Джон Адамс: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

▪ “What Gentle Women Dare” was a hell of a hard story to write. It went through nine versions over three years, all starkly different, though they all dealt with Liverpool sex workers in the 1700s. What was the problem? Overambitiousness, mostly. I was trying to encompass the entire history of violence against women—it’s what the story demanded.

Nothing worked until I—quite incoherently—whined about the story to my friend Dominik Parisien, coeditor of Uncanny Magazine ’s “Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction” special issue. He said, “Why don’t you think about ‘The Screwfly Solution’?” James Tiptree, Jr., is a huge influence on my work, and it turns out that that suggestion was exactly what I needed to dig the story out of its hole.

Sofia Samataris the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors, including the John W. Campbell Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

▪ Of all the stories I’ve written, I find “Hard Mary” the spookiest. Like many disturbing things, it started out fun. One October night I was swapping stories with friends, and my husband’s cousin, who was raised Amish, shared some superstitions about Old Christmas that she remembered from childhood. I immediately wanted to put this stuff into a story, and when I did, I stumbled, just like my characters, onto a robot. At this point I was having a great time imagining this near-future or alternate-future community, filling it with surnames from my own Amish and Mennonite family tree and exploring the ways such a group might incorporate a new technology, as well as questions of personhood for robots and women. But soon another, weirder question began to assert itself, and this was the question of character. I became fascinated by the human desire for the almost-human: the way we consistently impose a humanlike character on our toys, domestic animals, cell phones, and, of course, the characters we write. Since these characters are only like humans and not actual people, our moral obligation to them is fuzzy. We’re often unmoved—even entertained—when bad things happen to them. This started to creep me out. I felt that when Lyddie, my main character (!), insisted that the robot was a person and not a machine, she was also defending herself. She was defending herself against me. Is it possible to see a literary character as kind of artificial intelligence? And if so, what do we owe them, and how should we treat them? In writing “Hard Mary,” I felt a character turn and look at me.

Adam R. Shannonis a career firefighter/paramedic and fiction writer. His work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Compelling Science Fiction, Every Day Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies. “On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog” was included in Locus Magazine ’s recommended reading list and was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. Adam is a graduate of Clarion West 2017.

▪ I wrote this story at Clarion West in the summer of 2017. I had been planning a lighthearted piece with a dog as one of the characters. Then our dog Zeus became extremely ill, and we had to euthanize him. He was a gentle, deaf German shepherd with spinal problems; we had lowered our bed so he could get into it without falling. He understood a few hand-signed commands and liked to pretend he couldn’t see us when he didn’t feel like doing what we wanted. This story emerged like a cry of pain at his loss. A lot of people have said that it made them cry too—sometimes in places they didn’t plan to shed tears, like on the bus to work—and I can only hope that reading it was cathartic for them.

It can be agonizing to love something, or someone, when you know your lifespan will likely exceed theirs, and worse yet to know that you will probably be the one to make their end-of-life decisions. I hope this story reminds people to hold tight to the moment of committing yourself to another creature, no matter how time and events conspire to make the endings painful.

LaShawn M. Wanaklives in Wisconsin with her husband and son. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, FIYAH, and many others. She reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine and is a graduate of Viable Paradise. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

▪ Back in 2015, I was struggling with a lot of things—grief over my miscarriage, turmoil at my day job, fear over the upcoming election. During this I discovered Sister Rosetta Tharpe and her gospel music, which I latched on to like a lifesaver. Her songs and exuberance made me want to dig deeper into the music of that time, so when I came across Memphis Minnie and her blues, I knew I had to get them in a story together.

This story allowed me to weather the storm of that turbulent time. I used it to wrestle with faith, to mourn over loss, and to speak when I couldn’t raise my voice. It gave me a chance to honor my past through the rich history of the South Side of Chicago. It connected me to my African American heritage of using music to uplift, encourage, and fight injustice. And while I can’t sing to save my life, writing this story became my own form of beautiful resistance.

Plus, come on. It’s a story about black women saving the world with the power of voice and guitars. That. Is. AWESOME.

Selected by John Joseph Adams

Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame

The Era. Friday Black (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Zimmer Land. Friday Black (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Ashby, Madeline

Tierra y Libertad. MIT Technology Review, June

Baker, Celeste Rita

De MotherJumpers. Strange Horizons, October

Banker, Ashok K.

A Love Story Written on Water. Lightspeed Magazine, December

Barnhill, Kelly

Dreadful Young Ladies. Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories (Algonquin)

Bear, Elizabeth

Okay, Glory. Twelve Tomorrows, ed. Wade Roush (MIT Press)

She Still Loves the Dragon. Uncanny Magazine, January/February

Bolander, Brooke

The Only Harmless Great Thing. Tor.com , January

Buckell, Tobias S.

A World to Die For. Clarkesworld Magazine, January

Cargill, C. Robert

We Are Where the Nightmares Go. We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories (Harper Voyager)

Castro, Adam-Troy

The Last to Matter. Lightspeed Magazine, September

Red Rain. Nightmare Magazine, June

Clark, P. Djèlí

Night Doctors. Eyedolon, August

Fawver, Kurt

The Gods in Their Seats, Unblinking. Vastarien, Spring

The Myth of You. The Dissolution of Small Worlds (Lethe)

Goodfellow, Cody

The Sister City. Eyedolon, November

Goss, Theodora

Queen Lily. Lightspeed Magazine, November

Greenblatt, A. T.

And Yet. Uncanny Magazine, March/April

Harn, Darby

Princess Mine. Strange Horizons, March

Harrow, Alix E.

A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies. Apex Magazine, February

Headley, Maria Dahvana

You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You. Lightspeed Magazine, September