The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

Introduction

I keep thinking about this quote, from Hungarian playwright András Visky: “Nothing is more surreal than reality.” Visky was a political prisoner in Romania in the late fifties and early sixties; the context of this quote was discovering his name on a government list of “people of interest” years later. The surreal part is: he was two years old when the list was made.

Nothing is more surreal than reality.

Last year was full of unreality. I remember the day the lockdown order was announced, hurrying to the grocery store to stock up for two weeks—​two weeks of lockdown sounds hilarious to me now—​finding the shelves cleared of toilet paper, cleaning products, and cans of beans, the freezer section empty except for a lonely bag of cauliflower, people with shopping carts heaped high, everyone quiet, afraid to touch, afraid to breathe.

Then weeks later, sucking in fabric with every breath, walking those same aisles with arrows telling me which direction to go and Xs taped on the ground to show me what six feet is, plexiglass between me and the cashier. A map of the United States always open on my husband’s computer with red splotches documenting the spread; it was months before we stopped watching the death toll. We played the board game Pandemic over Zoom with his sister because it was the only board game we had in common, and we lost. And we laughed about it, because sometimes you gotta.

Or this: pulling up to the parking lot of a defunct dentist office so that a person dressed all in blue with only her eyes showing can reach into my car to shove a pipe cleaner up my nose, and I think about how lucky I am to have easy access to said pipe cleaner.

Masked neighbors walking their dogs. Sparkly Lady Gaga masks at the VMAs. Masked protesters.

All surreal.

Last year in quarantine, I became obsessed with a particular question, and it was a silly one: What are you comfort-watching right now? Because everyone was watching, all the time; everyone was braced for impact—​impact to their health, their kid(s), their job, their entire industry, sometimes all at once. Some people were reading books, but I have no idea how, because I couldn’t focus on anything that wasn’t loud and bright and familiar. At the time I posed this question, half of my friends were watching Contagion.

You know: Contagion. That movie about a pandemic.

Me, I was buried in Parks and Recreation, a sitcom I had already watched more than once, and I could not fathom the impulse to watch a movie about a pandemic, a reality that I was already frantic to escape from, even if it was just for twenty minutes at a time. I wanted to be in Pawnee or on the Rocinante headed toward a space station or in Hyrule with a Great Thunderblade or on my Animal Crossing island (which I named “Doom”).

But for so many people, Contagion was a stress relief—​a story of triumph over the situation we were still in the middle of. For me, there was comfort in knowing there were stories beyond the one I was living at the time. For them, there was comfort in knowing we could endure this, because we had already imagined it.

Exposure therapy is a type of therapy in which a person suffering from anxiety repeatedly encounters whatever stimulus provokes their fear response, again and again, until their brain becomes desensitized to that stimulus. But not everyone has a stimulus they can encounter reliably in real life, the way someone with a severe fear of heights can in a glass elevator or on a ledge. For those people, there is the imagined exposure—​a made-up scenario that they build with a therapist to provoke the fear response. The first time I did an imagined exposure, I was sure it would be useless. After all, the narrative I had constructed wasn’t real, so why would it provoke the same anxiety as a real-life situation? I was wrong, obviously, or I wouldn’t be telling you this. I got plenty anxious during that imagined exposure, every time I did it . . . until suddenly I didn’t anymore. You can actually build resilience by enduring situations that aren’t even real. Is that what my friends were doing, watching Contagion? Building resilience?

Nothing is more surreal than reality—​but an imagined reality can be powerful, too.

I often think of science fiction and fantasy stories as a playground of big ideas, a series of “what if?” scenarios. What if humanity had to coexist with dragons/artificial intelligence/aliens? What if we had to cope with a life-altering event, like an apocalypse/zombie virus/sudden proliferation of superpowers? What if the strangeness and unreality of magic suddenly intruded on our otherwise ordinary lives? What would we do then? Who would we be there?

How would we endure? Would we?

Science fiction and fantasy asks and answers those questions, sometimes realistically, sometimes fancifully, sometimes with humor and warmth, sometimes starkly, brutally. Good science fiction and fantasy finds the human frailty inside of those “what if?” scenarios, the little story inside of the big story. Good science fiction and fantasy explores big ideas but doesn’t try to do everything at once; it balances the specific and the small against the sweeping and the big and keeps them in tension like a drop of water clinging to a branch.

