprinted with the permission of Saga Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and KT Literary.

Shape-ups at Delilah’s by Rion Amilcar Scott. First published in The New Yorker, October 7, 2019. Copyright © 2019 Rion Amilcar Scott. Reprinted by permission of Rion Amilcar Scott.

Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen. First published in Nightmare Magazine, May 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Nibedita Sen. Reprinted by permission of Nibedita Sen.

Another Avatar by S. P. Somtow. First published in Amazing Stories, Volume 77, Issue I. Copyright © 2019 by Somtow Sucharitkul. Reprinted by permission of Somtow Sucharitkul writing as S. P. Somtow.

The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 107, April 1, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Reprinted by permission of Caroline M. Yoachim.

The Time Invariance of Snow by E. Lily Yu. First published in Tor.com. Copyright © 2019 by E. Lily Yu. Reprinted by permission of E. Lily Yu.

Foreword

Welcome to year

six of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. This volume presents the best science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) short stories published during the 2019 calendar year as selected by myself and guest editor Diana Gabaldon.

About This Year’s Guest Editor

Diana Gabaldon is the New York Times No. 1 best-selling author of the Outlander series, which has more than thirty-five million copies in print worldwide and is the basis for a current hit show on the Starz network (on which she serves as a consultant). Eight volumes have been published so far, and the ninth, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, is coming soon. There are also volumes one and two of The Outlandish Companion, a compendium of characters and lore for the Outlander series.

Diana is not exactly known for short work—her novels tend to be fairly mammoth tomes, and she doesn’t often write short fiction (and when she does, it’s normally novella or near-novella length)—but she’s a writer who’s been in the science fiction and fantasy field from the start of her career, though often seen as existing outside of it. Partly because of that perceived outsider status, and because she’s not normally associated with short fiction, I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of selections a writer such as she would choose. (And boy, was it a good idea—we’ve got quite an array of stories this year.) She’s one of the most voracious readers I’ve encountered during my time in publishing (and that’s saying a lot), which factored into her selection as well, though when you read her introduction to this volume you’ll see that her connection to short fiction goes back much farther and deeper than might have been known or expected.

Most of Diana’s short work is part of the Outlander series or the other series she’s most known for—the Lord John Grey series, which is itself part of the Outlander series and numbers nine volumes to date (including several novellas). Some of her novellas have been published as stand-alone books, but she’s also published in a range of anthologies, including Songs of Love and Death, Warriors, Legends II, Dangerous Women, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, and Down These Strange Streets. Her stories are in two Arthurian anthologies: Excalibur and Out of Avalon, and a satirical story, coauthored with her son Sam Sykes, is included in the anthology The Dragon Book. Collections of her work include A Trail of Fire and Seven Stones to Stand or Fall. She is also the author of a graphic novel, The Exile.

In addition to her writerly qualifications, Diana has degrees in marine biology and zoology, as well as a PhD in quantitative behavioral ecology; she spent more than a decade as a university professor. She was the founding editor of the journal Science Software Quarterly and has written textbooks and scientific articles. You know, when I heard that Diana Gabaldon had multiple degrees and a PhD, I thought: Sure, sure, that makes sense. But I never would have guessed the subjects of those degrees.¹ Or that she’d been a computing expert who founded a science journal. Or that in her twenties she wrote several comics for Disney featuring Scrooge McDuck and other Disney properties.

All that is to say: Diana clearly contains multitudes. As do the stories she chose for this year’s volume. It’s a varied and fascinating selection, and I expect readers will be just as excited about this crop of stories as Diana and I are.

Selection Criteria and Process

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2019. The technical 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 e-book); (2) publication in English by writers who are American or Canadian, or who have made the United States 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 are listed in the back of this book as Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2019.

2019 Summation

In order to select the Top 80 stories published in the SF/F genres in 2019, I read and considered several thousand stories from a wide range of anthologies, collections, and magazines—basically, wherever there are stories, you’ll find me there waiting to read them. As always, it was a tough process to decide which stories would make the cut, and so I ended up with several dozen stories that, in the end, were on the outside looking in, but nonetheless were excellent works.

The Top 80 this year was drawn from thirty-one different publications: twenty periodicals, nine anthologies, and two single-author collections (or, rather, one collection and one trilogy omnibus that included a bonus story). The final table of contents draws from thirteen different sources: nine periodicals and four anthologies. Lightspeed had the most selections (four); the anthology New Suns had three; and Nightmare and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction two each.

