The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition Read online

  THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION

  AND FANTASY, 2011 EDITION

  Edited by

  RICH HORTON

  For two editors who got me started on the route

  to putting together these books: Dave Truesdale and John O’Neill.

  Copyright © 2011 by Rich Horton

  Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-308-2 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-256-6 (trade paperback)

  Prime Books

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by Rich Horton

  FLOWER, MERCY, NEEDLE, CHAIN by Yoon Ha Lee

  AMOR VINCIT OMNIA by K. J. Parker

  THE GREEN BOOK by Amal El-Mohtar

  THE OTHER GRACES by Alice Sola Kim

  THE SULTAN OF THE CLOUDS by Geoffrey A. Landis

  THE MAGICIAN AND THE MAID AND OTHER STORIES by Christie Yant

  A LETTER FROM THE EMPEROR by Steve Rasnic Tem

  HOLDFAST by Matthew Johnson

  STANDARD LONELINESS PACKAGE by Charles Yu

  THE LADY WHO PLUCKED RED FLOWERS BENEATH THE QUEEN’S WINDOW by Rachel Swirsky

  ARVIES by Adam-Troy Castro

  MERRYTHOUGHTS by Bill Kte’pi

  THE RED BRIDE by Samantha Henderson

  GHOSTS DOING THE ORANGE DANCE by Paul Park

  BLOODSPORT by Gene Wolfe

  NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT by Carol Emshwiller

  BRAIDING THE GHOSTS by C.S.E. Cooney

  THE THING ABOUT CASSANDRA by Neil Gaiman

  THE INTERIOR OF BUMBLETHORN’S COAT by Willow Fagan

  THE THINGS by Peter Watts

  STEREOGRAM OF THE GRAY FORT, IN THE DAYS OF HER GLORY by Paul M. Berger

  AMOR FUGIT by Alexandra Duncan

  DEAD MAN’S RUN by Robert Reed

  THE FERMI PARADOX IS OUR BUSINESS MODEL by Charlie Jane Anders

  THE WORD OF AZRAEL by Matthew David Surridge

  UNDER THE MOONS OF VENUS by Damien Broderick

  ABANDONWARE by An Omowoyela

  THE MAIDEN FLIGHT OF McCAULEY’S BELLEROPHON by Elizabeth Hand

  Biographies

  Recommended Reading

  Publication History

  About the Editor

  THE YEAR IN FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, 2010

  RICH HORTON

  When we published the contents of this anthology, the first thing that attracted notice was the high proportion of stories from online venues. Sixteen of the twenty-eight stories in this book first appeared online. (Though actually one of those, K. J. Parker’s “Amor Vincit Omnia” was published more or less simultaneously in the Australian print ’zine Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.) Other best of the year books also showed higher than previous totals of online stories. Is the web finally taking over?

  Well, the proportion of short sf and fantasy first published online has been increasing steadily over time. So one would expect a concomitant increase in the proportion of online stories in Best of the Year books. In addition, the respectability of online sources has increased. Readers are more likely to expect good fiction there, and writers are happier to send their best stories there. (The pay has also increased, particularly at a site like Subterranean.) Mind you, one of the earliest online sites, Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction, remains probably the best, but for some time it was seen as almost an outlier, buoyed by the presence of a revered editor and by high pay.

  Other sites of a similar vintage battled image problems. One site that’s been around seemingly forever in web years is Strange Horizons. It published some very strong fiction from the beginning, but had early on a reputation as to a great extent a slipstream site, and a site for new writers. This reputation was to a great extent deserved—but so what? Slipstream can be very good, and supporting new writers is a wonderful thing. Strange Horizons has parlayed a certain dogged persistence, and consistent high standards, into ever increasing reputation, so that by now they are as respectable a place to publish new sf and fantasy as anywhere. They are still hospitable to new writers, but some of the writers who were new when the site debuted have become, if not exactly grizzled veterans, at least established pros. So at Strange Horizons now we can expect fiction from a wider variety of contributors, and a vigorous mix of sf and fantasy.

  Some sites built reputations first as print magazines. This is true of both Fantasy Magazine and Subterranean Magazine. Each transitioned online after several print issues. And each stand now among the very best venues of sf and fantasy (mainly fantasy of course at Fantasy Magazine). Another magazine that transitioned from print to online is Apex (formerly Apex Digest). The print magazine had a distinct focus on horror (albeit often sf horror), but the online version, though still prone to publish a fair amount of horror, seems more diverse in focus now. And in 2010 I thought it took a sharp leap upward in quality, partly perhaps due to the work of new editor Catherynne M. Valente (though I don’t want to diminish previous editor (and still publisher) Jason Sizemore’s contributions—the site was already on a definite upward path under his direction).

  But nowadays an online site can build a strong reputation essentially from scratch, and fairly quickly, much like any print magazine. Lightspeed, the sf companion to Fantasy Magazine, began publication in mid-2010, and from the first were publishing outstanding stories. The editor—former F&SF assistant and busy anthologist John Joseph Adams—is a major factor, of course. Similarly, Clarkesworld and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, though they’ve been around longer than Lightspeed, have quickly become destination sites for those who love short sf and f.

