The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

Contributors’ Notes

Senaa Ahmad’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Lightspeed, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. A Clarion 2018 alum, she’s received the generous support of the Octavia Butler Scholarship, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She’s the recipient of the 2019 Sunburst Award for Short Fiction.

■ Many years ago, I had this idea for a metafictional, kind of experimental short story collection. I finally wrote the first few stories at the 2018 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, mostly in a sweaty, unair-conditioned dorm, mostly in a panicked run against time, still trying to figure out how the collection would feel and work.

“Let’s Play Dead” was the first of these stories. I’d been thinking about the ways stories create distance from their readers, ejecting them from the immediacy or emotion of a moment, and where that distance can be useful. For example, how it can dilute or even undercut incidents of violence, so these moments don’t become grueling to read. Sometimes, this “useful” distance can come from humor, or surrealism, or breaking the fourth wall, or a particularly slippery narrator.

Other things that fed this story (a very incomplete list): Italo Calvino’s mind-bending use of anachronism in “The Dinosaurs,” Kate Bernheimer’s essay “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale,” that Millais painting of Ophelia, how cockroaches can survive decapitation but will die eventually of thirst, all the dazzling stories from my fellow writers at the workshop (a couple weeks after this, Mel Kassel would write the perfect, delightful “Crawfather”). I’m wildly grateful to Hasan Altaf at The Paris Review for pulling this story from the slush and for lasering in on things I wanted to improve but didn’t know how.

I wrote this story for many of the obvious reasons. I also wrote it as a sort of one-way correspondence to people I have known, mostly women in my life. A profound pleasure of publishing the story was to have some of them read it.

Celeste Rita Baker is a Virgin Islander currently flitting between the beach and the grocery store as she tries to be one of the survivors of de ’rona pandemic. She chronicled COVID-19 in a rudely opinionated timeline from October 2019 through March 2020, after which she just could not “go another further.” It’s on Amazon as “De Rona Reach.” She is also the author of Back, Belly, and Side, a short story collection, a mix-up of magical realism, fantasy, and mimetic fiction, some in Caribbean dialect and some in Standard English. Her stories have been included in The Caribbean Writer, Moko, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and other publications. She used to love doing live performance readings, often in costumes she’d made herself, and hopes to again one day when we can safely gather. A proud 2019 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, she is noticing that her stories are getting more and more silly and absurd and is loving it. Her website is celesteritabaker.com and she is occasionally on Twitter as @tenwest522.

■ I jumped back and almost fell off the chair several times while doing the research for “Glass Bottle Dancer.” Eventually I learned to stand up and reach the keyboard with my arms fully extended. I screamed and cackled and laughed at myself, but I just could not change the roaches to a more socially acceptable creature, like butterflies or grasshoppers. Much as they do in our own homes, they insinuated themselves into the story, which is about a human woman, Mable, and her determination to learn something frivolous just for fun.

I looked at photos of roaches until I learned to appreciate their beauty. I read about roaches until I understood how they contribute to the health of the planet. I knew if I had any hope of readers liking Oswald, Treevia, and their swarm, I had to like them first.

When Mable’s ability to dance roaches out of the homes of people and back to their intended environment eliminated the use of pesticides, both of which contribute to asthma and other respiratory conditions, I was delighted with the convergence. I enjoyed being Mable’s friend and companion as she stayed dedicated, despite her responsibilities and the opinions of others, to putting time and energy into adding a purely personal joy into her life. It is something I am continually learning to do. I had a great time writing this story and I hope you enjoyed it.

KT Bryski is a Canadian author, playwright, and podcaster. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare, Lightspeed, Apex, Strange Horizons, Augur, and PodCastle, among others, and her audio dramas are available wherever fine podcasts are found. She’s won the Parsec and the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, and she has been a finalist for the Aurora and the Sunburst. KT also cochairs ephemera, a monthly speculative fiction reading series. When she’s not writing, KT frolics through Toronto, enjoying choral music and craft beer. Find her on Twitter @ktbryski.

■ I suspect that in years to come, saying, “I wrote this story in 2020” will solicit an understanding nod. It was an exceptionally difficult year for most people: global pandemic, long-overdue societal reckoning, trauma, and heartbreak.

