Neil Clarke

I have come to look forward to Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes, the only (I think) best-of anthology going to cover all of the sf genre and nothing but the sf genre. I like getting a sense of the best of the genre has to offer, especially from the not free-to-read magazines, which often get a lot less attention online, and the original anthologies, which rarely cross my radar. I pepper the stories from them in among my other reading; this year that meant it took me show more about six months to get through the thirty-one stories collected in this volume. If I had a complaint, it would simply be that the pandemic has put the series behind and it still hasn't caught up: volume 7 came out in 2023 but collects stories originally published in 2021.

As always, there's a lot to like here even when every story isn't exactly to my taste, and I appreciate the anthology introducing me to writers I haven't (as far as I remember, anyway) previously experienced. My favorite in this volume was the very first story, "Muallim" by Ray Nayler, which is about a UN inspector who goes to Khynalyg, a (real) remote village in Azerbaijan to evaluate the success of a program to use a robot instructor in schools. Somewhere (I forgot where now) I found a negative review dismissing it as cliché, but I actually found it a sharply observed story about how interactions between different societies can surprise us, and how often technology is put to unexpected use. Clearly written, cleverly done. But that doesn't mean it was all downhill from there or anything. Other highlights included:

• "Proof by Induction" by José Pablo Iriarte. This was a 2022 Hugo finalist, so I had read it before, but it's a neat story about digital consciousness uploading and what some of the implications of that might be.
• "The Pizza Boy" by Meg Elison. A neat tale about a pizza delivery boy... in space! Where he works is a war zone, and the lengths he has to go to to gather ingredients are often illegal. Fun but serious at the same time, which is how I like my fiction.
• "I'm Waiting for You" by Kim Bo-young. Complicated story about a man taking a relativistic flight so that he can line up with one being taken by his fiancée, so they will keep their ages consistent at their wedding, only then his flight is delayed, so she has to adjust, so then he has to adjust, and it all gets quite convoluted and sad.
• "Hānai" by Gregory Norman Bossert. Aliens come to Hawaii to track down a woman who allegedly committed an enormous anthropological crime. Well observed character work and strong prose, neat exploration of a variety of cultural differences.
• "The Equations of the Dead" by An Owomoyela. A kid in a criminal organization is supposed to eliminate someone he's fallen in love with... and then ends up getting in way over his head, in a story involving mind uploads.
• "Complete Exhaustion of the Organism" by Rich Larson. I didn't totally know what was happening here but I very much enjoyed it anyway. Two people are on some kind of walk, trying to get away from some kind of weird society, but are followed by a child who comes back no matter how often they abandon it.
• "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer. Like "Proof by Induction," this was a reread, but I find Palmer's Bot 9 stories incredibly charming and well written, so I was happy to reread it. A little robot is the only hope of a massive spaceship that finds itself out of control, its human crew incapacitated, in what is possible hostile territory.

Those are just a few that stick out to on skimming back over the table of contents, but there are a number of other worthwhile stories here. There were only a couple that I did not enjoy; there were several stories included from an anthology called Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, and these I found missed more than they hit, the kind of near-future futurism that dates too quickly because it's too timely; only three years later, I didn't feel like the authors had called it correctly. One of them was my least favorite story in the book, Ken Liu's "Jaunt," which was less a story and more like worldbuilding and background for a story. But I have previously established on this blog that Ken Liu works for me much less often than he seems to work for other people.

Some of this content you can get online, of course (I have linked to them above when so), but the benefit of the volume is to get all of it in one place. Hopefully this series catches up soon! show less

Disclaimer: I'm not reading all the stories in this issue, only Peter Watts' Giants.

Giants concludes the 4 story Sunflower Cycle.

Suffice to say, it rocks.

A black hole drive, an AI that shouldn't be smarter than the meat inside it, unfathomable stretches of time, exploration, surprises, manipulation and murder. And that's just an appetizer.

Peter Watts has serious writing chops. It's clear as hell hard-hard SF and yet it's characters are still as amazing as it's tech, physics, and show more worldbuilding goodies.

In other words, he never let up. :) show less

Note: I use neutral they/ them pronouns when referring to Isabel Fall in this review as I am unsure of those they use.

I finally read I sexually identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall. It was unfortunately removed from this issue of Clarkesworld after an internet shit storm, but searching for it online you can find both the text and the original Clarkesworld podcast reading by Kate Baker, which is hosted on archive.org.

