The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019
Edited and with an Introduction by Carmen Maria Machado
John Joseph Adams, Series Editor
Foreword
Welcome to year five of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy! This volume presents the best science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) short stories published during the 2018 calendar year as selected by myself and guest editor Carmen Maria Machado.
Simply put, Carmen Maria Machado is one of short fiction’s contemporary masters. Indeed, if you pay attention to short fiction at all, you almost certainly have already read—and been blown away by—her work. She’s a force in both the literary and the genre worlds, first publishing a plethora of much-lauded short fiction that made her a star and then going supernova with the release of her collection Her Body and Other Parties. That book, which gathers much but not all of her body of work, won many awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for many others, including the National Book Award, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (L.A. Times Book Prize), the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Kirkus Prize, and others. And if all that weren’t impressive enough, it’s also in development as a television show at FX.
In genre, Machado’s short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Fairy Tale Review, Interfictions, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Lightspeed, Nightmare, PodCastle, Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and Unstuck, and in literary circles her fiction has graced the pages of such periodicals as Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, Granta, McSweeney’s, The American Reader, VQR, Gulf Coast, and others. In the realm of nonfiction, Machado is also a vibrant voice, with essays and criticism that have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, NPR Books, the Los Angeles Times Review of Books, Catapult, Guernica, and The Believer.
But there’s more! She has had stories in anthologies such as Watchlist, Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, Mixed Up, New Voices of Fantasy, Help Fund My Robot Army!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, Sunspot Jungle Vol. 1, Grave Predictions, and Latin@ Rising. She has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy twice (in the 2015 and 2018 volumes), The Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and Best Women’s Erotica of the Year. Her story “A Brief and Fearful Star” (published in Future Tense in 2018) was reprinted in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year and would have garnered serious consideration for this volume as well if Machado were not the guest editor.
Machado holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded a slew of fellowships and residences from such august bodies as the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Times listed her as a member of “The New Vanguard,” citing Her Body and Other Parties as one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2018. The technical criteria for consideration are (1) original publication in a nationally distributed American or Canadian publication (periodicals, collections, or anthologies, in print, online, or as an ebook); (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 (self-published works are not eligible); and (8) publication as an original work of the author (that is, not part of a media tie-in/licensed fiction program).
As series editor, I attempted to read everything I could find that met these selection criteria. After doing all 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 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 read all 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 sixty stories that did not make it into the anthology are listed in the back of this book as “Other Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2018.”
As per my standard practice, in my effort to determine the top eighty stories of the year, I read and considered several thousand stories from a wide variety of periodicals, anthologies, and collections. Winnowing down the list to just eighty was (as usual) extremely difficult, and so beyond the top eighty I had several dozen additional stories that were at one point or another under serious consideration.
The top eighty this year were drawn from forty different publications: twenty-three periodicals, ten anthologies, and seven single-author collections. The final table of contents draws from thirteen different sources: eleven periodicals, one anthology, and two collections. Nightmare Magazine had the most selections (four); Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com, and Fireside Fiction had two each.
Four of the authors included in this volume (Adam-Troy Castro, N. K. Jemisin, Seanan McGuire, and Sofia Samatar) have previously appeared in BASFF; thus, the remaining sixteen authors are appearing for the first time. Sofia Samatar has the most BASFF appearances all-time with four; this is the second appearance for Castro, Jemisin, and McGuire.
This year marks the first appearances of four periodicals in our table of contents: Apex Magazine, Future Tense, The Margins (Transpacific Literary Project), and FIYAH. Periodicals appearing in the top eighty for the first time this year include Eyedolon, MIT Technology Review, The Paris Review, Stonecoast Review, and Vastarien.
Adam-Troy Castro and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah had the most stories in the top eighty this year, with three each; several other authors had two each: Alyssa Wong, Annalee Newitz, Carrie Vaughn, Daniel H. Wilson, E. Lily Yu, Elizabeth Bear, Kelly Robson, Kurt Fawver, N. K. Jemisin, P. Djèlí Clark, and Seanan McGuire. Overall, sixty-six different authors are represented (which is, weirdly, the same number of different authors as in last year’s volume).
P. Djèlí Clark’s story selected for inclusion, “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” won the Nebula and Locus Awards, and was named a finalist for the Hugo and Sturgeon Awards. Daryl Gregory’s “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” was named a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, and Sturgeon Awards. Sarah Gailey’s “STET” is a Hugo and Locus finalist. The selections by Annalee Newitz (“When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis”) and Adam R. Shannon (“On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog”) were both finalists for the Sturgeon (and Newitz was this year’s winner), and Usman Malik’s story, “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung,” was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. N. K. Jemisin’s “The Storyteller’s Replacement” was a Locus finalist.