Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

I wrote this story for many of the obvious reasons. I also wrote it as a sort of one-way correspondence to people I have known, mostly women in my life. A profound pleasure of publishing the story was to have some of them read it.

Celeste Rita Bakeris a Virgin Islander currently flitting between the beach and the grocery store as she tries to be one of the survivors of de ’rona pandemic. She chronicled COVID-19 in a rudely opinionated timeline from October 2019 through March 2020, after which she just could not “go another further.” It’s on Amazon as “De Rona Reach.” She is also the author of Back, Belly, and Side, a short story collection, a mix-up of magical realism, fantasy, and mimetic fiction, some in Caribbean dialect and some in Standard English. Her stories have been included in The Caribbean Writer, Moko, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and other publications. She used to love doing live performance readings, often in costumes she’d made herself, and hopes to again one day when we can safely gather. A proud 2019 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, she is noticing that her stories are getting more and more silly and absurd and is loving it. Her website is celesteritabaker.com and she is occasionally on Twitter as @tenwest522.

■ I jumped back and almost fell off the chair several times while doing the research for “Glass Bottle Dancer.” Eventually I learned to stand up and reach the keyboard with my arms fully extended. I screamed and cackled and laughed at myself, but I just could not change the roaches to a more socially acceptable creature, like butterflies or grasshoppers. Much as they do in our own homes, they insinuated themselves into the story, which is about a human woman, Mable, and her determination to learn something frivolous just for fun.

I looked at photos of roaches until I learned to appreciate their beauty. I read about roaches until I understood how they contribute to the health of the planet. I knew if I had any hope of readers liking Oswald, Treevia, and their swarm, I had to like them first.

When Mable’s ability to dance roaches out of the homes of people and back to their intended environment eliminated the use of pesticides, both of which contribute to asthma and other respiratory conditions, I was delighted with the convergence. I enjoyed being Mable’s friend and companion as she stayed dedicated, despite her responsibilities and the opinions of others, to putting time and energy into adding a purely personal joy into her life. It is something I am continually learning to do. I had a great time writing this story and I hope you enjoyed it.

KT Bryskiis a Canadian author, playwright, and podcaster. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare, Lightspeed, Apex, Strange Horizons, Augur, and PodCastle, among others, and her audio dramas are available wherever fine podcasts are found. She’s won the Parsec and the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, and she has been a finalist for the Aurora and the Sunburst. KT also cochairs ephemera, a monthly speculative fiction reading series. When she’s not writing, KT frolics through Toronto, enjoying choral music and craft beer. Find her on Twitter @ktbryski.

■ I suspect that in years to come, saying, “I wrote this story in 2020” will solicit an understanding nod. It was an exceptionally difficult year for most people: global pandemic, long-overdue societal reckoning, trauma, and heartbreak.

For me, there was a lot of anger. As usual, I wrestled it fairly philosophically—​and partly through the lens of my own Anglicanism. “What does it mean, to forgive? What if the other party doesn’t feel remorse? Wait, isn’t the point of grace that it’s undeserved? Well, maybe for God, but I’m only human . . .”

And so it went. Eventually, I thought, “This is interesting. I’ve never had rage as my baseline emotion.” But almost immediately, I realized that wasn’t true. The last time I’d been so consistently angry, I was in elementary school, getting bullied. (Ironically, I was bullied for liking girls and writing stories. I must admit to a certain amount of satisfaction in growing up to become a queer fantasy author.)

So I took that context, those feelings, and I gave them to Emmy. Maybe I was feeding a tiger of my own. Or maybe I was working through the notion—​as Emmy does—​that anger isn’t inherently bad, a thing to be fought and exorcised. Harnessed correctly, anger is rocket fuel.

Born and raised in New York City, Yohanca Delgadois a writer of Cuban and Dominican descent. She is a graduate of American University’s MFA program, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and the Voices of Our Nations workshops. Her fiction appears in Nightmare, One Story, A Public Space, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2021–2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

■ “The Rat” was written at the 2019 Clarion Workshop, where the good-but-intense creative pressure helped me bring some seemingly disparate elements together in a single story. I sold Cutco knives for a summer in high school and was atrocious at it, but it was fun to draw on that experience for this story, and to write a character that reminded me so much of myself. As I revised, I found my way to the central question of this story: What if you could bear to look at the full depth of your own grief—​and recognize it for what it is, a record of all you have loved and survived in your life?

“Our Language” is tremendously important to me because it allowed me to directly explore my own Dominican lineage. It also taught me a lot about the importance of trust and patience in writing. I let myself write through the wilds of this tale, determined to let it be as strange as it wanted to be, but also knowing, deep down, that I needed the story to resolve in a way that resonated emotionally for me. I didn’t know how to balance those two impulses, and so I didn’t. Instead, I trusted the story and returned to it, over and over, for three years, until my subconscious told me where to go.

Gene Doucette(genedoucette.me) is a novelist, with over twenty science fiction and fantasy titles to his name, including The Spaceship Next Door, The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, and the Tandemstar books. His latest novel is The Apocalypse Seven. This story is his first attempt at short-form science fiction. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

■ The title came first.

I was brainstorming possible alternative titles for The Apocalypse Seven because at the time—​a year after I’d written it—​I’d become bored with the working title. (This happens a lot.) I pitched Schrödinger’s Catastrophe to my editor, only half-seriously, as I thought it was both too clever/obscure and too whimsical. Said editor, who did not share my exhaustion with The Apocalypse Seven as a title, suggested that while Schrödinger’s Catastrophe was indeed not a good fit for my apocalypse story, it would make for an excellent short story title.

So I wrote a story to go with the title.

I could say that “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe” came to me quickly and I wrote it all at once in about ten days, but while this is true, it’s also incomplete. The more complete version is that a lot of it had taken up permanent residence in my head long before I started writing; I’d explored quantum theory as a story premise before in a stage play I wrote in the early nineties, called Deus ex Quanta. (It was a locked-room mystery with two detectives attempting to solve the murder of a professor who was simultaneously alive.) “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe,” while featuring a very different plot, goes down the same path, but with the added advantage that I don’t have to think about how one might stage it before a live audience.