Six of the authors included in this volume (Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Charlie Jane Anders, E. Lily Yu, Jaymee Goh, and Tobias S. Buckell) previously appeared in BASFF; the remaining authors are appearing for the first time. Sofia Samatar (not included in this volume) still has the most BASFF appearances all-time with four; Castro, Yoachim, Anders, and Yu have appeared in BASFF three times now, and this is the second appearance for Buckell and Goh.

This year marks the first appearances of two periodicals in our table of contents, both of which are long-storied genre publications that have died and been brought back to life more than once: Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. They are among those periodicals appearing in the Top 80 for the first time this year, and joining them on that list are Anathema and PodCastle.

E. Lily Yu had the most stories in the Top 80 this year, with three; several authors had two each: A. T. Greenblatt, Elizabeth Bear (both of hers were selections), L. D. Lewis, N. K. Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse, Sam J. Miller, Tobias S. Buckell, and Veronica Roth. Overall, seventy authors are represented in the Top 80.

Gwendolyn Kiste’s story selected for inclusion, The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary), won the Bram Stoker Award (she won an additional Stoker for her nonfiction writing). Caroline M. Yoachim’s story, The Archronology of Love, was named a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Nibedita Sen’s story, Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island, was also a finalist for both awards, and Sen was a finalist for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

Among the Notable Stories, three were finalists for the Hugo Award: N. K. Jemisin’s Emergency Skin, Rivers Solomon’s Blood Is Another Word for Hunger, and Ted Chiang’s Omphalos. Mimi Mondal’s His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light, A. C. Wise’s How the Trick Is Done, Karen Osborne’s The Dead, in Their Uncontrollable Power, and A. T. Greenblatt’s Give the Family My Love were finalists for the Nebula Award.

Note: The final results of some of the awards mentioned above won’t be known until after this text goes to press. The Sturgeon and Locus award finalists had not been announced at the time of writing, presumably due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anthologies

The following anthologies all had stories selected for inclusion in this year’s volume: A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and yours truly; New Suns, edited by Nisi Shawl (three selections!); The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe; and Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, edited by me.

Several other anthologies had stories in the Top 80: Forward, edited by Blake Crouch; Echoes, edited by Ellen Datlow; Current Futures, edited by Ann VanderMeer; If This Goes On, edited by Cat Rambo; and Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan. The anthologies with the most stories in the Top 80 were the aforementioned New Suns (seven) and A People’s Future of the United States (six); Forward and The Mythic Dream had three each; Echoes and Wastelands: The New Apocalypse had two each.

As always, there’s a plethora of fine work published across a wide range of anthologies, but there isn’t always room in the Top 80 for even very good anthologies to be represented. Here’s a list of some of the anthologies that featured excellent work but nonetheless didn’t quite manage to crack the Top 80: Hex Life, edited by Christopher Golden and Rachel Autumn Deering; My Name Was Never Frankenstein, edited by Bryan Furuness; The Weight of Light, edited by Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller; Do Not Go Quietly, edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner; The Twisted Book of Shadows, edited by Christopher Golden and James A. Moore; Temporally Deactivated, edited by David B. Coe and Joshua Palmatier; and His Hideous Heart, edited by Dahlia Adler.

Collections

The standout collection from 2019 was—clearly, in my mind—Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, which included the stunning originals Omphalos and Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom (both of which are finalists for the Hugo Award); the former is in the Top 80, while the latter was too long to be considered. Strangely, this year only one other collection had a story in the Top 80 . . . and it’s not even really a collection: it’s a trilogy omnibus that also included an original short story set in the same world; I’m referring to Binti: The Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor, which produced the fine story Binti: Sacred Fire.

Other 2019 collections also included excellent work. Some of these contained only reprints, and thus were excluded from consideration, but I note them anyway in order to shine a light on them: Snow White Learns Witchcraft, by Theodora Goss; The History of Soul 2065, by Barbara Krasnoff; And Go Like This: Stories, by John Crowley; The City and the Cygnets, by Michael Bishop; The Girls with Kaleidoscope Eyes, by Howard V. Hendrix; Truer Love and Other Lies, by Edd Vick; All Worlds Are Real, by Susan Palwick; The Arcana of Maps, by Jessica Reisman; Memory’s Children, by Samuel Peralta; A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, by Kat Howard; Laughter at the Academy, by Seanan McGuire; and Hexarchate Stories, by Yoon Ha Lee. And not to forget perhaps the most surprising collection I discovered all year—that being Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, which also happens to be just about my favorite title of the year.

