The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018

Starred review from September 24, 2018
An almost unheard-of diversity of tales absolutely sing in this superlative anthology of short speculative stories. Encompassing a wide range of styles and perspectives, the book swings gracefully from thoughtful superhero SF (“Destroy the City with Me Tonight” by Kate Alice Marshall) to nuanced horror based on Congolese mythology (“You will Always Have Family: A Triptych” by Kathleen Kayembe) to musings on the justice and the multiverse (“Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities” by Lettie Prell) without a single sour note. A. Merc Rustad contributes “Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn,” a heartfelt piece about sentient spacecraft and found family, and Caroline M. Yoachim delves further into ideas of family and obligation with the windup characters of “Carnival Nine.” From the Chinese afterlife (“The Last Cheng Beng Gift” by Jaymee Goh) to a future of cyborgs run amok (“The Greatest One-Star Restaurant” by Rachael K. Jones), this anthology delivers. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company.

December 1, 2018
Jemisin, the latest guest editor for this series, has chosen stories with themes similar to the ones that appear in her own short story collection, How Long 'til Black Future Month? (2018).As Jemisin notes in the introduction, primary among those themes is revolution. Most of these authors express that theme as the battle for bodily and spiritual autonomy. Zombie soldiers surrender their bodies and wills during brutal military operations in Peter Watts' "ZeroS." Charlie Jane Anders offers a sadly relevant tale about a brutal conversion "therapy" for transgenders involving the transfer of consciousness to corpses. A. Merc Rustad riffs on Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang with a tale of a cyborg starship resisting the oppressive government that created her. In Caroline M. Yoachim's lovely "Carnival Nine," a society of windup toys tries to make the most of its limited range of motion and lifespan. Kathleen Kayembe is both fascinatingly creepy and heartbreaking in a story of an angry dead twin occupying his brother's corpse. Micah Dean Hicks explores the lonely ever after of the youngest prince in the fairy tale "The Six Swans," who longs for his former existence as a bird. Sometimes the story's theme is intermingled with another favorite Jemisin motif, food, as in a painfully grotesque tale by Rachael K. Jones, in which rebellious cyborgs masquerading as a spacefaring restaurant must cannibalize themselves for entrees. These are stories of accepting one's true self and rejecting what others would make of you. Sometimes one must transform to escape, but the essence remains.The stories in this collection will leave the reader mournful, angry, and inspired.

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