When I began writing, online magazines were little recognized, but were more open to international writers. Many came and went over the years. Now, of course, the online magazines dominate. The largest, corporate-backed online magazine is Tor.com. It is not generally open to submissions but uses several independent editors to acquire work instead. Tor.com Publishing, which runs alongside it, has done excellent work in novella length, with a strong focus on diversity and international writers.
Clarkesworld began all the way back in 2006 (I had a story in the first issue). It does remarkable work, including publishing Chinese, and now Korean, short stories in translation on a monthly basis.
Strange Horizons is one of the oldest online magazines in continuous operation. The editorial team has changed several times over the years. It is an excellent publication with a focus on both fiction and non-fiction, and runs themed country and region based issues from time to time. It also hosts the newer Samovar publication dedicated exclusively to translated fiction.
Also excellent are Uncanny and Lightspeed, similarly professional publications who have published very strong work. The Dark focuses on dark fantasy and horror, while Beneath Ceaseless Skies is dedicated to longer works of secondary world fantasy. Daily Science Fiction specializes in short-short stories, while Escape Pod focuses on audio in both reprint and original fiction. Fiyah is a magazine dedicated to Black SFF. Apex Magazine returned after a brief hiatus and remains an excellent publication.
There are various other magazines. Two good resources are ralan.com, the oldest genre market listing site on the web, and the Submissions Grinder at thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com.
5.
In putting together The Best of World SF, I have come up with a different anthology to what I thought it would be initially. If my approach before was to include all flavour of speculative fiction, including fantasy and horror, I have tried to narrow The Best of World SF more to the science fiction side. You will find plenty of robots (‘Prayer’ by Taiyo Fujii, ‘Fandom For Robots’ by Vina Jie Min Prasad) and spaceships (‘The Sun From Both Sides’ by R. S. A. Garcia, ‘The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir’ by Karin Tidbeck). One time-travel story too (‘Bootblack’ by Tade Thompson).
There are plenty of near-future visions of Earth here, from Tlotlo Tsamaase’s ‘Virtual Snapshots’ to Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s ‘Prime Meridian’. And some award winners, like the openers and closers of this anthology, Aliette de Bodard’s ‘Immersion’ (winner of both the Locus and Nebula awards) and Zen Cho’s ‘If At First You Don’t Succeed’, which won the Hugo.
I could not resist including a few weird stories, though, so be warned. These include Ekaterina Sedia’s ‘The Bank of Burkina Faso’, Nir Yaniv’s ‘Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys’ and Kofi Nyameye’s ‘The Old Man With The Third Hand’.
Hey, it’s my anthology, I’m allowed to have fun.
This is mostly a reprint anthology, but I have picked up just a handful of originals. These are Francesco Verso’s ‘The Green Ship’, Cristina Jurado’s ‘Dump’, Gerardo Horacio Porcayo’s ‘Rue Chair’ and Emil H. Petersen’s ‘The Cryptid’.
There are nine translated stories here, three of which were translated by the authors themselves. The translators have been paid equally to the authors, which I felt was important. Too many times translators are underpaid and go unrecognized (I should know!). My thanks therefore to Blake Stone-Banks, Kamil Spychalski, Michael Colbert, Steve Redwood and Toshiya Kamei for their work. I translated one story myself, and worked on the translation edit of one other.
I am grateful to all the contributors for entrusting their stories to me. Thank you for writing, thank you for pushing through, thank you for continuing to re-imagine the world and looking to the future so we, here in the present, can continue to try and be better than we are.
And my thanks to you, the reader, for picking up this book, for taking a chance. And if I have introduced you to some new works and writers, then I am content.
LAVIE TIDHAR
2021
Immersion
Aliette de Bodard
France
Aliette and I started writing around the same time, and I always saw her as a kindred spirit of sort. Like me, she was writing in English as a second language and breaking into the conservative world of English-language science fiction magazines at a time when the very idea of writers like us seemed absurd. We both went on to sign debut novel deals with the same publisher, and our literary concerns often seemed to mesh, or so it seems to me. We run into each other every now and then (once in Paris, another time in Toronto, and once at an event at a truly terrible Heathrow Airport hotel…). Since our early days, Aliette has fast become one of the most significant writers of the fantastic working today, with a slew of awards to her name, too many to list. When I came to edit The Apex Book of World SF back in 2009, Aliette was the first person I approached. I particularly admire her short fiction, which effortlessly moves between modes and genres, from hard space opera to alternate history steampunk to fantasy or noir: she can do it all. My main problem in putting together this anthology was just which of Aliette’s stories to ask for! In the end, however, I could think of no better story to open this volume with than ‘Immersion’, set in Aliette’s ambitious, expansive Xuya universe. Aliette draws on her Vietnamese heritage in this story, which won both the Locus and the Nebula awards. I hope you find it as powerful as I do.
In the morning, you’re no longer quite sure who you are.
You stand in front of the mirror – it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see – eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew.
You’re