I'm not going to talk about the controversy too much, other show more than to say as Genderqueer Transfemme Bisexual Panromantic Lesbian, I am burdened with the knowledge that some of the people who hate and hurt us [LGBTQIA / GSRM folx] the most tragically are us, and that I genuinely cannot understand how anyone who actually read the story in their darkest imagination could ever truly perceive it as anything but genuine and respectful. I truly sympathise with anyone who was negatively effected by reading the title or the story itself (I am certain most reactions were simply due to the title). Dysphoria, internalised transphobia, and the stresses of living in an increasingly hostile world during a trans genocide are things I personally struggle with and wouldn't wish on anyone. However, the do not excuse anyone from dogpiling, harassing, and forcing a trans person to have their story taken down, out themselves, and disappear due to the sheer volume of hate and threatened violence.

So often when one waits so long to finally get their hands on something it cannot help but disappoint. I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter confounded this and blew away any expectations I might have had. While I have a propensity for being hyperbolic, I am stone cold sober when I say this is one of the single most unique and brilliant works of science fiction ever created. As a study and extrapolation on gender and the commodification and weaponisation of every aspect of the human experience, particularly the dehumanisation and exploitation of marginalised people and everything we have painstakingly fought for and built, including the minutia of our identities. This should be discussed in the same breath as any of the speculative science fiction luminaries like Phillip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, and Urusla K. le Guin, especially in discussion of gender, as with Le Guin's seminal The Left Hand of Darkness.

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter is many things. At once, a reclamation of the semiotics of hate speech that are an empowering legacy of our communities from the pink triangles of Nazi concentration camps to terms like Queer and dyke. In this it is taking the bigoted 'One Joke' of transphobes that incorrectly asserts that being trans is simply making a decision on your identity and announcing it, exemplified by the only more hilarious with every repetition, "I identify as an attack helicopter", and actually taking a serious look at how this could be a gender identity. Quite frankly, gender contains infinitely more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the ignorant person's philosophy, and with xenogenders we are seeing people who experience and express their gender in innumerable ways that may be difficult for many to comprehend without an open mind and a little work, but most importantly allow people to better understand themselves.

We also see the POV character's relationship with themself and their gender now and before, and the circumstances that have influenced their identity. The way in which Fall translates emotion and sensation through aspects of an attack helicopter are not just beautifully illustrative, they are written with glorious evocative language that makes the esoteric absurdity wholly parsable. It is in this the sincerity and care is so explicit with a clear understanding and experience in the exploration and discussion of the facets of gender and individual experience.

It is a fascinating view on a unique relationship two people have with themselves, each other, their roles in the military, and the tools they operate. This complex and heartfelt relationship is both professional, personal, and facing potential upheaval with the different ways they relate to the horrific work they do, their rationales, and consciences.

It is also a wry, prescient look at the way the military uses previously 'unacceptable' identities and intersections of marginalisation as tools for recruitment and in aspects of propaganda and the sanitised image of the armed forces, as well as just being an incredibly well written sci-fi short story.

I absolutely adored finally reading/ hearing it and I am only more confused and miserable about the reaction this story and its author garnered. This truly is something special and the trauma suffered and phenomenal voice lost are victims of ignorance and hate that still infects out own communities. Just as those who don't and/ or refuse to comprehend our Queer and transness, everyone would do well to understand that one's own negative feelings, being upset or triggered, and/ or taking offence to something that doesn't contain harm, do not equate to something being bad and hateful. A subjective disagreement on taste and enjoyment should never lead to torch wielding and harassment (to be clear, call out bigots and explain the harm/ perception of harm in things, but don't reach right got the pitchforks without doing some critical thinking).

Wherever Isabel Fall is now, I wish them the very best, express my most sincere sympathise for everything they experienced, and wholeheartedly thank them for penning one of the most beautiful, thoughtful, and unique short stories every conceived. I truly believe this will become a fundamental text in gender studies, as the abuse that followed the publishing of it should be a stark reminder of mob mentality and the propensity for ignorance and harm is not something our own communities are free from. show less

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.

As always I enjoyed the experience of catching up on the year's best short fiction, much of which I had not show more 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 was "If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt. This story was originally published in Slate, as part of its "Future Tense Fiction" series. It's set in the future, after some kind of climate apocalypse. Infrastructure has largely collapsed and nature is taking back America's transportation networks. The three protagonists are a team of racers, competing to make the dangerous trip from East Coast to West and hopefully win themselves new lives in the process. Beautifully told, in terms of characters, prose, world, and theme. As is often the case, I found myself wishing I'd read it at the time it came out; I probably would have ranked it over anything on the year's Hugo Award for Best Short Story ballot (other than "Rabbit Test").

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! show less