The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2018 Edited by NK Jemisin

Anthologies are always fun because you can walk away with a stack of new writers to check out. While there are some established writers in this collection, there are a few who have yet to be collected. There aren't a lot of misses for me here, and my reading list got longer.

I am going to highlight five out of the twenty that are my favorite stories. The ones I really was absorbed into, and built small little worlds over ten or twenty pages. I get that some people are allergic to the idea of curating “the best” every year, but if you can't subscribe and read every magazine to keep up on all short fiction, this book will always give you the highlights from the yearly editor’s point of view.

In that sense, these are the stories that stuck with me the most. They are presented here in their order of appearance.

Rivers Run Free by Charles Payseur

When I think of how much fantasy is just reskinned versions of Lord of the Rings or Conan, it turns me away from a genre that contains great stories like this. Sentient water outrunning dowsers in hopes of returning to the ocean might seem a bit too out there for people used to court politics and sword battles. The tribal world is a mix of post apocalypse and western themes and is perfectly realized in just twelve pages. It's a strong opening to the collection.

The Resident by Carmen Maria Machado

So while it isn't on the cover, this anthology also has some horror. The Resident is a tight thirty-eight pages of unease. Rather than haunted houses and drooling monsters, Machado gives us the inside of a head rattled with anxiety and flashbacks to childhood trauma. Set inside an artists' colony in the Wyoming mountings, the atmosphere is full of fog and strangers. This feel like a particularly cathartic work, or at least well written enough that the emotions feel real and raw. Every once and awhile I need to be reminded how much I like horror as a genre, it's stories like this that do it.

Don't Press Charges And I Won't Sue by Charlie Jane Anders

Speaking of horror, if this story doesn't mess you up a little bit– you're probably a monster. Though most of the YA world is filled with dystopias, they're absent the horror of their own realities. Unless someone needs a noble sacrifice, we don't see the bodies left in the wake of these monstrous governments. We just get their Star Wars style plucky heroes facing it down. Anders gives us the real view from the people persecuted by a regime that wants to fix the Transgender problem as they see it. The story starts with a kidnapping and continues in a torture chamber, it spirals out from there. It's political to the core, but in a way that is a human story, not a polemic.

ZeroS by Peter Watts

Almost every sci-fi reader has passed through military Sci-Fi at one time or another. It's a genre that can be excellent but is filled to the brim with cliches and chauvinist tendencies. Watts morphs it into a mix of body horror as well as an exploration of the trauma of battle. I’ll admit at least some of the charm for me is that each of the sections of the story is named after a David Bowie Song. The story begins with Asante dying. He’s resurrected as part of a new unit of soldiers with implants throughout their body and brain. They’re disconnected from their bodies during battle, only getting flashes of the action when their body lines up and aims a shot. Watts explores some interesting ideas about war, and what we want from soldiers. It’s a tight short story that has a lot more depth than most novels in this genre.

Black Powder by Maria Dahvana Headly

Headly actually has two stories in this collection, both worthy of mention. Her first story, The Orange Tree, is a story about a poet and a golem in Spain. It’s the right mix of myth and fantasy to hit right in the same sweet spot as Neil Gaiman. Which may have been why I was so drawn in, but the second story Black Powder is even better. It’s set in a mountain town after a reactor melted down, and centers on a magic antique rifle that grants wishes. In nineteen pages it manages to jump around in time and build a world and entire mythology, just in time to wrap it off for a nice payoff. Headly is a talented writer, both stories combine to show you someone who is going to be a force to contend with.

The Rest

As befits an annual best-of collection, there aren’t many misses. There’s a few that are well executed, but not my taste. Jemisin states in the foreword that she was looking for stories that showed off the revolutionary power of genre fiction. She puts together a variety of sub-genres and points of view making this feel like a survey of modern science fiction. I know that it’s popular to kvetch that genre fiction is pandering and people just don’t write good old fashioned yarns about Iowans punching aliens in the face anymore, but those books are still out there. It may just be that they aren't doing anything to push boundaries.

People don’t write grim gothic novels anymore, but that doesn’t make Jane Eyre any less valuable to the culture. So while I sympathize that the culture changes make some people feel their influence as an audience matter less, times and taste change. Collections like this show that genre fiction is taking chances and trying to make new ways of telling stories, and in some ways becoming more adventurous than traditional literary fiction.