The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 2
“Singing of Mount Abora” by Theodora Goss is a fairy tale at its heart. It’s beautiful in imagery and language and has an exotic feel that’s easy to relate to a heroine trying to earn the right to marry her love through cleverness. The story threads a delicate line between familiar and legendary.
“The Witch’s Headstone” by Neil Gaiman is actually a chapter from his upcoming release, The Graveyard Book, about a boy growing up in a graveyard. In this tale Bod ventures outside of the graveyard in a quest to get a witch her very own headstone. What he finds instead is human greed and a curiously shaped curse. Gaiman is a master of creating characters readers can relate to, spinning vivid worlds and lining his fantasy with morbid curiosity. “The Witch’s Headstone” is no exception.
A tale straight out of an episode of The Universe, “Last Contact” by Stephen Baxter is an exceedingly sad tale of The Big Rip, that is a wormhole swallowing the Galaxy. Told primarily through conversations between a woman and her daughter, both scientists, it’s beautifully written and heart ripping at the same time. A very human take, it might be the most graceful story of The Epic End out there.
“Jesus Christ, Reanimator” by Ken MacLeod is a satirical look at the Second Coming. The world’s disillusionment in Christ is equally matched by his disillusionment at the world. As he himself points out: “I am the embodiment of the Logos, the very logic of creation, or as it was said in English, ‘the Word made flesh.’ Just because I am in that sense the entirety of the laws of nature doesn’t mean I know all of them, or can override any of them.” Story events unfold ironically close to the original stories, but most satisfying of all is how MacLeod, like many other authors in this book, adds a level of humanity to the character and events, using the contrast between the possible reality and the version of religion that extremists want others to believe in as a framework for the story.
“Sorrel’s Heart” by Susan Palwick is a startlingly dark tale that opens up with a young girl laying in the dirt trying to cut off her own heart. It continues from there morbid bits flung casually at the reader wrapped around a surprisingly powerful love story between freaks and outcasts in a future world where normal people hunt those born different in very obvious ways.
Michael Swanwick’s “Urdumheim” is a creation tale every bit as vivid as the stories found in Greek, Norse or Egyptian myths. Strange, and sometimes cruel(though no crueler that the Greek story of a god swallowing his children, or the Norse story of Odin forming the world from the blood and bones of a giant), this is an epic story of how the world came to be, solid enough to base a mythos on.
M. Rickert’s “Holiday” takes child pageants to a whole new place with a tale of a murdered pageant queen who begins to haunt (and perform for) a writer who is ill prepared to add the baffling problems of a murdered child to his already struggling life. There’s a real sinister mix if innocence and wickedness in this tale. It certainly sticks out even from the others in this book, leaving the reader unsettled and unsure, wondering if they were supposed to enjoy the story at all.
“The Valley of the Gardens” by Tony Daniel combines science and superstition (or outright magic) in curious ways, building a world that is tech heavy, but has every bit of the magic woven into the prior fantasy tales. Here are the twin tales of a man fighting a horrible enemy that seeks to destroy all life in our galaxy and a farmer whose memories are literally tied to the land who falls in love with a woman from the wilds of desert where strange magic/technology grows rampant. The two and their worlds are more closely related than the reader might suspect. This gem of a tale transcends both genres yet is firmly rooted in epic space opera, transporting readers into a magical world far beyond our future.
“Winter’s Wife” by Elizabeth Hand is a tale of the strangely exotic set in a small town with something familiar for most everyone, even if they aren’t familiar with Maine woods. Justin, friended before birth through his mother, has a close bond with Winter, a modern imagining of the wizard of the woods. The friendship leads to Justin being immediately accepted by Winter’s rather unique bride and treated as an adopted child. The close bond leads Justin through several extraordinary events that could make readers believe that magic does still exist in the woods of America.
Chris Roberson’s “The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small” has exotic down pat with a tale of a Chinese researcher who travels to a prison each day to hear the reminiscent tale of a prisoner who once traveled across the sea to Mexica to study the people there. A tale to remind readers that aspirations and man’s imagination and spirit are essential parts of science this one is satisfied to suggest a future of star traveling and leave those imagined stories to other authors.
“Orm the Beautiful” by Elizabeth Bear is sheer magic, the tale of a dying dragon who will take with him more than just his life, but will also relinquish control of the world to men and technology. Here Bear sets the beauty of fantasy to war with the potential of science fiction. But it also shows how the genres can work together as Orm the Beautiful, last of the dragons, goes to the humans to protect his species’ memories from other humans. Another sweet-sad tale in this collection the prose in this one echoes in the readers head like a nearly forgotten song.
Finally comes “The Constable of Abal” by Kelly Link, a complex tale of respectability, ghosts and blackmail. Zilla, famous in a society recently struck by plague for making charms that draw ghosts to the fashionable remains of the town, also happens to be using her daughter, Ozma to gather the secret evidence that Zilla uses to blackmail the highest of Abal. Until the day that Zilla, in a terrible temper, kills the constable, sending herself and her daughter into flight. But Zilla’s escape is truly a quest, as she drags Ozma and others through strange events in her search for something even she can’t put words to. It sets a fitting tone for the end of the anthology, not an end of sadness, such as “Orm the Beautiful” or “Last Contact”, but one that can lead readers to feel as if the stories in this book have at last released them to live their life anew.