Джон Адамс: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

This is a good time to remind fine people like you who love short fiction enough to not only read this book but read this foreword that short fiction publishers need your support to keep their endeavors going. If you can, subscribe, review, spread the word. Every little bit helps.

I’d like to take a moment to thank and acknowledge my team of first readers, who helped me evaluate various publications that I might not have had time to consider otherwise, including Alex Puncekar, Sandra Odell, and Christie Yant. Thanks also to Jenny Xu at Mariner Books, who is our current point person keeping things running smoothly behind the scenes at Best American HQ. Likewise I’m grateful to all the authors who alert me to their published eligible works by sending them to me via my BASFF online submissions portal (which is extremely helpful to make sure I don’t miss anything), and of course I also deeply appreciate the editors and publishers who take the time to make sure I get copies of the books or periodicals they publish. Thanks too to David Steffen, who runs the Submission Grinder writers’ market database, for his assistance in helping me do some oversight on my list of new and gone-extinct markets. And last but not least, a huge thanks to all the readers who have purchased (and reviewed!) previous iterations of BASFF and thus have enabled the series to continue; I hope we can keep it going for a long, long time. (If you read and loved a previous edition, please do consider leaving a review at your venue of choice; it really does help!)

Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition (the best of 2019), please visit johnjosephadams.com/best-americanfor instructions on how to submit material for consideration.

In an ideal world, I would have opened this essay with one of my favorite quotes from Salvador Dalí, the one he wrote in his diary about how he’s discovered that he’s always been painting the rhinoceros horn. It’s one of my favorite quotes about art, and I have always found its general thrust—the subtly singular focus of artistic obsession—to be funny, useful, and instructive. [1] “I, Dalí, deep in a constant introspection and a meticulous analysis of my smallest thoughts, have just discovered that, without realizing it, I have painted nothing but rhinoceros horns all my life [. . .] I take another look at all my paintings and I am stupefied with the amount of rhinoceros my work contains.” What freedom! What liberation! An artist finding at the root of his work a consistent and undeniable truth: the cosmic beauty of the rhinoceros horn. But instead I find myself feeling uncharitable, like a beleaguered parent driving a minivan across the Southwest whose fraternal twins are in the back seat drawing invisible lines down the upholstery and swatting at each other. [2] Unlike the parent of the squabbling kids, however, I’m less inclined to pull the van over to the side of the road than to drive the whole thing off an embankment, such is the level of my frustration.

There is currently an unending, utterly exhausting fight between two particular writing communities: literary fiction and genre fiction. Fight might not even be the correct word, as it lacks both the acute thrill and the clear resolution of physical combat. You cannot attend a con, conference, or spend any time on social media without running into this petty squabbling, in which some writers and readers of the two communities find themselves thoughtlessly repeating a series of untrue truisms about the other in what they consider sympathetic or like-minded spaces: con panels, for example, or classrooms, or the surprisingly narrow scope of their Twitter universe. The untrue truisms are slightly different only in the most minor way: the clichés spouted by genre writers about literary fiction tend to be ignorant and defensive; the clichés spouted by literary writers about genre fiction tend to be ignorant and snobbish. “Literary fiction is boring and entirely about college professors sleeping with their students!” “Genre fiction is unserious and entirely about dragons and spaceships! Pew pew, pew pew. ” [3] In the interest of full disclosure, this is the full sum of my personal experience on this matter: I’ve been told by genre editors/publications that my work is “too literary” and not sufficiently “genre,” but I’ve never experienced the inverse (though I am assured by genre writers that it happens, and I believe them); I’ve argued with a lot of people about this subject online and in person; I was once described on Twitter as a “litfic writer” who was “Quite Put Out” by a genre writer’s mindless repetition of the above tropes—though I write fantasy, I don’t use or recognize the word litfic, and I am actually Permanently Put Out; I wrote fabulism at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and two of the eight stories in my first collection at Clarion; people always seem to think that when I ramble on about gatekeeping I’m talking about literary fiction gatekeeping keeping out genre fiction, even though I am never, ever talking about that; I desperately wish I could believe in ghosts. They are such tedious clichés, and ones performed in such bad faith, that all they tell me is that the offending thinker is more interested in victimhood or condescension than in reading good work or becoming a better writer. It is solipsistic, irritating, and the opposite of useful. What a coincidence, I always think, that the fiction you think is terrible and not worth learning from is also one you’ve apparently never read. [4] Or haven’t read in a long time, or haven’t read enough of, or haven’t read since you were a kid, or only read for school, or haven’t read with any kind of curiosity or depth and width. Blanket statements about these communities fail to be many things: they are not smart, not thoughtful, not generous, not a reflection of an omnivorous mind—all things you need as a reader and a writer!—but perhaps most criminally, they are not interesting.

I’ve been teaching undergraduates for the better part of a decade, and spend much of my time telling them that literature is about potential, about the brazen and thrilling integration of other people’s history and art with their history and art, about ambitious leaps of genre and world-building and the ordinary magic of the human experience and the minute perfection of the sentence and pursuing your own obsessions and dozens of other wonderful things besides. And then they turn to the practitioners and readers of the craft and see endless, thoughtless squabbling, pointless category-enforcing, people who refuse to read outside of their comfort zones or even acknowledge their value, people who think of the work of certain writers as theirs instead of everyone’s. I am trying to show them that traditions are not destinies, that no community can own a writer or a book, that the existence of multiple distinct communities of literature means that there is more fiction to read, that the house is even bigger than you had imagined. And yet some folks are only interested in locking the doors, turning out the lights. It’s bullshit, and it hits every button of irritation I possess.

Kelly Link has often spoken of how genre is, among other things, “the promise of pleasure,” and if you think of all fiction as possessing or belonging to a genre (which I do), the issue becomes less combative. Instead of How can I denigrate the category to which this story belongs, and by extension this story? you might ask, What kind of pleasure does this story bring me? (Or, What kind of pleasure might this story bring someone else? ) [5] And, if you’re a writer yourself, What might I learn from this story? How might it contribute to my work, my practice? With that perspective fiction becomes infused with promise. This story might bring the deep somatic thrill of terror or the alluring perfume of mystery; it might sting with familiarity or drag you howling into the unknown, or both. It might give you sentences so thoughtful and precise you feel dizzy with specificity; those sentences might defamiliarize the familiar or be a garden path into some fresh territory you’ve never seen before. It might tell a story that you, in your eternal human nearsightedness, have never encountered before. It might tell you one that you didn’t know you needed to hear.