John Adams: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. Her short fiction has appeared in over a dozen best-of-the-year anthologies, and she has written Catwoman for DC Comics. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The A.V. Club, NPR.org, and elsewhere.

# A lot of things found their way all at once into “Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home”; some of them were concerns I knew I had, and some of them, as usual, are obvious only in retrospect. As someone who imagines herself to be a curmudgeon with a poor track record of correspondence, I didn’t know how interested I was in the epistolary form, and how it affects the reading experience, until I started writing this story.

Greg van Eekhout has so far published six novels whose audiences range from adult to middle grade. His most recent work is the Daniel Blackland trilogy, beginning with California Bones, a modern-day fantasy about wizards who gain powers by eating the fossilized remains of extinct magical creatures. Upcoming work includes a middle-grade novel about dogs in space. Find him at writingandsnacks.com.

# Among the biggest influences on my work are the crappy things I grew up on. Fast food. Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Corner convenience stores. Shopping malls. Hardly a Bradburian childhood to mine for material. Nevertheless, I keep coming back to the extruded product of my youth and examining what it turned me into and what about it is interesting, valuable, mythological, magical. When I was asked to write a science fiction story for an anthology inspired by the music of the awesome Canadian rock trio Rush (who never recorded extruded product, who are not crappy, who are in fact, as I said, awesome), I immediately thought of their song “Subdivisions,” which evokes the stultifying existence of suburbia. The trick was writing something that would not only appeal to Rush fans but would also speak to people who hate Rush, or are indifferent to Rush, or have never even heard of Rush. These people exist. I can’t even. The other challenge was to write something more than just a fan letter to my favorite band, but rather to make a statement of personal concern to me. So I wrote about extruded food product, social status, pets, commercial real estate development, quests, and friendship. For research I looked to Tempest, the video game featured in the early-’80s MTV video for “Subdivisions.” I got the high score because hardly anybody else had played the game in a while.

Alexander Weinstein is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (2016). He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prizes. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University.

# “Openness” was a story that took three years to write. The idea for the psychic technology came quite quickly. I was on a crowded bus in Boston, and I suddenly thought of how useful/horrifying it would be if we could project our likes/dislikes/preferences onto a visual aura around our bodies. You could look across a room and know that a stranger enjoyed Tom Waits, or hated cats, or was originally from Maine, and in turn you could psychically message people who shared your interests. So the technology of the story was fully formed, but I couldn’t yet place its human conflict. For my stories to feel successful they need the human element, so the technology becomes backgrounded (and part of the setting) and the humanity of the characters is foregrounded. Since I didn’t yet have this element, the story was put on the back burner.

It was about two years later, as I was going through a breakup with a woman I loved dearly, that the human element of the story took shape. The breakup dealt with putting up emotional walls—and as we were navigating this, I suddenly understood how the psychic technology of layers could work in the story as a metaphor for the emotional barriers that arise in a romantic relationship. This became the central theme of “Openness,” which explores the way in which we can retract our “layers” from those closest to us. Once I had this element, I was able to start drafting the story. As for the idea of “total openness,” I’m fascinated by the question of how much we share of ourselves with our romantic partners and our ability to be compassionate for our partners’ flaws and their most deeply held secrets.

Nick Wolven‘s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and various other magazines and anthologies. He’s particularly interested in near-future science fiction with a strong flavor of social commentary, not because he thinks anyone benefits from the commentary but because he’s so often bemused by society. His favorite authors in the science fiction genre are Samuel Delany, Margaret Atwood, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Wolven has a shabby-looking, sporadically updated blog at nickthewolven.com. He’s on Twitter, rarely, as @nickwolven. He lives in New York City with his family.

# A political spoof like “Caspar D. Luckinbill…” is too easily spoiled with explication. I’ll say only that I think there’s a natural affinity between science fiction and satire, since both depend in some sense on the art of exaggeration. Perhaps I can venture an exaggeration of my own, then, and say that science fiction sets out to make the strange seem ordinary—or anyway, plausible—while good satire often succeeds at making the ordinary seem strange. When the two are brought together, the effect can be dizzying. As Vonnegut reminds us, we all now and then come unstuck in time, unsure how we got to be where we are, dreading where we seem to be going. Nothing gives me this sense of being out of joint, out of place, and out of workable options like today’s multimedia blizzard of ads, fads, and admonitions.

Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold, cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, which have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories, came out in August 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

# I have terrible seasonal allergies, and for about a year I got allergy shots a couple times a week in hopes of reducing my symptoms. Allergy shots increase people’s tolerance to an allergen by injecting them with gradually increasing doses of whatever it is they are allergic to. After getting an allergy shot, you have to sit in the waiting room of the clinic for thirty minutes, just in case you have a serious anaphylactic reaction. Local reactions (giant itchy welts) on the arm where they’ve injected the allergen are quite common. “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” was inspired by the many hours I spent waiting in a medical clinic with itchy arms.

E. Lily Yu received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Her short fiction appears in a variety of venues, from McSweeney’s and Boston Review to Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, as well as multiple best-of-the-year anthologies. Her stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards.

# “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” paced my mind for days before pouring itself onto paper one March afternoon in a coffee shop decked in War of the Worlds kitsch. Conscious inspirations for this story include Richard Siken’s “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” Norman Rockwell’s Boy Reading Adventure Story, Connie Converse’s “Man in the Sky,” an illustrated edition of “The Red Shoes” in Chinese that terrified me as a child, a dragon borrowed from a Patricia McKillip novel, and a long list of books on family systems, attachment theory, and insight meditation. This is not a complete inventory, since good stories, like thieves, rifle their writer’s pockets and snap up all kinds of unconsidered trifles of life and mind.