John Adams: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

You might die.

You might die.

You might die.

The Omega Question is activated:

Who matters?

A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award and has been adapted for Showtime television. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

# “Teenagers from Outer Space” and “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” are siblings, both born from my abiding love of the ultra-cheap sci-fi movies of the 1950s and both part of a larger project to use the risible titles of those films as inspiration for stories that engage the source material with some emotional nuance and thematic complexity. These particular titles (it seems to me) are endearing both for their absurdity and for their essentially innocent exploitation of a then-new niche in the ecology of the American consumer—the one inhabited by the teenager, a word that, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, did not come into usage until the 1940s.

In retrospect, of course, the teen culture of the 1950s—from Blackboard Jungle to Buddy Holly—seems tame, but middle-class parents of the era must have felt as if their kids had undergone a transformation no less radical than Michael Landon’s in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Though the anxieties attendant upon that transformation are here veiled in nostalgia, they remain no less relevant today. Despite their titles, these are not—or were not intended to be—camp stories. In the note appended to the original publication of “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” I said that I was pretty sure that my own teenage daughter was a werewolf. I wasn’t entirely joking.

Leigh Bardugo is the best-selling author of Six of Crows (a New York Times Notable Book and CILIP Carnegie Medal nominee), Crooked Kingdom, the Shadow and Bone trilogy, Wonder Woman: Warbringer, and most recently The Language of Thorns, an illustrated collection of original fairy tales. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Best of Tor.com, Slasher Girls & Monster Boys, Last Night a Superhero Saved My Life, and Summer Days and Summer Nights. She lives in Los Angeles.

# I had a college roommate from Penticton, a small town in British Columbia. When she would describe it—the cottage she shared with her dad, the fruit she picked off the trees for her breakfast—my city-kid imagination painted her hometown as some kind of idyllic haven between Avonlea (wrong coast, I know) and Bradbury’s Green Town, Illinois. Years later I got to visit, and despite the miles of pristine pine forest we traveled through to get there, the town itself was a disappointment, full of fast-food drive-thrus and bargain water parks. But I was still obsessed with Penticton—the Ogopogo they claimed lived in the lake, the giant fiberglass peach where town kids worked part-time serving pie and smoothies, the rowdy tourists who found a way to roll that peach into the lake every summer until the owners finally weighted its base down with concrete. I like places like Penticton that are one thing to visitors and another to the people who live there year-round. I like the haunted feeling of towns where half the businesses shut their doors through the winter and the whole world seems to wait. When you’re young, summer has power. It’s this strange gap in the year that requires new routines and operates by its own rules, a time when you can be someone else, and maybe see yourself transformed. In Little Spindle, that magic is real. Many thanks to Stephanie Perkins, who edited this story and who has been known to cast spells down at the DQ.

Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, where he grew up surrounded by the arts and education: Both his parents were teachers, three of his uncles were world-renowned gallery painters, and his immigrant grandfather was a respected writer, in Hebrew, of Jewish fiction and folktales. As a child Peter used to sit by himself in the stairwell of the apartment building he lived in, staring at the mailboxes across the way and making up stories to entertain himself. Today, thanks to classics like The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place, and “Two Hearts,” he is a living icon of fantasy fiction. In addition to his novels and over one hundred pieces of short fiction, Peter has written many teleplays and screenplays (including the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn), six nonfiction books (among them the classic travel memoir I See By My Outfit), the libretto for one opera, and more than seventy published poems and songs. He currently makes his home in Oakland, California. His latest novel is Summerlong.

# There is one origin story for “The Story of Kao Yu” that I’ve never mentioned to anyone—even myself. I knew a lady long ago who was no pickpocket, no thief, no murderer, but for whom I would have come across the world—I did, more than once—to do her bidding, without the slightest issue of right or wrong ever raising its head. James Thurber ends one of his fairy tales with the moral, “Love is blind, but desire just doesn’t give a good goddamn…” As with Kao Yu himself, she was my only true experience of not giving a good goddamn. I miss her still.

Helena Bell lives and writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her fiction has previously appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, The Indiana Review, and Strange Horizons, among other places.

# “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess” began with the thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if a boy found a dragon egg, and instead of helping the boy save the kingdom, the dragon ate the boy in the end? Eventually I settled on the idea of setting it at the summer camp my brother and I went to as kids because, again, the thought of it amused me. But the core of it came from some advice that Joe Hill gave me at Clarion West about a completely different story. He’d suggested that I make a character do something really terrible, unforgivable even. That advice stayed with me, and I liked the idea of framing a story around an apology that needs to be given.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren. His story collection Windeye and novel Immobility were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the ALA-RUSA award for best horror novel of 2009, and his novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Persian, and Slovenian. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

# I’d had the idea for “Smear” some time ago, stemming partly from Kelly Link’s terrific story “Two Houses,” partly from Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” and partly from reading M. John Harrison’s and Samuel Delany’s work that describes body modification of starship pilots. I like too the idea of there being something we’re semiconscious of, something that’s there hovering just beyond perception or that might operate more along our neural pathways than out in the open. For such a being, if being is the right word for it, the distinction between a human mind and the artificial mind of a ship might not be as distinct as it would be for us, and we might perceive it only as a shift or torque in reality, always doubting whether anything was there at all.

Joseph Allen Hill is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in Lightspeed, Liminal Stories, the Cosmic Powers anthology, and this anthology, which you are reading right now.