  Finally one must mention Tor.com, which, backed by a major publisher, also began with a built-in reputation, and has continued to back that up with strong fiction. Tor.com, like most of these sites, has other features besides the fiction that draw readers. In Tor’s case, my favorite aspect is a vigorous blog with numerous contributors, on a variety of sf-related subjects. Most of the other sites have other interesting features, such as illustrations, interviews, and non-fiction of various kinds. Very notable in particular is the strong book review section at Strange Horizons.

  Other worthwhile sites include Abyss and Apex, Ideomancer, Reflection’s Edge, Chiaroscuro, Flurb, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

  Having sung the praises of online sites, it is incumbent on me to remind everyone that the print magazines, as well as original anthologies, are still an essential source of new stories. This year I felt that the magazines remained in a holding pattern. No major magazines folded or drastically changed format, though Realms of Fantasy, for the second year in a row, did temporarily fold, before being rescued by a new publisher. F&SF and Asimov’s both had very good years as far as fiction quality goes. Analog was not as strong, but it remains unique, its own magazine, with a pretty clear sense of its market, its aims, which alas don’t always square with mine. Realms of Fantasy is another magazine with a clear sense of mission—this is wholly Shawna McCarthy’s domain, in the way that its style and sensibility have remained consistent over the years. In the UK, Interzone is featuring very good stuff, with a distinct personality of its own; one perhaps best summarized as being in alignment with a quasi-movement Int
erzone regular Jason Sanford has dubbed “Sci-Fi Strange.”

  There were quite a few fine original anthologies this year. What was missing were the major unthemed original anthology series we saw over the past few years. The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and Fast Forward have died, and while a fourth number of Eclipse is planned, it won’t appear until 2011.

  Two of the most interesting original anthologies last year were big books that spanned genres, each mixing mainstream stories, and historical fiction, with a fair amount of sf and fantasy. These were Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio; and Warriors, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Martin and Dozois put out another strong book this year, this one more strictly fantastical in nature: Songs of Love and Death. Other top anthologies from 2010 included Swords and Dark Magic, edited by Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan; The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams; and The Beastly Bride, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Strahan had another very strong book, the much delayed Godlike Machines, from the Science Fiction Book Club. The Frederik Pohl tribute anthology Gateways, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, was distinctly uneven but had nice stuff from the likes of Gene Wolfe and Cory Doctorow. And one of the most anticipated books of the year was Jetse de Vries’s collection of “optimistic” sf, Shine, which was also uneven, but with some very good stories.

  That’s just a quick overview—there were probably a dozen more fairly solid anthologies last year, including several from Australia, and an interesting YA book, Zombies vs. Unicorns, edited by Justine Larbalestier and Holly Black.

  As ever, there were a number of impressive novellas published as chapbooks. For a variety of reasons (primarily, length restrictions and contractual obligations), I haven’t reprinted any of them here, but I urge the reader to seek out K. J. Parker’s Blue and Gold, David Moles’s Seven Cities of Gold, Ted Chiang’s The Lifecyle of Software Objects, Elizabeth Bear’s Bone and Jewel Creatures, and Lavie Tidhar’s Cloud Permutations, just to list my five favorites in that format from 2010.

  One odd sidelight to the year is the distribution of lengths of the stories I chose. In a typical year almost half the stories in my book are novelettes. For example, in 2009 I had one novella, thirteen novelettes, and sixteen short stories. But this year this book includes no fewer than five novellas (and I could easily have chose three or four more), and nineteen short stories. But only four novelettes. The novelette length has often been called the natural length for an sf story, and whatever you think of that argument from an artistic point of view; I think it does hold up that in most years there proportionately more outstanding novelettes than other lengths. But for whatever reason—just a statistical oddity, more than likely—that didn’t seem to be the case this year.

  Looked at as a whole, I think this was a fairly standard year for the field. The phrase “holding pattern” that I used for the magazine applies reasonably well to the entire field. I don’t see an overwhelming movement at hand (though Sanford’s “Sci-Fi Strange” idea is interesting), and despite the continuing increase in the influence of online sites and the ongoing stasis (it would appear) of the print magazines, what’s happening to the short fiction market seems more a long term evolution than any sort of revolution. I remain, as every year so far, quite thrilled with the contents of this book—I am confident that it provides a varied and energetic set of exceptional stories, proof that despite the vagaries of the market, the creative powers of the collective sf/f world of writers remain amazing.

  FLOWER, MERCY, NEEDLE, CHAIN

  YOON HA LEE

  The usual fallacy is that, in every universe, many futures splay outward from any given moment. But in some universes, determinism runs backwards: given a universe’s state s at some time t, there are multiple previous states that may have resulted in s. In some universes, all possible pasts funnel toward a single fixed ending, .

  If you are of millenarian bent, you might call Armageddon. If you are of grammatical bent, you might call it punctuation on a cosmological scale.

  If you are a philosopher in such a universe, you might call inevitable.

