Year’s Best SF 15 Read online

  Year’s Best SF 15

  Edited by

  David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

  To Canadian Fandom, especially to those we know and those we do not, who made our time in Montreal at the World SF convention a special treat. Thanks Eugene, thanks Rene, thanks Elisabeth, and special thanks to the people who created the necktie exhibit. And to the city of Montreal, for being itself.

  And to Charles N. Brown, a Giant of SF, who would have enjoyed this dedication, and who had to miss Montreal. Death will do that to you.

  And to Tor.com, for making our year harder, but better.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Vandana Singh

  Infinities

  Robert Charles Wilson

  This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Yoon Ha Lee

  The Unstrung Zither

  Bruce Sterling

  Black Swan

  Nancy Kress

  Exegesis

  Ian Creasey

  Erosion

  Gwyneth Jones

  Collision

  Gene Wolfe

  Donovan Sent Us

  Marissa K. Lingen

  The Calculus Plague

  Peter Watts

  The Island

  Paul Cornell

  One of Our Bastards Is Missing

  Sarah L. Edwards

  Lady of the White-Spired City

  Brian Stableford

  The Highway Code

  Peter M. Ball

  On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk

  Alastair Reynolds

  The Fixation

  Brenda Cooper

  In Their Garden

  Geoff Ryman

  Blocked

  Michael Cassutt

  The Last Apostle

  Charles Oberndorf

  Another Life

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  The Consciousness Problem

  Stephen Baxter

  Tempest 43

  Genevieve Valentine

  Bespoke

  Eric James Stone

  Attitude Adjustment

  Chris Roberson

  Edison’s Frankenstein

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editors

  Praise

  Other Books by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  The year 2009 began with some layoffs and firings in publishing, but not many affecting SF. Still, some SF people lost their jobs. The really good news is that SF and fantasy sales held up throughout the year for most publishing lines in spite of comparative disasters in other areas of publishing. But it was for the most part not a year of expansion and commercial ambition.

  The year 2010 is announced as one of economic recovery, and we certainly hope that is the case. In publishing, that means mostly holding the line, not growth. Several online venues for fantasy and SF, including the ambitious Baen’s Universe, have announced closings in early 2010. At least one of them, Internet Review of SF, has said they can no longer afford to lose money and that they see no way to break even, never mind profit.

  Marketing genres associated with fantasy, paranormal romance, vampire and zombie books for teenagers, and “urban fantasy” were notably successful in 2009. One might even claim that F&SF expanded in 2009, but that would require ignoring that fact that the associated genres are not notable for much variation from the commercial formulas of the horror or romance genres; they are about feelings more than thought or knowledge.

  The general quality of SF short fiction was no less in 2009, but from our vantage point there was a lot of SF with thinly-painted settings as backdrops for their characters, and in which not much happened. Sometimes, at least, this was done with style and sophistication, but not actually often enough for us to praise this trend.

  The electronic book was hysterically discussed and promoted all year, but the sales of electronic text did not increase to as high as 4 percent of any major publisher’s income. Ian Randal Strock of SF Scope reported double-digit sales on his electronic “bestseller.” So print is still the principal venue for SF and fantasy in terms of economics for writers and for publishers. Bless my soul, someone even mentioned publically that Amazon.com might be inflating its sales claims for electronic books or Kindle readers. Its figures are of course secret.

  And there was a scandal when it was discovered that one could lose an electronic book that one had bought if the seller decided it must take it back—and how easily it could be done with, in this case, a book by George Orwell. Welcome to the cloud where you don’t actually own, but just lease or license.

  We are reminded of the feudal system, where we serfs don’t actually own the property. The lords own it. It is the stuff of paranoid SF novels. They can come into your computer or reader or phone and delete. That information is no longer, as President Nixon once said of his previous statement of fact, operative. 1984, anyone?

  The magazines and original anthologies published a lot of good fiction but appeared to be commercially hard-pressed (with the occasional anthologies of vampire, zombie, and fantasy romance fiction the exception). Delivery and distribution bankruptcies hurt magazines and mass market books most of all. Trade paperbacks have been forced into prominence but costs, and therefore prices, are rising. This was also the year of the oversized ten-dollar ($9.99) mass market paperback. And of the highly discounted bestseller—at least four major retailers were selling select bestsellers at less than they paid for them. There was a good analysis of this in The New Yorker, showing who it would hurt (bookstores) and how.