For me, there was a lot of anger. As usual, I wrestled it fairly philosophically—​and partly through the lens of my own Anglicanism. “What does it mean, to forgive? What if the other party doesn’t feel remorse? Wait, isn’t the point of grace that it’s undeserved? Well, maybe for God, but I’m only human . . .”

And so it went. Eventually, I thought, “This is interesting. I’ve never had rage as my baseline emotion.” But almost immediately, I realized that wasn’t true. The last time I’d been so consistently angry, I was in elementary school, getting bullied. (Ironically, I was bullied for liking girls and writing stories. I must admit to a certain amount of satisfaction in growing up to become a queer fantasy author.)

So I took that context, those feelings, and I gave them to Emmy. Maybe I was feeding a tiger of my own. Or maybe I was working through the notion—​as Emmy does—​that anger isn’t inherently bad, a thing to be fought and exorcised. Harnessed correctly, anger is rocket fuel.

Born and raised in New York City, Yohanca Delgado is a writer of Cuban and Dominican descent. She is a graduate of American University’s MFA program, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and the Voices of Our Nations workshops. Her fiction appears in Nightmare, One Story, A Public Space, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2021–2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

■ “The Rat” was written at the 2019 Clarion Workshop, where the good-but-intense creative pressure helped me bring some seemingly disparate elements together in a single story. I sold Cutco knives for a summer in high school and was atrocious at it, but it was fun to draw on that experience for this story, and to write a character that reminded me so much of myself. As I revised, I found my way to the central question of this story: What if you could bear to look at the full depth of your own grief—​and recognize it for what it is, a record of all you have loved and survived in your life?

“Our Language” is tremendously important to me because it allowed me to directly explore my own Dominican lineage. It also taught me a lot about the importance of trust and patience in writing. I let myself write through the wilds of this tale, determined to let it be as strange as it wanted to be, but also knowing, deep down, that I needed the story to resolve in a way that resonated emotionally for me. I didn’t know how to balance those two impulses, and so I didn’t. Instead, I trusted the story and returned to it, over and over, for three years, until my subconscious told me where to go.

Gene Doucette (genedoucette.me) is a novelist, with over twenty science fiction and fantasy titles to his name, including The Spaceship Next Door, The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, and the Tandemstar books. His latest novel is The Apocalypse Seven. This story is his first attempt at short-form science fiction. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

■ The title came first.

I was brainstorming possible alternative titles for The Apocalypse Seven because at the time—​a year after I’d written it—​I’d become bored with the working title. (This happens a lot.) I pitched Schrödinger’s Catastrophe to my editor, only half-seriously, as I thought it was both too clever/obscure and too whimsical. Said editor, who did not share my exhaustion with The Apocalypse Seven as a title, suggested that while Schrödinger’s Catastrophe was indeed not a good fit for my apocalypse story, it would make for an excellent short story title.

So I wrote a story to go with the title.

I could say that “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe” came to me quickly and I wrote it all at once in about ten days, but while this is true, it’s also incomplete. The more complete version is that a lot of it had taken up permanent residence in my head long before I started writing; I’d explored quantum theory as a story premise before in a stage play I wrote in the early nineties, called Deus ex Quanta. (It was a locked-room mystery with two detectives attempting to solve the murder of a professor who was simultaneously alive.) “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe,” while featuring a very different plot, goes down the same path, but with the added advantage that I don’t have to think about how one might stage it before a live audience.

I also apparently had a powerful need to write something a little absurd. That kind of opportunity doesn’t come along very often.

Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her book series the Road to Nowhere won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. She was an Otherwise Award Honoree in 2018. In 2020, she published her first short story collection, called Big Girl, containing the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novelette “The Pill.” Elison’s first young adult novel, Find Layla, was published in 2020. Meg has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. Learn more at megelison.com and @megelison.

■ “The Pill” is a science fiction story that people tell me all the time is not really fiction. It is written from a fat life, about a fat life in a world that would rather we were almost anything than fat. I was inspired to write it by the death of a close friend’s mother from complications arising from weight-loss surgery, and by the things people say at a fat person’s funeral. I was affirmed in my convictions when the UK government started taking fat children away from their parents as a form of punishment. I wrote it in a white-hot rage after a doctor told me to lose weight to solve an eye infection. It is not really fiction.

