Alexandra Pierce Reviews The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3 edited by Allan Kaster

The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-264-0, $18.99, 309pp, pb) August 2023. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.

The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3 is (ob­viously) the third volume by editor Allan Kaster collecting the year’s top stories about space and time. All the stories were originally published in 2022, in online magazines (Clarkesworld, Tor.com) and paper ones (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact), as well as in the anthol­ogy Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance.

By my reckoning, six of the stories come under the ‘‘tales of space’’ banner. Four of them revolve around humans interacting with alien races, with very different purposes and outcomes: ‘‘Bishop’s Opening’’ by R.S.A. Garcia; ‘‘Boy in the Key of Forsaken’’ by Eric Del Carlo; ‘‘The Sufficient Loss Protocol’’ by Kemi Ashing-Giwa; and ‘‘An Expres­sion of Silence’’ by Beth Goder. ‘‘Proof of Concept’’ by Auston Habershaw, on the other hand, is from an alien’s point of view, as it learns who and what it is. My two favorites here were T.L. Huchu’s ‘‘The Mercy of the Sandsea’’ and Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s ‘‘The Sufficient Loss Protocol’’. Huchu’s story – en­tirely about humans, in a future of planetary colo­nization – is a sobering and timely story about the consequences for individual soldiers who followed orders and thought they were doing the right thing, only to have society and their own hierarchy flip the script. Ashing-Giwa’s story is a deeply chilling examination of corporate exploitation of planetary resources, and of following procedures to their logical conclusion – with dreadful consequences.

Another five stories deal with the question of time. Michael Swanwick’s ‘‘The Beast of Tara’’ deals directly with the consequences of investigating time; Michael Cassutt’s novella ‘‘Kingsbury 1944’’ only loosely, and only possibly, connects with the concept of time travel, at its conclusion. Three of the time stories are my favorites from the anthol­ogy. In ‘‘The Lonely Time Traveler of Kentish Town’’, Nadia Afifi considers the idea of time-travel tourism. Time travelers are a rare commodity, but because they are able to take other people with them when they go back in time, the British gov­ernment has set up the Historical Tourism Board. Sasha is one such time traveler, who decides to make money on the side by illegally taking some­one back to a particular moment in their family’s history. Through both the time-traveling and the incidental worldbuilding, Afifi presents a compel­ling and troubling vision of social ills, especially entrenched racism. Theodora Goss’s ‘‘A Letter to Merlin’’, written in epistolary style, presents time travel in a completely different way from Afifi and yet feels similar in the way they both consider issues of interacting with history. Here, Janelle doesn’t personally travel back in time, but instead inhabits the body of someone from the past; in this instance, Guinevere, of the King Arthur stories. Last, and completely differently, Ian R. MacLeod’s ‘‘The Chronologist’’ presents a town where the pro­gression of time has no external referent; instead, it’s dependent on their town clock, which needs to be tended by the Chronologist – a man who comes to town ‘‘according to the workings of a calendar… entirely his own.’’ A marvellously rendered story of small-town issues exacerbated by chronological isolation, MacLeod’s characters and storytelling make this a stand-out.

Indrapramit Das’s story ‘‘Of all the New Yorks in All the World’’ arguably fits into both the space and time categories, but also neither, dealing as it does with a multiverse. It’s a gentle story and is another favorite from the anthology. A few people are allowed to travel between worlds, and they are allowed to courier letters from a person in one universe to their counterparts in others – always going backwards in time, rather than to the same moment. The narrator is one such courier, who then fell in love with someone in another universe; the story revolves around dealing with his break-up and meeting his own world’s version of his girlfriend. It’s beautiful, and thoughtful.

All these stories clearly fit under the ‘‘tales of space and time’’ umbrella, while also having very little in common with one another. They explore different concerns, and come at the concepts of space travel or the issues of dealing with time in radically different ways. Questions of space and time are time-hallowed aspects of science fiction. Kaster’s collation of these stories in one volume demonstrates that – well more than a century after H.G. Wells, for example, wrote about space and time in The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine – authors are still finding new, exciting, and important ways to use space and time to ex­plore contemporary ideas and, just as importantly, to tell rollicking good stories.

This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.

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