The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 by Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams, eds.: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Mariner 978-0063315785, $18.99, 384pp, tp) October 2024.
There are a lot of different ways of assembling an anthology, but none seem quite so programmatic as John Joseph Adams’s The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, now in its tenth year. Adams describes his methodology with admirable clarity: As series editor, he compiles a list of 80 stories – half fantasy and half SF – -then strips all identifiers from the list (author’s name, publication venue) and sends it to the year’s guest editor, in this case Hugh Howey, who in turn selects 20 stories (again half and half) to make up the contents of the final volume. It’s not clear who sequences the stories, but it seems as though the plan is simply to alternate SF and fantasy. Of course, that fence between genres can sometimes get a bit tattered. One of the best stories in this year’s volume, P.A .Cornell’s haunting timeslip romance “Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont”, falls clearly in the tradition of Jack Finney, Richard Matheson, and Robert Nathan in describing a Manhattan apartment building in which the rooms are occupied by people from different eras, but presumably a passing reference to a “time vortex” qualifies it as SF, along with a rather contorted set of time travel rules that – as with all timeslip tales – exist mostly to make the plot work. Another story, A.R. Capetta’s “Resurrection Highway”, is a brisk postapocalyptic road-trip tale involving zombie cars, mages, and “automancers,” but is set in a future U.S devastated by climate change. This one is fantasy, but that setting borrows a lot from SF.
Debating genre boundaries, of course, is something best left to endless con panels and wonky academics, and the only real question is whether Adams’s process results in a bunch of good, readable stories. It does. As Adams points out, several of the stories have already appeared on awards ballots, and in fact three of the best are up for World Fantasy Awards (which will be announced before you read this) – the Cornell story, Amar El-Mohtar’s evocative folk-fantasy “John Hollowback and the Witch”, and P. Djèlí Clark’s alt-Victorian tall tale “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub”, which playfully manages to combine bits of cryptozoology, a version of Captain Nemo, and a city-stomping sort of steampunk-era kaiju. Speaking of genre districts, horror seems to show up more than usual among the fantasy selections, although it’s impossible to tell whether this reflects Howey’s predilections, Adams’s, or the original sources (which included anthologies such as Jordan Peele and Adams’s Out There Screaming and Jonathan Strahan’s The Book of Witches). One of the two Rebecca Roanhorse selections, “Eye & Tooth”, features sibling monster-hunters who are themselves monsters, while the Capetta story has those zombie cars, Grady Hendrix’s “Ankle Snatcher” is literally a monster-under-the-bed story (though with a surprising denouement), Sam J. Miller’s rather witty “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdulak” imports a vampire-like figure from Slavic folklore into a characteristically insightful family drama, and Sloan Leong’s “The Blade and the Bloodwright” blends elements of Hawaiian legend with a rather disturbing tale of body horror.
Not surprisingly, some of the strongest SF stories come from familiar masters of the form. James S.A. Corey’s “How it Unfolds” combines a very human-scale tale of marital problems with an ambitious (if pretty unconvincing) program of seeding exoplanets with almost infinite variations of human colonizers, all reconstituted from their human originals using something call “slow light.” Both Ann Leckie’s “The Long Game” and Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Falling Bodies” (of her two stories here, the one I enjoyed more ) explore in different ways what it means to be colonized, the Leckie from the point of view of a small alien hoping to befriend the human colonizers, the Roanhorse featuring the cultural alienation of a human adoptee of alien overlords. One of the most strikingly original selections, Christopher Rowe’s “The Four Last Things”, with its “muleships” and references to the “lords of the afternoon,” reflects his recent fascination with Cordwainer Smith, but also evokes a bit of Lem’s Solaris in its depiction of a planet whose oceans may be a form of communication.
A bit more familiar are the gigantic corporate killer-robots of V.M. Ayala’s “Emotional Resonance”, but Ayala manages to shift the tale into an insightful exploration of gender identity (the robots were once human minds), and like Isabel J. Kim’s “Zeta-Epsilon” it also explores the paradoxes of human-machine interfaces – except Kim focuses more on the limited lifespans of humans compared to the machines with which they are paired. Robots also figure prominently in Andrew Sean Greer’s “Calypso’s Guest”, a rather ingenious SF restaging of the Calypso episode from The Odyssey. Interestingly, and perhaps refreshingly, traditional SFnal dystopias are in short supply, though the grim world outside the walls of the high-tech redoubt of Thomas Ha’s “Window Boy” seems pretty harrowing. I have no clear idea whether stories like these accurately reflect the preoccupations and favorite themes of SFF writers in 2023, or how much might reflect the particular sensibilities of Howey or Adams, but at the very least they serve as intriguing snapshots from a moving train.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.
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