Kate Elliott has been publishing for over thirty years with a particular focus in immersive world building and centering women in epic stories of adventure and transformative cultural change. Her most recent novel is Unconquerable Sun, gender-spun Alexander the Great in space. She is best known for her Crown of Stars epic fantasy series, the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alt-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs Cold Magic, and YA fantasy Court of Fives. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards. Her novel Black Wolves won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy 2015. She lives in Hawaii.

■ When Jonathan Strahan invited me to write a story for The Book of Dragons, I knew instantly I wanted to tackle the theme of sacrificial women. I’ve always felt there was something obsessively misogynistic about tales of nubile virgins being sent to appease devouring beasts. Furthermore, in a harsh land ruled by a patriarchal order, it seemed to me that women who could potentially give birth to sons would be deemed too valuable to throw away. Not yet, anyway. Any woman growing older in the USA is all too aware of how often mainstream US culture vanishes older women, how they are seen to “lose value” once they are no longer young, fresh, and fertile. Too many of science fiction and fantasy’s modern narratives still elide and erase the presence of these women. So why mightn’t a society send worn-out elder women to be sacrificed to the fearsome dragons, who, being beasts, wouldn’t realize they were being gifted something the human society found worthless?

Yet having realized that was the story I wanted to tell, I couldn’t figure out how to tell it. I set it aside and tried three unrelated ideas, all of which felt flat. Then one day I wrote a paragraph in which an old woman woke to discover her husband had died in his sleep beside her. With each step she took, she would move farther away from the life she’d been told she had to live and the person she’d long ago accepted she had to be. The story became an unfolding scroll into a hidden wilderness that she and I traveled together to find out what the dragons really are.

A. T. Greenblatt is a Nebula Award–winning author and mechanical engineer. Her short stories and novelettes have appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Asimov’s, and other venues. Her work has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the WSFA Small Press Award. She currently lives in Philadelphia,

■ This story began as many of my stories do: with an image and an emotion. This time, the image was of a cyclist and a plucky robot going on a journey together, and it felt lighthearted and fun. It made me smile.

But I began writing the first draft of “One Time, a Reluctant Traveler” in the early days of the pandemic lockdown and suddenly, writing something cheerful felt like a farce as the infection rates began to climb, followed closely by the death toll. Everywhere there was a heavy feeling of depression and constant fear. Everyone I talked to felt trapped and powerless. The feeling spanned across my dissimilar social groups and across generations. So I used those emotions to take this image of a story and grow it into something very different than what I first envisioned. Instead of something lighthearted, this became a story about breaking out of a cycle and persevering in a place where there wasn’t much hope. Looking back on it, “One Time, a Reluctant Traveler” was a story I needed to tell myself in that moment.

One day, I’ll write that plucky robot story instead.

Daryl Gregory’s recent books include the Appalachian horror novel Revelator and the novella The Album of Dr. Moreau, both out in 2021. His novel Spoonbenders was a Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award finalist. The novella We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy and the Shirley Jackson Awards. SF novel Afterparty was an NPR and Kirkus best book of the year, as well as a finalist for the Campbell and Lambda Literary Awards. His other novels are the Crawford Award–winning Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet, Harrison Squared, and Raising Stony Mayhall. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories, a Publishers Weekly best book of the year. When there’s not a pandemic on, he frequently teaches writing seminars and is a regular instructor at the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop. This is Daryl’s second appearance in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, following the Hugo-nominated story “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” in 2019.

■ Legendary editor David Hartwell used to call many of my stories “neuro SF” because they were concerned with the hard (and weird) problems of consciousness: the illusion of free will, the nature of the self, the roots of both sociopathy and religious ecstasy, you name it. The idea for “Brother Rifle” was simmering for years after I read about the biological process of decision-making. It turns out that people whose emotion centers are damaged don’t become brilliant analysts like Spock; in fact, they find it harder to make even simple decisions. Certainty is an emotion, the signal from our subconscious that an answer has been reached, and that we can stop running in circles now. With the right tech, that signal can be blocked, diverted, or modified.