Periodicals

More than a hundred periodicals were considered throughout the year in my hunt for the Top 80 stories. I read magazines both large and small and sought out the genre stories that might have been lurking in the pages of literary and/or mainstream periodicals.

The following magazines had work representing them in the Top 80 this year: Anathema (two), Asimov’s Science Fiction (three), Beneath Ceaseless Skies (two), Clarkesworld (two), Fireside (two), Future Tense (two), Lightspeed (nine), Nightmare (four), Terraform (two), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (four), Tor.com (four), and Uncanny (eight). The following periodicals had one story each: Amazing Stories, Escape Pod, FIYAH, Foreshadow, PodCastle, The New Yorker, The Verge (Better Worlds), and Weird Tales.

The following outlets published stories that were under serious consideration for the Top 80: MIT Technology Review, Strange Horizons, Catapult, the Cincinnati Review, Conjunctions, Factor Four Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, Futures, the Southern Review, The Sun, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Tin House, and a little venue called the New York Times. This last I’ll expand upon a bit, because it was an intriguing project: the Times published a series of Op-Eds from the Future, which produced very good material by contributors including Ted Chiang, Brooke Bolander, and Jeff VanderMeer. Being in op-ed format, however, they didn’t necessarily feel like stories, though some of them were close enough to warrant consideration. They’re worth checking out online.

And now we come to the periodical graveyard, or, in some cases, a temporary resting place. As noted in this space last year, the long-running magazines Intergalactic Medicine Show and Apex Magazine both announced they were ceasing publication, with neither publishing any new content in 2019. However, as I was in the midst of this writing (mid-May 2020), Apex announced that it would be returning in 2021. Other publications that ceased operations (or went on indefinite hiatus) in 2019 include: Bastion, Factor Four Magazine, and Mad Scientist Journal. Additionally, one appeared and then shut down in 2019, the interesting but short-lived Foreshadow.

In tribute to these magazines that have gone the way of the dinosaur, I implore you to support the short fiction publishers you love. If you can, subscribe (even if they offer content for free), review, spread the word. Every little bit helps.

Acknowledgments

It would essentially be impossible for me to do the work of BASFF properly without the able assistance of others. This year, much of that work fell to my newly minted assistant series editor, Christopher Cevasco (who used to edit a pretty great historical fiction/fantasy magazine called Paradox back in the day); bringing him on board feels like one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. Additionally, Alex Puncekar and Christie Yant again provided editorial support. Huge thanks to you all.

I’d also like to thank Jenny Xu at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who kindly put up with my delay in turning in this foreword, and otherwise keeps the gears turning back at Best American HQ. Thanks too to David Steffen, who runs the Submission Grinder writer’s market database, for his assistance in helping me update the list of gone-extinct markets mentioned above.

As always, I’m most appreciative when authors alert me to their eligible works by dropping me a line or sending their work via my BASFF online submissions portal. Likewise, I’m grateful to the editors and publishers who do the same—particularly the ones who proactively make sure I get copies of their works without me having to ask (and/or ask . . . repeatedly!).

And finally, I’m eternally grateful to all of the readers of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy—both those who have read every volume and the newcomers. And a special thank-you to readers who have left positive reviews on Amazon or Goodreads or the like; reader reviews really do help bring attention to this series, as does talking about BASFF—or any book or story you love—on social media.

Submissions for Next Year’s Volume

Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition (the best of 2020), please visit johnjosephadams​.com/​best​-american for instructions on how to submit material for consideration.

—John Joseph Adams

Introduction

There’s a haunted

room in my house. It’s the back bedroom on the first floor—though I doubt there’s ever been a bed in it. In fact, no one in the family has ever been able to use that room for anything, for long.

My grandparents built the house in 1938; I own it now. In 1952 my grandfather died in the house—suddenly, from a pulmonary embolism. My mother and I were there at the time, but I don’t recall the circumstances, as I was two weeks old. Five years later, my grandmother died and my mother inherited the house. We lived there for the next nine years.

