Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

I also apparently had a powerful need to write something a little absurd. That kind of opportunity doesn’t come along very often.

Meg Elisonis a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her book series the Road to Nowhere won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. She was an Otherwise Award Honoree in 2018. In 2020, she published her first short story collection, called Big Girl, containing the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novelette “The Pill.” Elison’s first young adult novel, Find Layla, was published in 2020. Meg has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. Learn more at megelison.com and @megelison.

■ “The Pill” is a science fiction story that people tell me all the time is not really fiction. It is written from a fat life, about a fat life in a world that would rather we were almost anything than fat. I was inspired to write it by the death of a close friend’s mother from complications arising from weight-loss surgery, and by the things people say at a fat person’s funeral. I was affirmed in my convictions when the UK government started taking fat children away from their parents as a form of punishment. I wrote it in a white-hot rage after a doctor told me to lose weight to solve an eye infection. It is not really fiction.

Kate Elliotthas been publishing for over thirty years with a particular focus in immersive world building and centering women in epic stories of adventure and transformative cultural change. Her most recent novel is Unconquerable Sun, gender-spun Alexander the Great in space. She is best known for her Crown of Stars epic fantasy series, the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alt-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs Cold Magic, and YA fantasy Court of Fives. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards. Her novel Black Wolves won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy 2015. She lives in Hawaii.

■ When Jonathan Strahan invited me to write a story for The Book of Dragons, I knew instantly I wanted to tackle the theme of sacrificial women. I’ve always felt there was something obsessively misogynistic about tales of nubile virgins being sent to appease devouring beasts. Furthermore, in a harsh land ruled by a patriarchal order, it seemed to me that women who could potentially give birth to sons would be deemed too valuable to throw away. Not yet, anyway. Any woman growing older in the USA is all too aware of how often mainstream US culture vanishes older women, how they are seen to “lose value” once they are no longer young, fresh, and fertile. Too many of science fiction and fantasy’s modern narratives still elide and erase the presence of these women. So why mightn’t a society send worn-out elder women to be sacrificed to the fearsome dragons, who, being beasts, wouldn’t realize they were being gifted something the human society found worthless?

Yet having realized that was the story I wanted to tell, I couldn’t figure out how to tell it. I set it aside and tried three unrelated ideas, all of which felt flat. Then one day I wrote a paragraph in which an old woman woke to discover her husband had died in his sleep beside her. With each step she took, she would move farther away from the life she’d been told she had to live and the person she’d long ago accepted she had to be. The story became an unfolding scroll into a hidden wilderness that she and I traveled together to find out what the dragons really are.

A. T. Greenblattis a Nebula Award–winning author and mechanical engineer. Her short stories and novelettes have appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Asimov’s, and other venues. Her work has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the WSFA Small Press Award. She currently lives in Philadelphia,

■ This story began as many of my stories do: with an image and an emotion. This time, the image was of a cyclist and a plucky robot going on a journey together, and it felt lighthearted and fun. It made me smile.

But I began writing the first draft of “One Time, a Reluctant Traveler” in the early days of the pandemic lockdown and suddenly, writing something cheerful felt like a farce as the infection rates began to climb, followed closely by the death toll. Everywhere there was a heavy feeling of depression and constant fear. Everyone I talked to felt trapped and powerless. The feeling spanned across my dissimilar social groups and across generations. So I used those emotions to take this image of a story and grow it into something very different than what I first envisioned. Instead of something lighthearted, this became a story about breaking out of a cycle and persevering in a place where there wasn’t much hope. Looking back on it, “One Time, a Reluctant Traveler” was a story I needed to tell myself in that moment.

One day, I’ll write that plucky robot story instead.

Daryl Gregory’s recent books include the Appalachian horror novel Revelator and the novella The Album of Dr. Moreau , both out in 2021 . His novel Spoonbenders was a Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award finalist. The novella We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy and the Shirley Jackson Awards. SF novel Afterparty was an NPR and Kirkus best book of the year, as well as a finalist for the Campbell and Lambda Literary Awards. His other novels are the Crawford Award–winning Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet, Harrison Squared, and Raising Stony Mayhall. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories, a Publishers Weekly best book of the year. When there’s not a pandemic on, he frequently teaches writing seminars and is a regular instructor at the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop. This is Daryl’s second appearance in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, following the Hugo-nominated story “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” in 2019.

■ Legendary editor David Hartwell used to call many of my stories “neuro SF” because they were concerned with the hard (and weird) problems of consciousness: the illusion of free will, the nature of the self, the roots of both sociopathy and religious ecstasy, you name it. The idea for “Brother Rifle” was simmering for years after I read about the biological process of decision-making. It turns out that people whose emotion centers are damaged don’t become brilliant analysts like Spock; in fact, they find it harder to make even simple decisions. Certainty is an emotion, the signal from our subconscious that an answer has been reached, and that we can stop running in circles now. With the right tech, that signal can be blocked, diverted, or modified.

When Jonathan Strahan told me he was editing a robot anthology called Made to Order, I realized that this was an opportunity to write about a kind of human robot whose decisions are shaped by hardware and software. But aren’t we all human robots? Even without a chip in our heads, other preexisting conditions—​genetics, social institutions, socioeconomic status, the friends and family who surround us, down to the food we ate for lunch and the current chemical states of our neurons—​all conspire to narrow our degrees of freedom. Any final decision—​red pill or blue pill?—​is made inside a black box, beyond our control and outside of conscious awareness. We can only hope that the puppet master living in our brain is a benevolent one.

In other words, my brain decided to write this story, and hopes your brain likes it.