Hannu Rajaniemi: The New Voices of Science Fiction

The New Voices of Science Fiction collects stories by writers whom Hannu Rajaniemi and I believe will become increasingly important in the years to come. All the stories in this volume were published quite recently, after 2014, and the writers themselves for the most part are new to their success. Many of these writers will be writing and publishing their first novels in the next few years, while some, including Rebecca Roanhorse, Sam J. Miller, Sarah Pinsker, and Rich Larson, are already on their way.

Another talented group of up-and-coming writers was featured in The New Voices of Fantasy , which I co-edited with the legendary fantasist Peter S. Beagle. It came out in 2017 and won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology. The book collected stories by several authors whose careers have taken off, including Carmen Maria Machado, Brooke Bolander, and Hannu Rajaniemi, to name just a few.

In 1977, a youthful George R. R. Martin took up the mantle of anthologies dedicated to younger writers, publishing several volumes centered around the John W. Campbell Award, which is given at the annual Hugo Award ceremony to the best new writer. Martin published work by himself, Lisa Tuttle, George Alec Effinger, Suzy McKee Charnas, Spider Robinson, and John Varley, among others. Martin’s series ran five volumes in all, ending in 1987.

The New Voices of Science Fiction is very much of this particular moment in the genre. If we had commissioned it ten years earlier, you would perhaps have seen such now-famous stories as Charles Stross’s “Accerlando” (or my personal Stross favorite, “Tourists,” which Stross calls “a case of hit-and-run amnesia”). You may have found “Calorie Man” or “The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Bacigalupi, early in his career. And, if the anthology had been truly attuned to what was happening at the time, you just may have discovered a truly breathtaking story, “Deus Ex Homine,” by an unknown writer named Hannu Rajaniemi.

So, what is the new generation of science-fiction writers up to? With Jamie Wahls, it’s the witty “Utopia, LOL??” about an everyman who finds himself in a future that he is incapable of comprehending. Alice Sola Kim takes Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” on a test drive through time, “One Hour, Every Seven Years.” In “Mother Tongues,” S. Qiouyi Lu shows to what new lengths a mother may go to sacrifice for her daughter. And with “Openness,” Alexander Weinstein demonstrates the ultimate potentials of social media.

With these twenty fabulous stories, writers Amal El-Mohtar, Kelly Robson, Lettie Prell, Suzanne Palmer, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, and others show that the future of science fiction is in sure hands—and that, like the real future, it’s only a brief matter of time before it arrives.

I certainly did not feel like a new voice when my first novel, The Quantum Thief , came out almost a decade ago. I only had the faintest idea that I even had a voice, except for the chorus of worry, self-doubt, and guilt in my head. I simply wrote about my obsessions—physics, gentleman thieves, chocolate, game theory—and filtered them through the idiosyncrasies of a second-language writer grappling with translating Finnish idioms into English. Somehow, that mess resonated with a wide readership across the world, and I am forever grateful for that.

But even now, several books and many stories later, I find the concept of a writerly voice elusive. The most adroit writers have the power to disappear, existing only as people and worlds conjured in our heads like waking dreams. And if the voice is the distillation of one’s worldview, an approximation of one’s consciousness, then finding it may be as difficult as locating the seat of the self—or its absence—in deep meditation.

But I do know what the writers who have shaped me sound like. What was novel in my own voice was a distorted echo of Finnish mythology, Jules Verne, Maurice Leblanc, Tove Jansson, Roger Zelazny; British space opera writers like Iain Banks and Charles Stross; and many more. I fell in love with them and was changed by them. The truly new voices—whether chronologically recent or simply discovered by the reader for the first time—do that, and more. A new voice says something previously unspoken and true about the world around us. A new voice makes us want to imitate it, to amplify it, to join it in a chorus. A new voice wakes us to the fact that things are no longer the same.

All the stories in this volume have that power of waking: an original thematic scope, a tonal freshness. They make you a little uncomfortable. These writers are native to a strange world where science-fictional inventions are injected into the veins of the mundane on a daily basis, and political reality out does satire. It is a world of contradictions: of vast slow-burning threats and sudden bone-cracking transformations. It is a world that mixes utopian dreams with brutal greed, that embraces diversity while walking over the weak. It is a complex world that cannot be defined by a single new perspective.

This anthology assembles a chorus of storytellers who are up to the task of capturing the essence of our world’s present and future. They refuse to be contained in one genre, but what they do is unmistakably science fiction. Yet they are not satisfied with using well-worn tropes of SF, such as time travel—or shinier speculative machinery, such as the Singularity—just as cold thought experiments, but they repurpose these ideas into deep explorations of gender, love, and identity. There are stories about contemporary nightmares like social media and climate change, but they have a clarity and attention to human detail that go beyond Black Mirror –esque cautionary tales. They don’t hesitate to confront pain and willingly walk into the dark, but they also guide us back from it—and sometimes to laugh uproariously at the absurdity of it all.

And finally, these authors show us the new new things, from global cataclysms to personal transformations that get us lost in entirely unprecedented landscapes. They will, no doubt, inspire fresh writerly talent, and make us readers hungry for new kinds of stories we did not even know we wanted.

They are here to wake us, by giving us new waking dreams. Read them, and be changed.

Alexander Weinstein’s fiction has appeared in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and Best American Experimental Writing , and has been awarded the the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, Etching’s Whirling, and New Millennium Prizes. He is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University. His collection of short stories, Children of the New World , was selected as a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year for 2016.

“Openness” follows the rise and fall of a romance complicated by technologically-enhanced digital intimacy.

BEFORE I DECIDED to finally give up on New York, I subbed classes at a junior high in Brooklyn. A sixth grade math teacher suffering from downloading anxiety was out for the year, and jobs being what they were, I took any opportunity I could. Subbing math was hardly my dream job; I had a degree in visual art, for which I’d be in debt for the rest of my life. All I had to show for it was my senior collection, a series of paintings of abandoned playgrounds, stored in a U-Pack shed in Ohio. There was a time when I’d imagined I’d become famous, give guest lectures at colleges, and have retrospectives at MoMA. Instead, I found myself standing in front of a class of apathetic tweens, trying to teach them how to do long division without accessing their browsers. I handed out pen and paper, so that for once in their lives they’d have a tactile experience, and watched as they texted, their eyes glazed from blinking off message after message. They spent most of the class killing vampires and orcs inside their heads and humoring me by lazily filling out my photocopies.