During that time, my parents tried repeatedly to use the back bedroom for an office, a writing room, file storage, a small library . . . but no one ever stayed in the room for more than half an hour at a time, and sooner or later, whichever parent was trying to do taxes or write lesson plans would be doing it on the coffee table in the living room or the kitchen counter.

The back bedroom is always cold. Its door opens onto a small central space where an old floor furnace supplies heat to the master bedroom, a small bathroom, the living room—and theoretically, to the back bedroom. Even with the door wide open and the furnace going full blast three feet away, the room is always cold.

We moved from that house when I was fourteen. It was another fifty years before it occurred to me that my grandfather might have died in the back bedroom.

His name was Harold S. Sykes, and he was the mayor of the city we lived in. He also wrote fantasy and science fiction stories,¹ some of them published in Amazing Stories, Super Science Stories: The Big Book of Science Fiction, and other magazines of what-wasn’t-yet-called speculative fiction. My mother had kept several of the magazines, and as I read everything else in the house, I also read those.

Now, while reading through the eighty finalist stories submitted for this anthology, I’d noticed certain common themes and concepts among them, which rang a faint, subliminal bell for me. There were echoes from a long life of reading everything I could get my hands on, including a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but there were plenty of new themes, too. And as I was reading some of these stories in my old family house, it occurred to me to wonder what had (and hadn’t) changed in the years between 1930 (when my grandfather’s first story, The Insatiable Entity, was published in Science Wonder Stories) and 2020.

Fantastic stories dealt (and still deal) with pretty much everything, but if you look at a lot of them, it’s easy to see broad general categories. Let’s look at a few.

First, there’s Doomed Earth. This one has always been with us, apparently. As well it might be: it’s an inherently human concept, heavy with hubris, and ever more engorged in later years. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, Earth tended to be doomed by external forces: asteroids, alien invasions, planetary discombobulations. In the modern forms, it’s always humans. We are responsible for the death/destruction of the planet!

What’s interesting about the differences in early and later doom stories is that in both types, the destruction/impairment of Earth is often merely the instigating factor for a second type of story—Escaping Spaceship/Seeds of Humanity—but in the more modern versions, you often see stories that don’t deal with escape as much as they deal with entrapment. People stranded on a dying world, meeting the notion of personal obliteration with everything from courage and unselfish love to pettiness and abnegation.

Now, even the Escaping Spaceship stories are less straight adventure and more psychology. One very interesting evolution is that many such stories involve extensive worldbuilding: the painstaking composition of a new onboard culture, frequently one whose Earthbound roots have long since decayed.

(One of the very interesting stories in this anthology is actually a twofer: Between the Dark and the Dark involves two parallel stories, one onboard such a multigenerational ship whose humans have long since lost direct touch with Earth—though their ship hasn’t—and one on Earth, showing the equally changed culture of the people who stayed behind to deal with natural and political disasters, whose long-term hope lies in those deaf space-seeds, hurtling outward.)

One thing you always run into when dealing with SF/F is that slash between the Fs. There’s a rough rule of thumb for what’s fantasy and what’s science fiction, but there’s often a lot of overlap.

Where do Aliens fall? It often depends on how the writer has drawn the specs. Invasion of Earth by (usually, but not always, inimical) aliens can be—and often is—straight SF, so long as the world of the story is drawn with internally consistent rules.

Invasion-by-hostile-aliens stories were much more common in the earlier days of speculative fiction than they are now. (I read a story in one of my grandfather’s magazines called The Bas-Relief, which dealt with the periodic invasion of Earth by a race of giant eel-men, who were using Earth as a breeding ground for food, i.e., humans. This one scared the pants off me when I read it. I was about eleven, I think, but still.)

Now, writers seem much more inclined to think that humans are the nastiest thing around, and thus much more likely to go invade, exploit, or ruin some hapless other planet. This may be the result of them growing up with the actuality of space travel, rather than merely the concept of it—and with a basic conception of humanity formed by social media rather than, say, philosophy or religion.

Putting aside invasion stories, though, aliens offer a kaleidoscopic view of humanity—particularly one sort of story that’s almost completely modern: AI/Tech stories.

In 1930 computers didn’t exist. You didn’t start seeing stories involving machine intelligence until the late ’50s (hey, ENIAC is only eight years older than I am), but such stories pretty much exploded through the last quarter of the twentieth century. And the major modern fictional innovation is that the tech often becomes real characters, rather than simply part of the worldbuilding.

