And then there are the novellas—one of the really enjoyable fairly recent trends is the availability of novellas as standalone slim books. I’ve long felt that the novella is a particularly good length for SF, but a hard one to publish in magazines, where they take up so much room. So the recent bloom is welcome. Mind you, most of these books aren’t available for reprint, and many are too long for a book like this. But they deserve your attention. Tor.com Publishing is noted as a leader in this area, and they didn’t disappoint this year with books like Ian McDonald’s Time Was and Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. But there are many other houses publishing such books: this year I was impressed by The Freeze-Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts, from Tachyon; The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum, by Cynthia Ward, from Aqueduct; and The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard, from Subterranean.
Now it would be disingenuous of me to fail to mention the numerous online sources of short SF. After all, while I do feel that print sources are shortchanged in award nominations (for simple to understand reasons), the online world is full of really outstanding work. Full disclosure—I’m the reprint editor for Lightspeed, and I think we publish great stuff. So too do our fellow recent winners of the Best Semiprozine Hugo, Clarkesworld and Uncanny. And of course Tor.com is absolutely an outstanding site. Beyond those, I’d like to highlight the other online sites I’ve taken stories from this year (and these by no means exhaust the great places to find short SF online): Beneath Ceaseless Skies (which focusses on “literary adventure fantasy”), Giganotosaurus (which tends to publish longer pieces), Apex (which had its origin as a print magazine with a tropism towards horror, but which publishes a very wide range these days), and Kaleidotrope, a magazine I’ve loved since its early days as a saddle-stitched print magazine. I don’t have space to list everything from those places in this introduction (check the acknowledgements page).
When I was just starting to read adult short SF, I checked the acknowledgements pages for the anthologies I read, and that’s where I learned about Analog and Galaxy and F&SF and Fantastic and New Worlds, etc. And it was a delight to find some of them on my local newsstand. Nowadays it’s pretty easy to find a lot of them on the internet—and one certainly should. But I’ll suggest again that looking in bookstores for anthologies and magazines, or online for how to subscribe to them, or in the local library, is also rewarding—and, I do think, important to the health of the science fiction field—indeed, to the entire literary world.
A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies
Alix E. Harrow
You’d think it would make us happy when a kid checks out the same book a zillion times in a row, but actually it just keeps us up at night.
The Runaway Prince is one of those low-budget young adult fantasies from the mid-nineties, before J.K. Rowling arrived to tell everyone that magic was cool, printed on brittle yellow paper. It’s about a lonely boy who runs away and discovers a Magical Portal into another world where he has Medieval Adventures, but honestly there are so many typos most people give up before he even finds the portal.
Not this kid, though. He pulled it off the shelf and sat cross-legged in the juvenile fiction section with his grimy red backpack clutched to his chest. He didn’t move for hours. Other patrons were forced to double-back in the aisle, shooting suspicious, you-don’t-belong-here looks behind them as if wondering what a skinny black teenager was really up to while pretending to read a fantasy book. He ignored them.
The books above him rustled and quivered; that kind of attention flatters them.
He took The Runaway Prince home and renewed it twice online, at which point a gray pop-up box that looks like an emissary from 1995 tells you, “the renewal limit for this item has been reached.” You can almost feel the disapproving eyes of a librarian glaring at you through the screen.
(There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches).
Our late fee is twenty-five cents per day or a can of non-perishable food during the summer food drive. By the time the boy finally slid The Runaway Prince into the return slot, he owed $4.75. I didn’t have to swipe his card to know; any good librarian (of the second kind) ought to be able to tell you the exact dollar amount of a patron’s bill just by the angle of their shoulders.
“What’d you think?” I used my this-is-a-secret-between-us-pals voice, which works on teenagers about sixteen percent of the time.
He shrugged. It has a lower success rate with black teenagers, because this is the rural South and they aren’t stupid enough to trust thirty-something white ladies no matter how many tattoos we have.
“Didn’t finish it, huh?” I knew he’d finished it at least four times by the warm, well-oiled feel of the pages.
“Yeah, I did.” His eyes flicked up. They were smoke-colored and long-lashed, with an achy, faraway expression, as if he knew there was something gleaming and forbidden just beneath the dull surfaces of things that he could never quite touch. They were the kinds of eyes that had belonged to sorcerers or soothsayers, in different times. “The ending sucked.”
In the end, the Runaway Prince leaves Medieval Adventureland and closes the portal behind him before returning home to his family. It was supposed to be a happy ending.
Which kind of tells you all you need to know about this kid’s life, doesn’t it?
He left without checking anything else out.
GARRISON, ALLEN B—THE TAVALARRIAN CHRONICLES
LE GUIN, URSULA K—A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA
He returned four days later, sloping past a bright blue display titled THIS SUMMER, DIVE INTO READING! (who knows where they were supposed to swim; Ulysses County’s lone public pool had been filled with cement in the sixties rather than desegregate).
Because I am a librarian of the second sort, I almost always know what kind of book a person wants. It’s like a very particular smell rising off them which is instantly recognizable as Murder mystery or Political biography or Something kind of trashy but ultimately life-affirming, preferably with lesbians.
I do my best to give people the books they need most. In grad school, they called it “ensuring readers have access to texts/materials that are engaging and emotionally rewarding,” and in my other kind of schooling, they called it “divining the unfilled spaces in their souls and filling them with stories and starshine,” but it comes to the same thing.
I don’t bother with the people who have call numbers scribbled on their palms and titles rattling around in their skulls like bingo cards. They don’t need me. And you really can’t do anything for the people who only read Award-Winning Literature, who wear elbow patches and equate the popularity of Twilight with the death of the American intellect; their hearts are too closed-up for the new or secret or undiscovered.