are all also writers I’ve had my eye on for a few years. (Speaking of the perils of gender identification, I recall that I publicly listed Lavie Tidhar as a woman and Vylar Kaftan as a man in discussing a publication they both appeared in a few years ago—at least my aggregate counts were correct!) And I’m particularly pleased to have two even newer writers in the book: E. Lily Yu (still in college as far as I know!) and Kat Howard. And I should probably also mention that some of the writers I’ve already anthologized twice are quite young, or at any rate quite new to publishing, such as C.S.E. Cooney, Genevieve Valentine, and Alexandra Duncan. The field remains in good hands.
Commercially, there were some shifts in the short fiction field. One of the major magazines,
The major print magazines mentioned above—
Obviously I think highly of the online places I plucked stories from:
The list of original anthologies from which I chose stories is a good start in covering the best such books of 2011: Down These Strange Streets, edited by Gardner Dozois; Teeth, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; Blood and Other Cravings, also edited by Datlow; Eclipse 4, edited by Jonathan Strahan; another Strahan book: Life on Mars; Steampunk!, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (both of whom also have stories in this book!); and Fables from the Fountain, edited by Ian Whates. Ellen Datlow had another really outstanding year: besides the two books mentioned above, her books Naked City and Supernatural Noir were first rate. Jack Dann and Nick Gevers edited a fine collection of ghost stories with a steampunk flavor: Ghosts by Gaslight. Jonathan Strahan’s Engineering Infinity was a strong collection of hard SF—so too was TRSF, a magazine-like collection of near future short stories published through MIT’s
As ever, I’ll suggest that one of the best ways to understand the real state of the SF and fantasy field is to read the best stories! So I’ll leave that task to you—enjoy!
GHOSTWEIGHT
Yoon Ha Lee
It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.
What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts.
Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.
“There’s time for one more hand,” Lisse’s ghost said. It was composed of cinders of color, a cipher of blurred features, and it had a voice like entropy and smoke and sudden death. Quite possibly it was the last ghost on all of ruined Rhaion, conquered Rhaion, Rhaion with its devastated, shadowless cities and dead moons and dimming sun. Sometimes Lisse wondered if the ghost had a scar to match her own, a long, livid line down her arm. But she felt it was impolite to ask.
Around them, in a command spindle sized for fifty, the walls of the war-kite were hung with tatters of black and faded green, even now in the process of reknitting themselves into tapestry displays. Tangled reeds changed into ravens. One perched on a lightning-cloven tree. Another, taking shape amid twisted threads, peered out from a skull’s eye socket.
Lisse didn’t need any deep familiarity with mercenary symbology to understand the warning. Lisse’s people had adopted a saying from the Imperium’s mercenaries:
Lisse had expected pursuit. She had deserted from Base 87 soon after hearing that scouts had found a mercenary war-kite in the ruins of a sacred maze, six years after all the mercenaries vanished: suspicious timing on her part, but she would have no better opportunity for revenge. The ghost had not tried too hard to dissuade her. It had always understood her ambitions.
For a hundred years, despite being frequently outnumbered, the mercenaries in their starfaring kites had cindered cities, destroyed flights of rebel starflyers, shattered stations in the void’s hungry depths. What better weapon than one of their own kites?
What troubled her was how lightly the war-kite had been defended. It had made a strange, thorny silhouette against the lavender sky even from a long way off, like briars gone wild, and with the ghost as scout she had slipped past the few mechanized sentries. The kite’s shadow had been human. She was not sure what to make of that.
The kite had opened to her like a flower. The card game had been the ghost’s idea, a way to reassure the kite that she was its ally: Scorch had been invented by the mercenaries.
Lisse leaned forward and started to scoop the nearest column, the Candle Column, from the black-and-green gameplay rug. The ghost forestalled her with a hand that felt like the dregs of autumn, decay from the inside out. In spite of herself, she flinched from the ghostweight, which had troubled her all her life. Her hand jerked sideways; her fingers spasmed.
“Look,” the ghost said.
Few cadets had played Scorch with Lisse even in the barracks. The ghost left its combinatorial fingerprints in the cards. People drew the unlucky Fallen General’s Hand over and over again, or doubled on nothing but negative values, or inverted the Crown Flower at odds of thousands to one. So Lisse had learned to play the solitaire variant, with jerengjen as counters.