  The woman has haunted Blackwheel Station for as long as anyone remembers, although she was not born there. She is human, and her straight black hair and brown-black eyes suggest an ancestral inheritance tangled up with tigers and shapeshifting foxes. Her native language is not spoken by anyone here or elsewhere.

  They say her true name means things like gray and ash and grave. You may buy her a drink, bring her candied petals or chaotic metals, but it’s all the same. She won’t speak her name.

  That doesn’t stop people from seeking her out. Today, it’s a man with mirror-colored eyes. He is the first human she has seen in a long time.

  “Arighan’s Flower,” he says.

  It isn’t her name, but she looks up. Arighan’s Flower is the gun she carries. The stranger has taken on a human face to talk to her, and he is almost certainly interested in the gun.

  The gun takes different shapes, but at this end of time, origami multiplicity of form surprises more by its absence than its presence. Sometimes the gun is long and sleek, sometimes heavy and blunt. In all cases, it bears its maker’s mark on the stock: a blossom with three petals falling away and a fourth about to follow. At the blossom’s heart is a character that itself resembles a flower with knotted roots.

  The character’s meaning is the gun’s secret. The woman will not tell it to you, and the gunsmith Arighan is generations gone.

  “Everyone knows what I guard,” the woman says to the mirror-eyed man.

  “I know what it does,” he says. “And I know that you come from people who worship their ancestors.”

  Her hand—on a glass of water two degrees from freezing—stops, slides to her side, where the holster is. “That’s dangerous knowledge,” she says. So he’s figured it out. Her people’s historians called Arighan’s Flower the ancestral gun. They weren’t referring to its age.

  The man smiles politely, and doesn’t take a seat uninvited. Small courtesies matter to him because he is not human. His mind may be housed in a superficial fortress of flesh, but the busy computations that define him are inscribed in a vast otherspace.

  The man says, “I can hardly be the first constructed sentience to come to you.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s not that.” Do computers like him have souls? she wonders. She is certain he does, which is potentially inconvenient. “I’m not for hire.”

  “It’s important,” he says.

  It always is. They want chancellors dead or generals, discarded lovers or rival reincarnates, bodhisattvas or bosses—all the old, tawdry stories. People, in all the broad and narrow senses of the term. The reputation of Arighan’s Flower is quite specific, if mostly wrong.

  “Is it,” she says. Ordinarily she doesn’t talk to her petitioners at all. Ordinarily she ignores them through one glass, two, three, four, like a child learning the hard way that you can’t outcount infinity.

  There was a time when more of them tried to force the gun away from her. The woman was a duelist and a killer before she tangled her life up with the Flower, though, and the Flower comes with its own defenses, including the woman’s inability to die while she wields it. One of the things she likes about Blackwheel is that the administrators promised that they would dispose of any corpses she produced. Blackwheel is notorious for keeping promises.

  The man waits a little longer, then says, “Will you hear me out?”

  “You should be more afraid of me,” she says, “if you really know what you claim to know.”

  By now, the other people in the bar, none of them human, are paying attention: a musician whose instrument is made of fossilized wood and silk strings, a magister with a seawrack mane, engineers with their sketches hanging in the air and a single doodled starship at the boundary. The sole exception is the tattooed traveler dozing in the corner, dreaming of distant moons.

  In no hurry, the woman draws the Flower and points
it at the man. She is aiming it not at his absent heart, but at his left eye. If she pulled the trigger, she would pierce him through the false pupil.

  The musician continues plucking plangent notes from the instrument. The others, seeing the gun, gawk for only a moment before hastening out of the bar. As if that would save them.

  “Yes,” the man says, outwardly unshaken, “you could damage my lineage badly. I could name programmers all the way back to the first people who scratched a tally of birds or rocks.”

  The gun’s muzzle moves precisely, horizontally: now the right eye. The woman says, “You’ve convinced me that you know. You haven’t convinced me not to kill you.” It’s half a bluff: she wouldn’t use the Flower, not for this. But she knows many ways to kill.

  “There’s another one,” he says. “I don’t want to speak of it here, but will you hear me out?”

  She nods once, curtly.

  Covered by her palm, engraved silver-bright in a language nobody else reads or writes, is the word ancestor.

  Once upon a universe, an empress’s favored duelist received a pistol from the empress’s own hand. The pistol had a stock of silver-gilt and niello, an efflorescence of vines framing the maker’s mark. The gun had survived four dynasties, with all their rebellions and coups. It had accompanied the imperial arsenal from homeworld to homeworld.

  Of the ancestral pistol, the empire’s archives said two things: Do not use this weapon, for it is nothing but peril and This weapon does not function.

  In a reasonable universe, both statements would not be true.

  The man follows the woman to her suite, which is on one of Blackwheel’s tidier levels. The sitting room, comfortable but not luxurious by Blackwheeler standards, accommodates a couch sized to human proportions, a metal table shined to blurry reflectivity, a vase in the corner.

  There are also two paintings, on silk rather than some less ancient substrate. One is of a mountain by night, serenely anonymous amid its stylized clouds. The other, in a completely different style, consists of a cavalcade of shadows. Only after several moments’ study do the shadows assemble themselves into a face. Neither painting is signed.