Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

■ I’m tempted to think that “The Plague Doctors” has had greater impact precisely because less than six months after I handed in the final draft, the world saw the beginnings of COVID-19. But this story is more than accidental zeitgeist. It’s the end product of an idea I laid out to my medical adviser for the story, Dr. Adrian Charles: “This is our chance to depict a version of the revolutionary, decentralized approach to health care that we’ve been discussing for ages.”

Dr. Charles knows his sci-fi and did not flinch when I asked him to design a disease that would undermine the global health system by revealing the hubris of the so-called developed world—​a disease that looked easy to control until it suddenly (and horribly) was not. The invented pathogen was deadlier and more contagious than the coronavirus, but the resulting massive systemic disruptions were similar. I believe the solutions are also similar: a greater focus on the baseline health of vulnerable communities; decentralized, community-based delivery of free health and well-being services (e.g., clinics and home care) operating in parallel with centralized, specialized medical services (hospitals and specialist centers); and more global interconnectedness, openness, and cooperation, especially among nonstate actors.

These are the survival strategies of small islands, mountain villages, and remote settlements. When you have to plan for disaster or disruption with scarce resources, you learn that system redundancy and access to information are essential, and basic self-sufficiency is fundamental. These lessons are useful for everyone, everywhere, especially those who think they’re invincible. Beyond this present pandemic, I hope “The Plague Doctors” will serve as a perennial reminder that whatever the sum of our parts, as a community or a nation, nothing is too big to fail.

Karin Lowacheewas born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her novels have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have been published in numerous award-winning anthologies and magazines. Many of these stories can be found in her collection Love & Other Acts of War.

■ This is the second story for my contribution to the anthology series the Dystopia Triptych. The premise was to write three connected stories across the anthologies that covered Before, During, and After (or approaching an After) a dystopian society. I chose to tell my stories through the lens of grief and mourning, to capture universal emotions (frustration, anger, depression) through the personal. The first story was from the mother’s point of view after the death of a child, the last from the father’s. This second story was from the point of view of the best friend of the child. Having worked in the education field in one way or another through the years, I also wanted to tackle the crisis of education and examine some of the issues and mindsets that have failed so many of the world’s children and youth. Many factors play into the education crisis, including economic and social, and my reading about the education industrial complex, especially around standardized testing, fed the genesis of this story.

Tochi Onyebuchiis the author of Riot Baby, which won the New England Book Award for fiction, an Alex Award, and was a finalist for the Nommo, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards. His young adult novels include the Beasts Made of Night series and the War Girls series. He holds degrees from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and Sciences Po. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Omenana, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Tor.com and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. His most recent book is the nonfiction (S)kinfolk.

■ Readers of “How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary” may recognize the story structure from Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” which itself, arguably, can trace its architectural genealogy to Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” My original mandate for “Reparations” was large enough that the only way I could pinpoint a story was to write into one of the most challenging and politically/socially taboo subjects I could think of, which is how I alighted on the subject of reparations for African Americans.

I’d tried a few different points of entry, but none of them could capture the totality of what I wanted to cover. Indeed, I might have wound up with an entire novel, but when I thought of those stories that managed the type of panorama I sought, Ken Liu’s story stood out to me. (It was also fresh in my mind as I’d taught it in a graduate seminar a few months prior.) I wanted to tell not only the inside story of this effort to accomplish the politically impossible but also its effects on its intended beneficiaries. This format allowed me to do that and then some.

Some readers may find it debatable that this story, set a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from our pandemic present, is science fictional at all, but I think that fantastika shouldn’t restrict itself to imaginative expansions of our material reality, but our moral one as well.

Sarah Pinskeris the author of Nebula Award­–winning novel A Song for a New Day and Philip K. Dick Award–winning collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea. Her new novel, We Are Satellites, came out in 2021. She has over fifty short stories published in magazines, anthologies, and year’s bests, translated into almost a dozen languages. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her wife and terrier.

■ This story had the longest gestation of anything I’ve ever worked on. My senior year of college, in my fiction independent study, I started a story about Uncle Bob and his weird public access television show. I had trouble finishing stories back then, and this really wasn’t anything close to a story; it was at best a character study. I forgot about it for years, until for some reason an old console television in a garage jogged it back to mind. That was when I realized that the story might not be just in the character, but in the act of rediscovering him. I didn’t bother looking for the fragment, since Uncle Bob sprung back into my head fully realized.

I needed something to bring to the Sycamore Hill workshop for 2019, so I started fresh with my twenty-years-lost television host and a new character, a woman who didn’t remember him until she did. I got to layer in stuff that I wouldn’t have been able to write back then either, about memory and possessions and the stories we tell. I’m grateful to everyone at the workshop for their critique, and for helping me mark one of my writer-bingo squares: this is my first story edited by Ellen Datlow. I don’t normally write stuff this dark, so I’m strangely proud of having written something that Ellen, the queen of short horror, called creepy.

Amman Sabetis a writer and designer living and working in Los Angeles, California. His stories have appeared in The New Voices of Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, F(r)iction, Metaphorosis, and other such publications. Amman is a Clarion alumnus and an SFWA member. Between work and writing, he is learning a lot by building an off-grid cabin, deep into COVID year two. Add him on Twitter @AmmanSabet.

■ Submarine mutinies and Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development are inspirations for “Skipping Stones in the Dark.” But this story’s mood also comes from working as a designer and witnessing how mistakes get built into products without a mature vision of the future.