John Adams: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

# I’ve always liked metafiction, from Looney Tunes to Italo Calvino to comic books proclaiming in bold-print narration that the superheroes will die if I don’t turn the page. It always gets me, no matter how corny or pretentious. Stories about stories are meaningful because our lives are made of stories. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and how the world works and what it is to exist and act in the world. I wrote “The Venus Effect” because I was exhausted by a real-life story. Let’s call it the police brutality story. The names change, the setting jumps around the United States, a few plot details get switched up, but it’s always the same structure and always the same ending. I imagine the police brutality story will play out at least a couple times between me writing this now and you reading this. I hope very much that I am wrong in this assertion, but history suggests that I will not be. It was this sense of inevitability that drove me to write the story, the slow, dull grind of knowing exactly what is going to happen and not being able to do anything. I wanted to capture that feeling of exhaustion and powerlessness. The story is about other things—who is and is not a part of society, respectability politics, the value of fiction in confronting real-world issues—but the core of it, I think, is that feeling, the agony of the inevitable.

N. K. Jemisin is the author of several novels, including The Fifth Season, which won the Locus and Hugo Awards (making her the first black author to win either award for best novel). Her short fiction and novels have also been nominated multiple times for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards and shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree. Her speculative works range in genre from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West workshops. She lives in Brooklyn, where in her spare time she is a biker and a gamer; she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her obnoxious ginger cat. Her essays and fiction excerpts are available at nkjemisin.com. Her newest novel, The Stone Sky, came out in August 2017.

# Back in 2014 or 2015, there was a debate about the H. P. Lovecraft bust that embodied the World Fantasy Award, and substantial discussion of just how much Lovecraft’s fear of “the other” informed his work. I’d read some Lovecraft a long while before, but somehow hadn’t realized that his “sinister hordes” were immigrants, poor people, and people of color like me. Once I saw it, though, I couldn’t unsee it. I started to notice Lovecraftian paranoia not just in his work but in the reactions of bigoted people in the everyday: the police officer who imagines that an unarmed black child is a terrifying monster; the doctor who believes his Latina patient can’t feel pain the way ordinary (white) human beings can; the parent who sees a trans child as an unnatural freak. I’m also well aware that despite the paranoid fantasies of Lovecraftian bigots, historically it’s marginalized people who have the most to fear from “the other”… yet we seem to manage without seeing every stranger on the street as a monster from beyond.

So then I got the idea to write a story about (basically) Cthulhu attacking New York City, as one does. And I decided that New York—the New York of my experience, which is filthy and “ethnic” and full of “perverts” and poor people and basically everything Lovecraft despised, by his own word—would tell the big C exactly where he could put his eldritch abomination. Maybe, just maybe, all the people Lovecraft hated, all us sinister hordes, are exactly what humanity needs in its direst hour. And maybe, just maybe, I could use Lovecraft’s own material to battle the ugliness he helped to foment in the fantasy zeitgeist. Plus: giant monster fight! Those are always fun.

Alice Sola Kim‘s writing has appeared in publications such as McSweeney’s, Tin House, BuzzFeed READER, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, the Village Voice, and Lenny. She is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award and has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Elizabeth George Foundation.

# I belong to a writing group that has existed since I was in college. The group has gone through many transformations—people have joined, left, and moved, necessitating both an East Coast and a West Coast branch—but it’s essentially still the same group. When the BuzzFeed editors Karolina Waclawiak, Saeed Jones, and Isaac Fitzgerald solicited a story from me for BuzzFeed READER on the theme of being almost famous, I knew right away that I wanted to write something inspired by my gorgeous long-running miracle of a writing group—except completely scary and evil, which my writing group is only sometimes.

As in the story, a lot of us are East Asian and South Asian, and when we all started writing in college, there was this sense that there wouldn’t be enough room for all of us—that our place in the white-dominated literary world would be as tokens and therefore maybe only one of us would make it. But literary publishing has slowly become, is still in the process of slowly becoming, more reflective of the actual diverse world, and I’m happy to say that, unlike in the story, all of us in the group are seeing each other succeed. It is unbelievable and wonderful and everyone has worked so hard for it—no one took the shortcut of feeding their friends to a giant snake woman, for which I am thankful.

A. Merc Rustad is a queer nonbinary writer who lives in Minnesota. Merc is a Nebula Award finalist for “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door”—definitely a highlight of the year! Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Gamut, and other fine venues. Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or on their website, amercrustad.com. Their debut short story collection, So You Want to Be a Robot, was published in May 2017.

# I almost didn’t write this. No, that’s not quite right—I wrote it, and it scared me because it felt true and honest. This was all-out me on the page. I had read a lot of portal fantasies, and none of them seemed to follow through on the aftermath. The trauma of being locked out of your found-home, cut off from all your friends and the life(s) you built, unsure why you could never go back. I refused to let this be a downer, either; it needed a happy ending, and I had these nagging doubts that Serious Genre would want that. So I trunked the story for six months, and only at the last minute of Fireside‘s sub window did I send it out. Well. You know the rest. I like happy endings. I’m so pleased by the warm, welcoming reception “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door” has gotten. It’s the most rewarding aspect of being a writer: when you see people connect with a story, the characters, and find hope in the end. Let’s all build lots of doors.

Nisi Shawl‘s alternate history/AfroRetroFuturist novel Everfair was a 2016 publication and a finalist for the Nebula Award. Her 2008 collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and she has been a guest of honor at WisCon, the Science Fiction Research Association, and ArmadilloCon. She is the coauthor of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and she coedited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Recently she guest-edited Fantastic Stories of the Imagination‘s special People of Color Take Over issue. Since its inception she has been reviews editor for the feminist literary quarterly Cascadia Subduction Zone. Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in the fantastic genres, and she serves on Clarion West’s board of directors. She lives in Seattle, taking daily walks with her mother, June, and her cat, Minnie, at a feline pace.