This in turn led to more psychologically oriented stories asking metaphysical questions about the nature of intelligence—and of emotion (sometimes by contrast with a machine intelligence; sometimes by imitation or evolution of one). But a story lives or dies on its characters. Said characters may be tech themselves, but they still embody human preoccupations with themselves, and AI stories let writers do their favorite thing and explore themselves, while still dealing with novel situations that are disturbingly possible.

Another subset of Alien stories goes in the opposite direction, squarely into fantasy. These are the stories that are based on and drawn from extant folklore, magical beliefs, and history. Most such stories (as opposed to novels) deal with a particular human attribute—sexuality, greed, charity, identity—metaphorically expressed, and you’ll see this particular story form going way back—perhaps the oldest form of speculative fiction. Homer, anyone? Beowulf? Gilgamesh?

As noted, one subset of folklore/myth crosses into the Alien concept. Another deals explicitly or referentially with real cultural beliefs and stories, and the third takes invented folklore/fairy story/myth material, but presents it stylistically in a traditional manner of storytelling.

I’m kind of putting aside discussion of stories written ostensibly as fantasy, but primarily for the purpose of political or social commentary, often using a standardized fairy-tale setting. There’s a certain amount of this in many stories—in fact, a good story almost always includes a layer of social commentary—but in latter years, I’m seeing many more explicitly political stories. There’s one included in this anthology—Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters—and I chose that one for its wit, elegance, humor, and heart.

Going on from the concept of using fairy tales and folklore as the basis for a story—whether merely as the setting of a world, or using the storytelling style—we come to the notion of Trope stories.

Trope stories are those wherein the writer deliberately takes on a popular style or trope and either uses it for humor (The Galactic Tourist . . .) or goes further, into metafiction (Another Avatar). This is a fairly modern approach. You do occasionally see this in older mid-twentieth-century stories, but almost always in the form of a futuristic murder mystery (cf. Isaac Asimov).

So—is all writing essentially navel-gazing? Well, yes, but consider where that phrase came from: the Greek term omphalos, which translates roughly as navel, but which referred originally to the navel of the world; i.e., the metaphorical center or hub of something. Good navel-gazing is the ultimate in speculative fiction, where a writer can express a greater truth by means of a microcosmic experience that takes the reader to the heart (or the navel . . .) of the matter.

Navel-gazing risks being boring by a lack of specificity. Someone contemplating the downfall of humanity is a bore (you’d think modern Twitter minds would realize this, but nooo . . .), whereas someone contemplating their own imminent demise is pretty fascinating.

Overall, in this very informal survey of trends, I’d have to say that twenty-first-century speculative fiction expresses a lot more personal anxiety than did older stories from the mid-to-latish twentieth century—though such writing has always been used as a means of dealing with Fear of the Unknown.

The major difference I see is that the unknown now openly and explicitly encompasses ourselves. One of the stories in this book, Erase, Erase, Erase, could as easily be a literary short story dealing with alienation and powerlessness, or a straight psychological description of the results of child abuse. It’s only fantasy because we don’t know whether the first-person writer is mentally deranged or not; either way, they’re telling the truth.

I don’t recall much political moralizing in the older stories, either overt or veiled. (There were a couple of stories in the entry pool that so clearly were focused on Voldemort—you know, He Who Must Not Be Named because everybody already knows who you’re talking about—that the authors were metaphorically jumping up and down in agitation, waving their arms and pointing a thousand-watt flashlight, wordlessly shouting, Him! It’s Him I’m talking about! I mean it’s HIM!!!)

On the other hand, there’s a real place for what might be called Domestic stories: stories that take their shape from ordinary modern life and its historical imperfections . . . and run with it. There are three of those in this book: Life Sentence, Shape-ups at Delilah’s, and Up from Slavery. These all feature explicitly political/social commentary, but it’s used as the springboard of the story, not the ultimate point. The stories are about real people, not animated megaphones.

As a final note, there are speculative stories that overlap with classic SF/F story types—ghost stories and horror stories. (See Fear of the Unknown, above.) There were a few entries along these lines, and while they were very effective, I didn’t choose to include any of them. (Too many good stories, too few pages!) Not that all ghost stories are necessarily scary. After all, in the end, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.