  And perhaps most important, this was the year that Google attempted to establish that it could violate copyright with impunity; 2010 will be the year that that happens, or doesn’t. It is still in court.

  Yet we still offer cautious optimism for the SF field. A lot of what has grown up on the internet in the last decade depends on the free time of employed people, or the free time generated by a person with a job in the household, and maybe even some of the household discretionary spending or borrowing. Some of that free time and money (and optimism) has evaporated, along with trillions of dollars from the national economies of the developed countries. So we look forward to creativity on a shoestring and less sleep.

  There are still three professional magazines that publish SF, and several online venues that pay more than a token for fiction. However, much of the new fiction of high quality is showcased in original anthologies these days, and they are the source for just about half the wordage in this book (nine of the stories). Only mentioning the SF anthologies, among the best are: X6, an Australian small press collection of novellas; Other Earths, edited by Nick Gevers; We Think Therefore We Are, edited by Pete Crowther; When It Changed, edited by Geoff Ryman; and the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction #3, edited by George Mann.

  Our Year’s Best SF is an anthology series about what’s going on now in SF. We try in each volume of this series to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. It is supposed to be fun to read, a special kind of fun you cannot find elsewhere. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2009.

  This book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is fairly clearly that and not something else. It is our opinion that it is a good thing to have genre boundaries. If we didn’t, young writers would probably feel compelled to find something else, perhaps less interesting, to transgress or attack to draw attention
to themselves. We have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and slipstream, and postmodern literature. We (Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s Best Fantasy as well, a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy fiction too. But here, we choose science fiction.

  We make a lot of additional comments about the writers and the stories, and what’s happening in SF, in the individual introductions accompanying the stories in this book. Welcome to the Year’s Best SF in 2009.

  David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

  Pleasantville, NY

  Infinities

  VANDANA SINGH

  Vandana Singh (users.rcn.com/singhvan/) is from India and lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, where she is an assistant professor of physics. Her stories are collected in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008). Her novella “Distances” was published in 2008 by Aqueduct Press. She has also published two YA novels, Younguncle Comes to Town and Younguncle in the Himalayas. And she is the editor of To Each Her Own: Anthology of Contemporary Hindi Stories. In an interview she says, “The city of Delhi is thousands of years old and I grew up surrounded by history, almost literally in the shadows of crumbling fort walls and nameless medieval monuments (among the modern high-rises). The very air was—and still is—thick with stories. But I had to go away, to take the view from a far shore, to see all this.”

  “Infinities” was published in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, which came out at the end of 2008 in India. She says, “Physics is a way of viewing the world, and it is one of my most important lenses. One of the most exciting things about science is that it reveals the sub-text of the physical world. In other words, surface reality isn’t all there is, the world is full of hidden stories, connections, patterns, and the scientific as well as the literary and psychological aspects of this multi-textured reality are, to me, fascinating.” This is a story about a man in India who loves mathematics.

  An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.

  —Srinivasa Ramanujan,

  Indian mathematician (1887–1920)

  Abdul Karim is his name. He is a small, thin man, precise to the point of affectation in his appearance and manner. He walks very straight; there is gray in his hair and in his short, pointed beard. When he goes out of the house to buy vegetables, people on the street greet him respectfully. “Salaam, Master sahib,” they say, or “Namaste, Master Sahib,” according to the religion of the speaker. They know him as the mathematics master at the municipal school. He has been there so long that he sees the faces of his former students everywhere: the autorickshaw driver Ramdas who refuses to charge him, the man who sells paan from a shack at the street corner, with whom he has an account, who never reminds him when his payment is late—his name is Imran and he goes to the mosque far more regularly than Abdul Karim.

