The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019
Ed. by Carmen Maria Machado
With the recent demise of two of the biggest “year’s best SF” anthology series, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, under series editor John Joseph Adams, is going to have to pick up some slack. Putting SF and Fantasy together though can sometimes be an awkward fit.
2019’s editor, Carmen Maria Machado, is dismissive of genre labels, but they do provide some idea of what readers can expect. The first story here, “Pitcher Plant,” sets the table well, with someone invading a haunted house full of booby traps that may be “more sorcery than engineering.” It’s a story set in the weird world of dark fantasy, and it’s typical of a line-up that skews toward horror. There’s also a political edge to much of the selection, though not as pronounced as in last year’s volume. Of course, horror and politics are a big part of what 2019 felt like, in SF, fantasy, and real life.
This is a strange book. Strange primarily in terms of Zamyatin’s style, his deliberately alienating “language of thought” that traps us uncomfortably in the head of the fragmenting and indeed insane mind of D-503 to the point where trying to make any sense out of his impressions becomes futile. A “multicolored noise that stifles the logical process of thought,” we might call it. And no, I’m not even sure what those words might be referring to when read in context.
You may think you’re on familiar CanLit ground with a novel about a family of hardscrabble farmers trying to save their struggling homestead from predatory corporate interests. And, in so far as the basic landscape goes, you’d be right. But the year is 2058 and, climate change having done its work and turned southern Alberta into a dustbowl where a 500 ml bottle of water costs $8.50 and only the rich enjoy the luxury of flush toilets, different forces are now in play.
N. K. Jemisin, author of the award-winning Broken Earth novels, gets another series started in this fantasy tale of a New York City that is coming to life in a strange new way.
At the beginning of the twenty-third century humanity finds itself in the middle of a new Cold War. Only this time the conflict has gone off-planet, pitting Earth against its colony on Mars. Standing somewhere in-between the two great rivals is Luoying, who is returning to Mars after spending five years as part of a mission abroad (that is, on Earth).
There’s a moment in Don DeLillo’s classic black-comedy novel White Noise when the main character hears one of his children reciting fragments of commercial advertising in their sleep. We realize from this that things have gotten really bad.
The hacker first became a staple of science fiction with the advent of cyberpunk and William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. Since then he’s gone on to become a figure as familiar to the genre as spaceship captains and mad scientists, and in recent years has been enjoying a resurgent popularity.
With a title like How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? you may be expecting a collection of stories with a political bent, and if so N. K. Jemisin does not disappoint. In her introduction Jemisin, whose byline will likely always be headed by the fact that she won the Hugo Award for best novel three years in a row for the three parts of her Broken Earth series, talks about how much of an outsider she felt as a black woman author entering the field of SF and Fantasy in the early 2000s.
Planet 11-H37 isn’t a hospitable place at the best of times. Because of its peculiar orbit it is pretty neatly split between a hemisphere that is always burning hot and another side that is frozen solid. In between the two is a narrow green belt called the Razor.