Last year, a house my parents had owned was sold, and my sister and I were obliged to belt up to Flagstaff, Arizona, and spend a frantic three days salvaging old family papers, photographs, dishes, silver, and What-the-Hell-Is-This? items from the storage space under the house. Most of this was carted next door—to my grandparents’ house, the one I now own.

Among the salvaged artifacts was a big, very old, very battered leather suitcase. We hadn’t looked inside it, but when I started shoveling things out of my living room months later, I stopped and opened the suitcase, out of curiosity. It was full of typed manuscripts; my grandfather’s stories.

I took it to the back bedroom. One of these days, I’ll take a chair and a lamp in there to read the stories, and meet again a man I haven’t seen in a very long time. I’ll leave the door open, though. For warmth.

—Diana Gabaldon

MATTHEW BAKER

Life Sentence

from Lightspeed

Home.

He recognizes the name of the street. But he doesn’t remember the landscape. He recognizes the address on the mailbox. But he doesn’t remember the house.

His family is waiting for him on the porch.

Everybody looks just as nervous as he is.

He gets out.

The police cruiser takes back off down the gravel drive, leaving him standing in a cloud of dust holding a baggie of possessions.

He has a wife. He has a son. He has a daughter.

A dog peers out a window.

His family takes him in.

Wash is still groggy from the procedure. He’s got a plastic taste on his tongue. He’s got a throbbing sensation in his skull. He’s starving.

Supper is homemade pot pies. His wife says the meal is his favorite. He doesn’t remember that.

The others are digging in already. Steam rises from his pie as he pierces the crust with his fork. He salivates. The smell of the pie hitting him makes him grunt with desire. Bending toward the fork, he parts his lips to take a bite, but then he stops and glances up.

Something is nagging at him worse than the hunger.

What did I do? he says with a sense of bewilderment.

His wife holds up a hand.

Baby, please, let’s not talk about that, his wife says.

Wash looks around. A laminate counter. A maroon toaster. Flowers growing from pots on the sill. Magnets shaped like stars on the fridge.

This is his home.

He doesn’t remember anything.

He’s not supposed to.

His reintroduction supervisor comes to see him in the morning.

How do you feel, Washington?

Everybody keeps calling me Wash?

I can call you that if you’d like.

I guess I’m not really sure what I like.

Lindsay, the reintroduction supervisor, wears a scarlet tie with a navy suit. She’s got a bubbly disposition and a dainty build. Everything that she says, she says as if revealing a wonderful secret that she just can’t wait to share.

We’ve found a job for you at a restaurant.

Doing what?

Working in the kitchen.

That’s the best you could get me?

At your level of education, and considering your status as a felon, yes, it really is.

Where did I work before?

Lindsay smiles.

An important part of making a successful transition back to your life is learning to let go of any worries that you might have about your past so that you can focus on enjoying your future.

Wash frowns.

Why do I know so much about mortgages? Did I used to work at a bank?

To my knowledge you have never worked at a bank.

But how can I remember that stuff if I can’t remember other stuff?

Your semantic memories are still intact. Only your episodic memories were wiped.

My what?

You know what a restaurant is.

Yeah.

But you can’t remember ever having eaten in a restaurant before.

No.

Or celebrating a birthday at a restaurant. Or using a restroom at a restaurant. Or seeing a friend at a restaurant. You’ve eaten in restaurants before. But you have no memories of that at all. None whatsoever. Lindsay taps her temples. Episodic memories are personal experiences. That’s what’s gone. Semantic memories are general knowledge. Information. Names, dates, addresses. You still have all of that. You’re a functional member of society. Your diploma is just as valid as before. And your procedural memories are fine. You still know how to ride a bike, or play the guitar, or operate a vacuum. Assuming you ever learned, Lindsay laughs.

Did you do anything else to me?

Well, of course, your gun license was also revoked.

Wash thinks.

Did I shoot somebody?

All felons are prohibited from owning firearms, regardless of the nature of the crime.

Wash turns away, folding his arms over his chest, pouting at the carpet.

Washington, how do you feel?

Upset.

That’s perfectly normal. I’m so glad that you’re comfortable talking with me about your feelings. That’s so important.

Lindsay nods with a solemn expression, as if waiting for him to continue sharing, and then leans in.