  They all know him, the kindly mathematics master, but he has his secrets. They know he lives in the old yellow house, where the plaster is flaking off in chunks to reveal the underlying brick. The windows of the house are hung with faded curtains that flutter tremulously in the breeze, giving passersby an occasional glimpse of his genteel poverty—the threadbare covers on the sofa, the wooden furniture as gaunt and lean and resigned as the rest of the house, waiting to fall into dust. The house is built in the old-fashioned way about a courtyard, which is paved with brick except for a circular omission where a great litchi tree grows. There is a high wall around the courtyard, and one door in it that leads to the patch of wilderness that was once a vegetable garden. But the hands that tended it—his mother’s hands—are no longer able to do more than hold a mouthful of rice between the tips of the fingers, tremblingly conveyed to the mouth. The mother sits nodding in the sun in the courtyard while the son goes about the house, dusting and cleaning as fastidiously as a woman. The master has two sons—one is in distant America, married to a gori bibi, a white woman—how unimaginable! He never comes home and writes only a few times a year. The wife writes cheery letters in English that the master reads carefully with finger under each word. She talks about his grandsons, about baseball (a form of cricket, apparently), about their plans to visit, which never materialize. Her letters are as incomprehensible to him as the thought that there might be aliens on Mars, but he senses a kindness, a reaching out, among the foreign words. His mother has refused to have anything to do with that woman.

  The other son has gone into business in Mumbai. He comes home rarely, but when he does he brings with him expensive things—a television set, an air-conditioner. The TV is draped reverently with an embroidered white cloth and dusted every day but the master can’t bring himself to turn it on. There is too much trouble in the world. The air-conditioner gives him asthma so he never turns it on, even in the searing heat of summer. His son is a mystery to him—his mother dotes on the boy but the master can’t help fearing that this young man has become a stranger, that he is involved in some shady business. The son always has a cell phone with him and is always calling nameless friends in Mumbai, bursting into cheery laughter, dropping his voice to a whisper, walking up and down the pathetically clean drawing-room as he speaks. Although he would never admit it to anybody other than Allah, Abdul Karim has the distinct impression that his son is waiting for him to die. He is always relieved when his son leaves.

  Still, these are domestic worries. What father does not worry about his children? Nobody would be particularly surprised to know that the quiet, kindly master of mathematics shares them also. What they don’t know is that he has a secret, an obsession, a passion that makes him different from them all. It is because of this, perhaps, that he seems always to be looking at something just beyond their field of vision, that he seems a little lost in the cruel, mundane world in which they live.

  He wants to see infinity.

  It is not strange for a mathematics master to be obsessed with numbers. But for Abdul Karim, numbers are the stepping stones, rungs in the ladder that will take him (Inshallah!) from the prosaic ugliness of the world to infinity.

  When he was a child he used to see things from the corners of his eyes. Shapes moving at the very edge of his field of vision. Haven’t we all felt that there was someone to our left or right, darting away when we turned our heads? In his childhood he had thought they were farishte, angelic beings keeping a watch over him. And he had felt secure, loved, nurtured by a great, benign, invisible presence.

  One day he asked his mother:

  “Why don’t the farishte stay and talk to me? Why do they run away when I turn my head?”

  Inexplicably to the child he had been, this innocent question led to visits to the Hakim. Abdul Karim had always been frightened of the Hakim’s shop, the walls of which were lined from top to bottom with old clocks. The clocks ticked and hummed and whirred while tea came in chipped glasses and there were questions about spirits and possessions, and bitter herbs were dispensed in antique bottles that looked as though they contained djinns. An amulet was given to the boy to wear around his neck; there were verses from the Qur’an he was to recite every day. The boy he had been sat at the edge of the worn velvet seat and trembled; after two weeks of treatment, when his mother asked him about the farishte, he had said:

  “They’re gone.”

  That was a lie.

  My theory stands as firm as a rock; every arrow directed against it will quickly return to the archer. How do I know this? Because I have studied it from all sides for many years; because I have examined all objections which have ever been made against the infinite numbers; and above all because I have followed its roots, so to speak, to the first infallible cause of all created things.

  —Georg Cantor, German mathematician (1845–1918)

  In a finite world, Abdul Karim ponders infinity. He has met infinities of various kinds in mathematics. If mathematics is the language of Nature, then it follows that there are infinities in the physical world around us as well. They confound us because we are such limite
d things. Our lives, our science, our religions are all smaller than the cosmos. Is the cosmos infinite? Perhaps. As far as we are concerned, it might as well be.