When Jonathan Strahan told me he was editing a robot anthology called Made to Order, I realized that this was an opportunity to write about a kind of human robot whose decisions are shaped by hardware and software. But aren’t we all human robots? Even without a chip in our heads, other preexisting conditions—​genetics, social institutions, socioeconomic status, the friends and family who surround us, down to the food we ate for lunch and the current chemical states of our neurons—​all conspire to narrow our degrees of freedom. Any final decision—​red pill or blue pill?—​is made inside a black box, beyond our control and outside of conscious awareness. We can only hope that the puppet master living in our brain is a benevolent one.

In other words, my brain decided to write this story, and hopes your brain likes it.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrofuturist freedom dreamer, Swahili sea lover, and femme storyteller hailing from Nairobi, Kenya. She holds a Literary Arts MFA from Brown University. Shingai’s short story “Holding onto Water” was longlisted for the Nommo Awards 2020 and her flash fiction “Remember Tomorrow in Seasons” was shortlisted for the Fractured Lit Prize 2020. Her work has also been published in Fantasy Magazine and Khōréō Magazine. She is a Clarion UCSD Class of 2020/2021 candidate and the cofounder of Voodoonauts: A free Afrofuturist workshop for Black writers. Shingai’s novella version, & This Is How to Stay Alive, is now accessible.

■ This story was drawn from grief, both collective and personal. When I think about the ones I’ve loved and lost and the ones who’ve remained, I am in awe of a love that lives outside of time, and I think that is the thing that I do not want to be missed. Baraka’s life carries a deep sadness (that exists in the lives of so many Kenyan boys who are forced to perform a certain type of masculinity to be considered valid in our society), but it also carries moments of deep hope, love, joy, and faith in family—​these moments, for me, are where eternity lives. The in-between moments of dancing and breathless laughter, of swimming and endless stories. I am always incredibly conscious of stating that this is just one version of one story and there are hundreds of thousands of other queer and Kenyan and happy and sad and hopeful and curious Black stories to be told. I’m just grateful that this one gets to sit among them.

Mel Kassel is a writer working on her first story collection and novel. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, The Toast, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Clarion alumna, and a World Fantasy Award winner. Despite being a dog person who loves the ocean, she lives in the Midwest with a big gray cat. Find her on Twitter @MelKassel or online at www​.melkassel​.com.

■ “Crawfather” was the third story I wrote at Clarion in 2018. I had spent the previous weeks rigorously attempting to impress my peers, and I was feeling burned out. I decided that my next piece would be a “fun” story that didn’t feel weighty or draining to create.

“Crawfather” was indeed the story I had the most fun writing that summer, though it didn’t end up being an entirely silly piece. Remembering so many awkward family gatherings in Minnesota gave me the POV—​I think there’s something innately funny about the self-importance of a conservative family narrating in first-person plural. I wanted to convey how family traditions can become nonsensical and harmful over time, and how they tend to encourage a cultish insularity. So, this family organizes its traditions around the myth that they’re being persecuted by a giant crawfish (never mind that it’s no smarter than a regular-sized one).

I’m very fond of this story for how it combines some of my favorite elements: a cool creature, the dangers of ritual, and absurdity with a hint of horror. Also, it continues to have the best title of anything I’ve ever written.

Ted Kosmatka is the author of three novels and numerous short stories. Over the years he’s worked as everything from a corn detasseler to a lab tech to a game writer. His short fiction can be found reprinted in more than a dozen year’s-best anthologies.

■ Working on this story was a bit like painting a garage floor. First you have your paint and then your epoxy activator, in its clear little packet, and you stare at them separately for a bit, trying to work out what’s what before adding part A to part B, mixing them together, and hoping it’ll stick. (And that your dog won’t walk across the floor while it’s wet.) The part A for this story was an idea about artificial intelligence and consciousness that I’d been kicking around for a while. The part B came months later, and that was the story part, a chase into the darkness; and as I was laying it down, I just hoped I’d gotten the mixture right.

Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade novel Dragon Pearl won the Locus Award for best YA novel and the Mythopoeic Award, and was a New York Times best seller. His most recent work, the modern fairy-tale collection The Fox’s Tower and Other Stories, came out in October 2021. Lee’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as Tor.com, Lightspeed, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Audubon magazine. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

■ “Beyond the Dragon’s Gate” came to me because I’m trans. I knew how dysphoria worked in my life, but I wondered how it would affect an AI. I hadn’t seen a lot of discussion as to how changing an AI’s physical shell would affect it, whether that shell was an android or a starship or anything in between. Surely if an AI was advanced enough to feel emotional attachments and use the capabilities of its current physical body, it might then also have very personal feelings about whether or not that body felt right to it.

At the same time, I wanted to contrast this idea of an AI’s dysphoria with the viewpoint of a human character who was fascinated by fluidity of form—​who would actively have sought it out, given the opportunity. Even in the space of a short story, I wanted to show that sentient beings could have different visceral reactions to this sort of fluidity of perceived form.

Ken Liu (http://​kenliu​.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he wrote the Dandelion Dynasty , a silkpunk epic fantasy series in which engineers hold the place of honor reserved for magicians, as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

■ I wrote “The Cleaners” as part of Faraway, an Amazon Original Stories collection of modern retellings of classic fairy tales. But a strict “retelling” didn’t appeal to me, so I decided to craft a new fable only loosely inspired by an idea from a classic story—​the notion of “extraordinary sensitivity” from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.” My tale takes a few metaphors that we’re all familiar with—​our emotions color our memories, our memories are attached to our possessions, psychic pollution and emotional labor—​and makes them all literally true in this alternate reality, since the literalization of the metaphorical is our oldest mode of storytelling and my favorite way to approach speculative fiction.

As with everything else written in 2020, the global pandemic hovers over each word in this story like an image filter, leaving a distinctive shift in highlights and hues. I still cannot read it without feeling the isolation, the loneliness, the despair that we all endure, not because we live in a particular time or place or are part of some event, but because we’re human.

Barbadian novelist and research consultant Dr. Karen Lord is the author of Redemption in Indigo, winner of the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2011 William L. Crawford Award, and the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Her other works include the science fiction duology The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, and the crime-fantasy novel Unraveling. She edited the anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, and has coauthored research on development and on youth employment with the University of the West Indies for the UNDP and the Caribbean Development Bank.

■ I’m tempted to think that “The Plague Doctors” has had greater impact precisely because less than six months after I handed in the final draft, the world saw the beginnings of COVID-19. But this story is more than accidental zeitgeist. It’s the end product of an idea I laid out to my medical adviser for the story, Dr. Adrian Charles: “This is our chance to depict a version of the revolutionary, decentralized approach to health care that we’ve been discussing for ages.”

Dr. Charles knows his sci-fi and did not flinch when I asked him to design a disease that would undermine the global health system by revealing the hubris of the so-called developed world—​a disease that looked easy to control until it suddenly (and horribly) was not. The invented pathogen was deadlier and more contagious than the coronavirus, but the resulting massive systemic disruptions were similar. I believe the solutions are also similar: a greater focus on the baseline health of vulnerable communities; decentralized, community-based delivery of free health and well-being services (e.g., clinics and home care) operating in parallel with centralized, specialized medical services (hospitals and specialist centers); and more global interconnectedness, openness, and cooperation, especially among nonstate actors.

These are the survival strategies of small islands, mountain villages, and remote settlements. When you have to plan for disaster or disruption with scarce resources, you learn that system redundancy and access to information are essential, and basic self-sufficiency is fundamental. These lessons are useful for everyone, everywhere, especially those who think they’re invincible. Beyond this present pandemic, I hope “The Plague Doctors” will serve as a perennial reminder that whatever the sum of our parts, as a community or a nation, nothing is too big to fail.

Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her novels have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have been published in numerous award-winning anthologies and magazines. Many of these stories can be found in her collection Love & Other Acts of War.

■ This is the second story for my contribution to the anthology series the Dystopia Triptych. The premise was to write three connected stories across the anthologies that covered Before, During, and After (or approaching an After) a dystopian society. I chose to tell my stories through the lens of grief and mourning, to capture universal emotions (frustration, anger, depression) through the personal. The first story was from the mother’s point of view after the death of a child, the last from the father’s. This second story was from the point of view of the best friend of the child. Having worked in the education field in one way or another through the years, I also wanted to tackle the crisis of education and examine some of the issues and mindsets that have failed so many of the world’s children and youth. Many factors play into the education crisis, including economic and social, and my reading about the education industrial complex, especially around standardized testing, fed the genesis of this story.