But honestly though, you should feel grateful you weren’t born somewhere that still has prisons. Lindsay reaches for her purse. Do you know what would have happened to you a century ago for doing what you did? The judge would have locked you up and thrown away the key! Lindsay says brightly, and then stands to leave.

Wash gets woken that night by a craving.

An urgent need.

Was he an addict?

What is he craving?

He follows some instinct into the basement. Stands there in boxers under the light of a bare bulb. Glances around the basement, stares at the workbench, and then obeys an urge to reach up onto the shelf above. Pats around and discovers an aluminum tin.

Something shifts inside as he takes the tin down from the shelf.

He pops the lid.

In the tin: a stash of king-size candy bars.

As he chews a bite of candy bar, a tingle of satisfaction rushes through him, followed by a sense of relief.

Chocolate.

Back up the stairs, padding down the hallway, he pit-stops in the bathroom for a drink of water. Bends to sip from the faucet. Wipes his chin. Stands. A full-length mirror hangs from the back of the door. He’s lit by the glow of a night-light the shape of a rainbow that’s plugged into the outlet above the toilet.

Wash examines his appearance in the mirror. Wrinkles around his eyes. Creases along his mouth. A thick neck. Broad shoulders, wide hips, hefty limbs, and a round gut. Fingers nicked with scars. Soles hardened with calluses. The body of an aging athlete, or a laborer accustomed to heavy lifting who’s recently gone soft from lack of work.

He can’t remember being a toddler. He can’t remember being a child. He can’t remember being a teenager. He can’t remember being an adult.

He stares at himself.

Who is he other than this person standing here in the present moment?

Is he anybody other than this person standing here in the present moment?

His wife stirs as he slips back into bed. She reaches over and startles him with a kiss. He kisses back, but then she climbs on top of him, and he pulls away.

Too soon? she whispers.

Mia, that’s her name, he remembers. She has a flat face, skinny arms, thick legs, and frizzy hair cut off at her jawline, which he can just make out in the dark. Her nails are painted bright red. She sleeps in a plaid nightgown.

I barely know you, he says.

Mia snorts. Didn’t stop you the first time. She shuffles backward on her knees, tugging his boxers down his legs as she goes, and then chuckles. I mean our other first time.

The restaurant is a diner down by the highway, a chrome trailer with checkered linoleum and pleather booths and ceiling fans that spin out of sync, featuring a glass case of pastries next to the register and a jukebox with fluorescent tubing over by the restrooms. The diner serves breakfast and lunch only. Wash arrives each morning around dawn. The kitchen has swinging doors. He does the dishes, sweeps the floors, mops the floors, and hauls the trash out when the bags get full. Mainly he does the dishes. Dumps soda from cups. Pours coffee from mugs. Scrapes onion rings and pineapple rinds and soggy napkins and buttered slices of toast and empty jam containers and crumpled straw wrappers into the garbage. Sprays ketchup from plates. Rinses broth from bowls. Racks the tableware and sends the racks through the dishwasher. Stacks spotless dishes back onto the shelves alongside the stove. Scours at crusted yolk and dried syrup with the bristly side of sponges. Scrubs skillets with stainless steel pads for so long and with such force that the pads fall apart and still there’s a scorched residue stuck to the pans. Burns his hands with scalding water. Splashes stinging suds into his eyes. His shoes are always damp as he drives home in the afternoon. He shaves, he showers, and he feeds the dog, a moody mutt whose name is Biscuit. Then he sits on the porch step waiting for the rest of his family to get home. His house is modest, with small rooms and a low ceiling, and has no garage. The gutters sag. Shingles have been blown clear off the roof. The sun has bleached the blue of the siding almost to gray. Across the road stands a field of corn. Beyond that there’s woods. The corn stalks sway in the breeze. The dog waits with him, curled up on the grass around his shoes, panting whenever a car drives past. He lives in Kansas.

Sophie, his daughter, a ninth grader, is the next to arrive home, shuffling off the bus while jabbing at the buttons of a game. Jaden, his son, a third grader, arrives home on the later bus, shouting taunts back at friends hanging out the windows. His wife works at a hospital, the same hours that he does, but she gets home last since the hospital is all the way over in Independence.

