Грег Иган: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Time travel is an old trope, but it got a fresh treatment in 2019, with Annalee Newitz’s fine sophomore effort, The Future of Another Timeline (Tor), taking non-binary feminists back to the past to fight a time war for women’s rights in the future, with murder, mayhem, and Bay Area punk rock thrown in as a bonus. I also thought Charlie Jane Anders delivered the goods with her second novel, The City in the Middle of the Night (Tor), a genuinely compelling novel of aliens, rebels, and smugglers set on a weirdly inhospitable planet. And Sarah Pinsker’s debut novel, A Song for a New Day (Berkley), offered a compelling look at how social changes might impact live performance that was both provocative, highly enjoyable, and very prescient.

There were some excellent series installments published during the year, with the second and third books of Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy, The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption (Orbit), probably being the highlight, though I greatly enjoyed Ian McDonald’s Luna: Moon Rising (Gollancz), Alastair Reynolds’s Shadow Captain (Gollancz), C. J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher’s Alliance Rising (DAW), and the latest Expanse novel from James S. A. Corey, Tiamat’s Wrath (Orbit). There also were a number of excellent SF novels published in translation this year. The best of these—and honestly one of the top three or four SF novels of 2019—was Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (Pantheon), which I unhesitatingly recommend. Also excellent were Hugo Award–winner Liu Cixin’s Supernova Era (Tor) and Chen Qiufan’s debut, Waste Tide (Tor).

Other 2019 SF novels that have gotten a lot of attention include Catfishing on CatNet , Naomi Kritzer (TorTeen); Frankissstein , Jeanette Winterson (Grove; Jonathan Cape); Golden State , Ben Winters (Mulholland); Perihelion Summer , Greg Egan (Tor.com); Rule of Capture , Christopher Brown (Harper Voyager); The Forbidden Stars , Tim Pratt (Angry Robot); The Testaments , Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese; Doubleday); War Girls , Tochi Onyebuchi (Razorbill); Atlas Alone , Emma Newman (Ace); Destroy All Monsters , Sam J. Miller (Harper Teen); A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World , C. A. Fletcher (Orbit); Fleet of Knives , Gareth L. Powell (Titan); The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man , Dave Hutchinson (Solaris); Edges: Inverted Frontier Book 1 , Linda Nagata (Mythic Island); The Quantum Garden , Derek Künsken (Solaris); Doggerland , Ben Smith (Fourth Estate); Finder , Suzanne Palmer (DAW); Famous Men Who Never Lived , K. Chess (Tin House); Do You Dream of Terra-Two? , Temi Oh (Saga); and David Mogo, Godhunter, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Abaddon).

With so much short fiction published every year it’s hard to imagine any year being a bad year for anthologies, and this was not that year. Instead, we had a year where we saw all of the themes and trends impacting the wider SF field—from climate change to community inclusiveness to works in translation to Afrofuturism—writ small. Before proceeding, I should mention as a disclaimer that I edited two anthologies, Mission Critical and The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen , both of which appeared during the year. I commend them to you and move on.

With major novels in translation from Yōko Ogawa, Liu Cixin, Chen Qiufan, Yoshiki Tanaka, Baoshu, and others, and with short fiction in translation in Clarkesworld, Apex, The Dark, and other venues, this was the year of SF in translation, something reflected in the number of anthologies of SF in translation published in 2019. Probably the one with the highest profile, and one of the year’s best anthologies overall, was Ken Liu’s second anthology of Chinese fiction in translation, Broken Stars (Tor), which featured outstanding work by Han Song, Xia Jia, Baoshu, and Liu Cixin. This companion to 2016’s Invisible Planets is essential. Hachette India published two SF anthologies during the year, Tarun K. Saint’s The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction and Sukanya Venkatraghavan’s Magical Women . Both were fascinating. Saint’s anthology features Vandana Singh’s “Reunion”—one of the year’s very best stories—along with strong work by S. B. Divya, Giti Chandra, and Sumita Sharma. Happily, the publisher is making the book available in the British and North American markets. Magical Women , on the other hand, provided a critically useful look at genre fiction being written by Indian women and included interesting work by Shveta Thakrar, Nikita Deshpande, and Asma Kazi. We’re only just beginning to see translated fiction coming from South Korea, a lot of it thanks to the efforts of Sunyoung Park, Gord Sellar, and the team at Clarkesworld . Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park co-edited a major anthology, Readymade Bodhisattva (Kaya), which featured fine work by Kim Changgyu, Park Min-gyu, Jeong Soyeon, and others. And finally, one of my favorite anthologies of the year was Basma Ghalayini’s Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba from UK publisher Comma Press. A thoughtful, rich, varied collection of SF that imagined events one hundred years after the occupation of Palestine, it was a revelation featuring fine work from Saleem Haddad, Anwar Ahmed, Mazen Maarouf, and more. It’s highly recommended.

There were a handful of other strong original SF anthologies published during the year, the best of which was Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams’s status quo–challenging A People’s Future of the United States (One World), which featured top-quality work from Charlie Jane Anders, Alice Sola Kim, Sam J. Miller, and many more. In a similar vein, also worthwhile and recommended are Cat Rambo’s If This Goes On: The Science Fiction Future of Today’s Politics (Parvus) and Jason Sizemore’s Do Not Go Quietly (Apex). After the Lavalle and Adams anthology, probably the most impressive English-language SF anthology was Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe’s third editorial collaboration, The Mythic Dream (Saga), which featured outstanding work by Indrapramit Das, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, and others. I also was impressed by Nisi Shawl’s fine New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (Solaris), Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin’s The Outcast Hours (Solaris), and Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers (Titan).

In recent years tech companies, science magazines, and think tanks have produced a variety of fiction projects, some of which featured dull, plodding work and some of which are truly outstanding. The very best of these for 2019, and one of the top original anthologies of the year of any kind, was Ann VanderMeer’s Current Futures: A Sci-Fi Ocean Anthology (XPRIZE), which featured new SF about climate change and the world’s oceans by some of the best women writers working today, including work by Vandana Singh, Nalo Hopkinson, Elizabeth Bear, and Deborah Biancotti. The project, which oddly appears to be blocked from search engines, is only available on a website here (https://go.xprize.org/oceanstories) and has my highest recommendation. The other major projects in this space for the year were Slate ’s Future Tense, which featured strong work from Ken Liu, Chen Qiufan, Elizabeth Bear, and others, and the New York Times ’ fascinating “Op-Eds From the Future” series, that includes short pieces from Cory Doctorow, Ted Chiang, Brooke Bolander, and Fran Wilde, among others. This year also saw publication of an anthology collecting the first year of Future Tense’s stories, Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow edited by Kirsten Berg (The Unnamed Press).