The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8

The eighth volume of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year was released in 2024, collecting the best short fiction of 2022. (The series fell behind a year thanks to COVID and has unfortunately not managed to catch up yet.) As I usually do, I dipped in and out of it, reading a story every now and again between other books, stretching my reading across about five months.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8
edited by Neil Clarke

Collection published: 2024
Contents published: 2022
Acquired: September 2024
Read: October 2024–March 2025

As always I enjoyed the experience of catching up on the year's best short fiction, much of which I had not read. (I think there were just two Hugo finalists in here, even though, as always, much of what's here would have been quite competitive on a Hugo ballot in my opinion.) My very favorite story in the book I've already written up here: "If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt. This tells the story of three women making a transcontinental road race in a postapocalyptic United States. Strong worldbuilding, great characterization. Other highlights included: (I will link to the story in question if it has a free and legal online version somewhere)

• "The Dragon Project" by Naomi Kritzer. About genetically engineering custom animals, this story is—like a lot of Kritzer's work—cute and light but effectively done.
• "Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist" by Isabel J. Kim. Neat metafictional piece about being the girlfriend of the main character in a cyberpunk dystopia, and the way she uses tropes to extend her own life. Stylishly told, cleverly written. My second encounter with Kim but hopefully not my last.
• "The Historiography of Loss" by Julianna Baggott. Sharp and creepy story about a technology where people can simulate deceased loved ones. Similar premise to "Proof by Induction," I guess, but goes in a very different but just as effective direction.
• "The Plastic People" by Tobias S. Buckell. I feel like I am always enjoying random stories by Buckell that I happen across; I probably should read a collection of them someday. Horrifying but great story about rich kids who adopt a climate refugee from the Earth's surface and are incapable of treating it like a human being.
• "Mender of Sparrows" by Ray Nayler. Hard to discuss this one without giving a lot away, but I thought it was beautifully told and went in some unexpected directions. Like Buckell, Nayler seems like someone I should seek out more. 
• "The Past Life Reconstruction Service" by Zen Cho. I always really enjoy Cho's short fiction, and this was no exception; a rich guy keeps exploring past lives to try to get over an ex-lover. Acutely observed characterization.
• "Solidity" by Greg Egan. Over on r/printSF, Egan is praised for the rigor of his hard sf, but this is one of those stories by him that demonstrates he has a more dynamic range than even his devotees often grant him. People start slipping between realities, but in subtle, uneasy ways; you can be replaced, but only by someone who could plausibly be in the same situation. So how do people hang on to reality, and to each other, in such a trying circumstance? What would you do if you could never find your loved one again?
• "Two Spacesuits" by Leonard Richardson. Many years ago, I read and very much enjoyed Richardson's novel Constellation Games, but have never read anything else by him. This was fun but weird. A guy's parents start doing weird stuff because of... alien YouTube videos?

Most years there's at least one story whose inclusion I find inexplicable, but I didn't experience that this time around; indeed, I was skeptical of "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi going in, having read it before, but ended up enjoying it more this time around. Looking over the 2023 Hugo finalists again, I do think there are two notable omissions here (S. L. Huang's "Murder by Pixel" and Samantha Mills's "Rabbit Test") but both are in Clarke's 2021 recommended reading list at the back.

As always, if you like short sf, this is an indispensable read... at this point, it's the only sf best-of still going!

Review: Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 2011-20
Acquired: May 2021
Read: July 2021

Spirits Abroad: Stories by Zen Cho

I really enjoyed Zen Cho's Hugo-winning novelette "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again," about an imugi trying to become a dragon but instead falling in love with a grad student, so I was delighted when I obtained an advance copy of Spirits Abroad, a collection of her short fiction from the past ten years. (There was an earlier edition a few years ago, but this one adds a few stories.) Cho is a Malaysian-British writer of fantasy, and the stories here are organized into three sections.

The first, Here, is made up of stories set in Malaysia. Many, if not all of them, simply take Malaysian folklore beliefs seriously, and tell stories about them in the modern world. I really enjoyed almost all of them; we have stories about an emigrant to America coming home for her grandmother's funeral (but she's a witch), about someone who does smell magic and befriends a cat, about a young girl who gets wishes from a fish pond, about a young vampire. Many are about not fitting in and not meeting expectations because you emigrated, because you're a lesbian, because you can't do as well on tests as your parents would like. They have a certain appeal to the sf&f reader in that the Malaysian "worldbuilding" is pretty immersive, with little explanation of a bunch of terms that I, at least, did not know. But I like that kind of thing in my sf, so why wouldn't I like it when reading about a real culture that is "alien" to me?

The second, There, are stories set in the "West," mostly the UK, but just one in the US, but still largely drawing on Malaysian mythology. "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again" is in this section. Other highlights included a story about an awkward girl trying to save her college roommate from a bizarre stalker (who might be a mythological creature) and "Prudence and the Dragon," which is about a dragon coming to London for a sacrifice of a beautiful maiden... but he falls in love with someone who hasn't even noticed he's there. (This story takes place, I think, in the world of Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown novels.) Again, there's a lot of good stuff here; clever twists on mythology, and nice observation of culture clash. I don't think I bounced off a single story in this section.

Lastly comes Elsewhere, stories set in other worlds. This section is the only one where I really bounced off any stories; I didn't care for one told entirely in a sort of mythological register. I like sf&f... which is not quite the same thing as myth, even if they are related. But there are a couple good ones, "The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote" and "The Terra-cotta Bride"-- the latter is about automata in hell! My favorite was "The Four Generations of Chang E," the book's sole science fiction story, about lunar colonists and the way we have expectations for future generations and neglect the lessons of past ones.

I think I can claim this is the best single-author short story collection I've read in the last year (it edges out Exhalation for me), and I wish the short fiction Hugo Award finalists I'm currently working my way through were as consistently good as this is.