Wash tries to cook once, tries to make meatloaf. He knows what a meatloaf is. He understands how an oven functions. He gets the mechanics of a whisk. He can read the recipe no problem. But still the attempt is a disaster. He pulls the pan out when the timer goes off, and the bottom of the meatloaf is already charred, and the top of the meatloaf is still raw. He hadn’t been able to find bread crumbs, so he had torn up a slice of bread instead, which doesn’t seem to have worked. He samples a bite from the center of the meatloaf, that in-between part neither charred nor raw, and finds some slivers of onion skin in among what he’s chewing. When his wife arrives home, she surveys the mess with a look of amusement and then assures him that this isn’t a skill he’s forgotten. She does the cooking. At home, the same as at the diner, he does the dishes.

Other items that his wife assures him were not accidentally erased during his procedure: the date of her birthday (all he knows is the month, August); the date of their anniversary (all he knows is the month, May).

Here’s a clue. My birthday was exactly a week before you came home. Borrow a calculator from one of your delightful children if you need help with the math, Mia says, dumping a box of spaghetti into a pot of roiling water while simultaneously stirring a can of mushrooms into a pan of bubbling marinara. If you’d like to know how long you’ve been married, your marriage license is in the filing cabinet in the basement. In fact, if you’re really feeling ambitious, your children have some birth certificates in there, too. Heck, check your immunization record while you’re down there, you’re probably due for a tetanus shot.

There are moments so intimate that he can almost forget he’s living with strangers. His daughter falls asleep on him one night while watching a show about zombies on the couch, her head lolling against his shoulder. His son leans into him one night waiting for the microwave to heat a mug of cider, his arm wrapping around his waist. Late one night after the kids are asleep, his wife hands him a rubber syringe and a plastic bowl and asks him to flush a buildup of wax from her ears, an act that to him seems far more intimate than intercourse.

But then there are the moments that remind him how much he must have lost. One night, during a supper of baked potatoes loaded with chives and bacon and sour cream, his family suddenly cracks up over an in-joke, a shared memory that’s somehow related to mini-golf and bikinis. His wife is laughing so hard that she’s crying, but sobers up when she realizes how confused he looks.

Sorry, it’s impossible to explain if you weren’t there, Mia says, thumbing away tears.

But he was there, he was the one who noticed, Jaden protests.

He can’t remember anymore, you ninny, Sophie scowls.

And then the subject gets changed.

Wash does know certain information about himself.

He knows his ancestry is part Potawatomi. He knows his parents were named Lawrence and Beverly. He knows his birthplace is near Wichita.

But taking inventory of what he knows isn’t as simple as thinking, What do you know, Wash?

He has to ask a specific question.

He must know other facts about himself.

He just hasn’t asked the right questions yet.

Wash, were you ever in a fight before?

Wash, did you like your parents?

Wash, have you seen a tornado?

He doesn’t remember.

He tries asking Sophie about his past one afternoon. Wash is driving her to practice. Sophie runs cross.

What was my life like before the wipe? Wash says.

Sophie is a plump kid with crooked teeth, a pet lover, and has a grave demeanor, as if constantly haunted by the fact that not all kittens have homes. She’s doing history homework, flipping back and forth between a textbook and a worksheet, scribbling in information. She’s got her sneakers propped on the dashboard with her ankles crossed.

Huh? Sophie says.

What do you know about my life?

Um.

Like tell me something I told you about myself before I got taken away.

She sneers at the textbook. Bends over the worksheet, forcefully erases something, and blows off the peels of rubber left behind. Then turns to look at him.

You never really talked about yourself, Sophie says.

He tries asking Jaden about his past one afternoon. Wash is driving him to practice. Jaden plays soccer.

What was I like before I went away? Wash says.

Jaden is a stringy kid with a nose that dominates his other features, a soda junkie, and constantly hyper, regardless of caffeine intake. He’s sitting in an upside-down position with his legs pointed at the roof, his back on the seat, and his head lolled over the edge, with his hands thrown across the floor of the truck. He’s spent most of the ride listing off the powers of supervillains.

I dunno, Jaden says.

You must remember something about me.

I guess.

So what type of person was I?

Jaden plucks at the seatbelt. Frowns in thought. Then turns to look at him.

A grown-up? Jaden says.

Wash tries asking his wife, but her taste in conversation is strictly practical, and she doesn’t seem interested in reminiscing about his life before the wipe at all. No photos are framed on the counter. No snapshots are pinned to the fridge. If pictures of his family ever hung on the walls, the pictures have long since disappeared.

But other artifacts of