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

Science fiction relishes year’s-best anthologies like this one, and last year saw the publication of my own book mentioned above as well as Gardner Dozois’s final anthology, The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Griffin), Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four (Night Shade), Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019 (Prime), Carmen Maria Machado and John Joseph Adams’s The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (Mariner), and Bogi Takác’s Transcendent 4: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (Lethe), all of which are worth seeking out. Also of interest are Neil Clarke’s The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction (Night Shade) and Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman’s The New Voices of Science Fiction (Tachyon).

Finally, although I’m not covering fantasy or horror here, I’ll note that the best fantasy or horror anthology of the year was Ellen Datlow’s massive Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories (Saga), which featured an impressive array of ghostly fiction from some of the best writers in the field. Also highly recommended is Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer’s even more enormous The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (Vintage), which is essentially a college course in a book. Seek it out.

Whether 2019 is eventually seen as a good year or a poor one for short fiction, it nonetheless saw publication of no fewer than four magisterial short story collections from major writers working in their prime. Easily the most anticipated of these was Ted Chiang’s Exhalation: Stories (Knopf). Only the second collection of his work to be published in a thirty-year-long career, following 2002’s Stories of Your Life and Others (Tor), Exhalation: Stories brought together all of Chiang’s significant published works since that first collection, including classics like the title story and “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” alongside two major new stories, “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” and “Omphalos.” At times almost giddily inspired and thought-provoking, it is essential for lovers of short fiction of any kind. Completely different and yet a not-too-distant cousin to the intellectual brilliance of Exhalation , the simply titled The Best of Greg Egan (Subterranean) collects twenty stories published across nearly thirty years and includes stone-cold classics like “Learning to Be Me,” “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” and Hugo winner “Oceanic.” Egan’s short fiction swept through the field in the 1990s like few others have done in the history of SF, and this book is an indispensable record of that. Less definitively science fictional, The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan collects twenty stories published over a fourteen-year period that saw Kiernan establish herself not as science fiction writer or fantasy writer or horror writer, but simply and purely as a writer and one who on her day could deliver a tour de force in just about any genre. This book collects the fruit of many such days. Highlights include “Tidal Forces,” “Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8),” and “The Prayer of Ninety Cats.” And then there’s a book that simply does not fit. In fairness, it belongs, but it does not fit. The late, great tale-teller R. A. Lafferty wrote science fiction, science-fictiony stuff, yarns, notions, and fantasies across a career that stretched from 1959 to his death in 2002. The Best of R. A. Lafferty (Gollancz), which again I must confess to having edited, was rightly published as part of the Gollancz Masterworks series and collects nearly two dozen of his finest stories along with assorted introductions and such. A wonderful book, and happily a North American edition is forthcoming.

While those four books stood out, they were by no means alone. I was enchanted by Sofia Rhei’s Everything is Made of Letters (Aqueduct). Translated from Spanish, it contained five science-fictional fabulations including the simply delightful “Secret Stories of Doors,” which is reprinted here. In a not-dissimilar vein, SF writer and poet Malka Older delivered her debut collection, … And Other Disasters (Mason Jar), which was playful, allusive, and captivating. Perhaps more immediately science fictional was Aliette de Bodard’s first collection, Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight (Subterranean), which collected her Xuya universe stories in a single volume along with a major new novella “Of Birthdays, and Fungus, and Kindness,” which I would have included here, had space permitted. Yoon Ha Lee’s Hexarchate trilogy is one of the outstanding works of science fiction of the 2010s. Each volume was individually nominated for the Hugo Award, as was the series, while Ninefox Gambit was also nominated for the Nebula. This year saw the publication of Hexarchate Stories (Solaris), which collects all of the short fiction in the series alongside a new novella, “Glass Cannon.” The other standout SF collection of the year was Cory Doctorow’s rebellious and revolutionary Radicalized (Tor), which collected four new novellas, each of which were essential.

This list could continue indefinitely, but to keep things as brief as possible, I’d also recommend Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse , S. B. Divya (Hachette India); And Go Like This , John Crowley (Small Beer); Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer); Snow White Learns Witchcraft , Theodora Goss (Mythic Delirium); Episodes , Christopher Priest (Gollancz); Homesick , Nino Cipri (Dzanc); Laughter at the Academy , Seanan McGuire (Subterranean); Binti: The Complete Collection , Nnedi Okorafor (DAW); A City Made of Words , Paul Park (PM); salt slow , Julia Armfield (Flatiron); Mars , Asja Bakic (The Feminist Press); The City and the Cygnets , Michael Bishop (Fairwood; Kudzu Planet); Collision , J.S. Breukelaar (Meerkat); Unforeseen , Molly Gloss (Saga); Meet Me in the Future , Kameron Hurley (Tachyon); Big Cat and Other Stories , Gwyneth Jones (NewCon); All Worlds Are Real , Susan Palwick (Fairwood); Miracles & Marvels: Stories , Tim Pratt (Merry Blacksmith); and Learning Monkey and Crocodile , Nick Wood (Luna).

As any longtime reader will tell you, science fiction publishers have been publishing novellas or short novels as stand-alone books for decades. Whether or not the old Ace Doubles met the length criteria to be novellas or not, by the 1980s these small books were fairly commonplace. And yet, even allowing for that and the view held by some readers that the novella is the ideal length for a science fiction story, it’s undeniable that they have gained unprecedented attention in the last four or five years.

Tor.com Publishing was launched by Tor Books in 2014 to publish novellas and short novels, and quickly established itself as the preeminent novella publisher in the field with runaway successes like Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti stories, Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries, and Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. This year Tor.com produced some of the very best stories of the year, which are only omitted from this book because of length. Certainly, P. Djèlí Clark’s wonderful The Haunting of Tram Car 015 and Saad Z. Hossain’s remarkable The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday would be in this book if I had unlimited space, and I also happily recommend C. S. E. Cooney’s Desdemona and the Deep , Michael Blumlein’s Longer , Priya Sharma’s Ormeshadow , Katharine Duckett’s Miranda in Milan , Ian McDonald’s The Menace from Farside , and Alastair Reynolds’s Permafrost . Tor.com also published Greg Egan’s outstanding climate-change novel, Perihelion Summer , which I feel is the most approachable work of his career. Since I’m discussing novellas published as stand-alone books, I couldn’t not mention again Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War (Saga), which I expect to sweep all of the major awards during 2020. I also was knocked out by Rivers Solomon’s powerful The Deep (Saga), which was based upon work done with the band Clipping, and by K. J. Parker’s outstanding My Beautiful Life (Subterranean). British independent press Newcon continues to publish excellent novellas, this year including Adam Roberts’s The Man Who Would Be Kling and Dave Hutchinson’s Nomads .