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Riot Baby, which won the New England Book Award for fiction, an Alex Award, and was a finalist for the Nommo, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards. His young adult novels include the Beasts Made of Night series and the War Girls series. He holds degrees from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and Sciences Po. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Omenana, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Tor.com and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. His most recent book is the nonfiction (S)kinfolk.

■ Readers of “How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary” may recognize the story structure from Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” which itself, arguably, can trace its architectural genealogy to Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” My original mandate for “Reparations” was large enough that the only way I could pinpoint a story was to write into one of the most challenging and politically/socially taboo subjects I could think of, which is how I alighted on the subject of reparations for African Americans.

I’d tried a few different points of entry, but none of them could capture the totality of what I wanted to cover. Indeed, I might have wound up with an entire novel, but when I thought of those stories that managed the type of panorama I sought, Ken Liu’s story stood out to me. (It was also fresh in my mind as I’d taught it in a graduate seminar a few months prior.) I wanted to tell not only the inside story of this effort to accomplish the politically impossible but also its effects on its intended beneficiaries. This format allowed me to do that and then some.

Some readers may find it debatable that this story, set a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from our pandemic present, is science fictional at all, but I think that fantastika shouldn’t restrict itself to imaginative expansions of our material reality, but our moral one as well.

Sarah Pinsker is the author of Nebula Award­–winning novel A Song for a New Day and Philip K. Dick Award–winning collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea. Her new novel, We Are Satellites, came out in 2021. She has over fifty short stories published in magazines, anthologies, and year’s bests, translated into almost a dozen languages. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her wife and terrier.

■ This story had the longest gestation of anything I’ve ever worked on. My senior year of college, in my fiction independent study, I started a story about Uncle Bob and his weird public access television show. I had trouble finishing stories back then, and this really wasn’t anything close to a story; it was at best a character study. I forgot about it for years, until for some reason an old console television in a garage jogged it back to mind. That was when I realized that the story might not be just in the character, but in the act of rediscovering him. I didn’t bother looking for the fragment, since Uncle Bob sprung back into my head fully realized.

I needed something to bring to the Sycamore Hill workshop for 2019, so I started fresh with my twenty-years-lost television host and a new character, a woman who didn’t remember him until she did. I got to layer in stuff that I wouldn’t have been able to write back then either, about memory and possessions and the stories we tell. I’m grateful to everyone at the workshop for their critique, and for helping me mark one of my writer-bingo squares: this is my first story edited by Ellen Datlow. I don’t normally write stuff this dark, so I’m strangely proud of having written something that Ellen, the queen of short horror, called creepy.

Amman Sabet is a writer and designer living and working in Los Angeles, California. His stories have appeared in The New Voices of Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, F(r)iction, Metaphorosis, and other such publications. Amman is a Clarion alumnus and an SFWA member. Between work and writing, he is learning a lot by building an off-grid cabin, deep into COVID year two. Add him on Twitter @AmmanSabet.

■ Submarine mutinies and Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development are inspirations for “Skipping Stones in the Dark.” But this story’s mood also comes from working as a designer and witnessing how mistakes get built into products without a mature vision of the future.

Ford Pintos would explode when rear-ended because safety wasn’t an objective during manufacturing. Google Glass launched and failed because of neglecting to validate user needs. Pfizer’s Bextra was an anti-inflammatory drug that gave heart problems and fatal skin conditions leading to the second largest pharmaceutical settlement in history. Cautionary tales serve as great rallying points for the future of making better things. It’s true for cars, computers, drugs, and perhaps also generation ships.

I find that the contest of wills between humans and AI spins out interesting failure modes when you add the pressures of time, space travel, and the mind’s instinct to reject unnatural boundaries. For every generation ship to reach its star we could suppose there might be hundreds that don’t, right? My thanks to C. C. Finlay and Gordon Van Gelder for taking a chance on this at F&SF.