One way that it does that is through specificity—​not telling you every story about living through the zombie apocalypse, but telling you just one story, locating a particular person at a critical juncture. That specificity is not at odds with the big ideas of a science fiction or fantasy story—​it is the best way to communicate those ideas.

Sometimes writers—​of all genres—​make the mistake of thinking that for a story to be relatable, it needs to be broad. It needs to feel like it could take place anywhere, that it could be about anyone. We write about a character going to “the grocery store” without telling you if it’s a Jewel-Osco or a Publix or a Piggly Wiggly or a Whole Foods, as if all grocery stores look the same, feel the same, smell the same. But they don’t. A Fresh Market in a wealthy northwest suburb of Chicago—​where there’s always classical music playing and everything has wood paneling—​is a long way away from a Jewel-Osco in downtown Chicago, with narrow aisles and sticky tile and a distinct lack of fancy mustards. A grocery store that could be anywhere is far more surreal than a grocery store on Mars.

Science fiction and fantasy is therefore not inherently more unrealistic-feeling than a broad, vague story in any other genre. All stories must find a moment in time and in place. Just as a single death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic, as the saying goes, we cannot locate ourselves in an idea that is too big. The narrower and more specific the story, the more we relate to it, and the more big ideas we can tolerate around it without losing our sense of reality.

Most of the time, when you call something “small,” it’s an attempt to diminish its importance. Not here, in these twenty stories. If a big idea is a roar from the void, the small story is the whisper in my ear that I can understand. If a big idea is a smooth, towering wall, the small story is the handholds that help me climb it. Science fiction and fantasy always asks “what if?”—​but that is not why these genres first grabbed me as a kid and held on for the rest of my life. It’s the quiet moments, the frail moments, and the questions asked in trepidation: “Will they make it?” and “At what cost?”

In these twenty stories, you will find dragons, magic, alternate realities, artificial intelligence, apocalypse, giant murderous robots, and quantum physics. You will find stories about death, transformation, survival, aging, self-acceptance, community, and reconciliation. Big, impossible, unfathomable ideas as wide as the unexplored universe and as strange as a talking insect.

In these twenty stories, you will find a story about someone dealing with grief after the death of her mother; someone troubled by bullies at school; someone in an abusive marriage; someone who finds reminders of a dead friend everywhere he looks; someone on a bicycle ride to scatter loved ones’ ashes; someone searching for the truth about their past. These are small stories—​in the best sense of the word. They will make you ask yourself those smaller questions: “Will they make it?” and “At what cost?” And they will make you care, deeply, about the answers.

They will, if you’re anything like me, get you to care about things that you weren’t ready to care about. While reading these stories, I cried actual tears about a rat (“The Rat”). I became emotionally attached to a giant, deadly crawfish (“Crawfather”), a swarm of lovable roaches (“Glass Bottle Dancer”), a deeply creepy, sin-eating tiger (“Tiger’s Feast”), more than one sentient spaceship (“Schrödinger’s Catastrophe,” “Skipping Stones in the Dark”), dragons (“The Long Walk”), and a bunch of wire twisted into the shape of a man (“The Beast Adjoins”). I examined and reexamined some uncomfortable truths (“The Pill,” “How to Pay Reparations”). It is perhaps not surprising at all that after this year of communal loss, many of the stories I gravitated toward most explored profound, inescapable grief (“The Rat,” “And This Is How to Stay Alive,” “Survival Guide,” “The Cleaners,” “One Time, a Reluctant Traveler”). There is one about a plague (“The Plague Doctors”), but it will remind you that scientific innovation is a remarkable and precious thing.

These stories have things to say, but they won’t lay those things at your feet like the lesson at the end of a fable. They will invite you in. They will introduce you to a specific person or set of people, ground you in a particular moment in time, and ask for your interest, and refuse to give you an easy answer. Science fiction and fantasy are often genres of social critique, but that doesn’t mean they have to wrap things up neatly for you; instead, they can provoke and unsettle you, and allow you the space to consider and reconsider and come to new conclusions.

And they will show you how we endure. Whether we endure. What our endurance might cost us. What we will give away in pursuit of resilience, and what we will gain if we achieve it. There are no easy answers, not in these stories, and not in our own lives. But we must continue to ask these questions. The only way out, the saying goes, is through—​and how lucky for us, that science fiction and fantasy are already so consistently concerned with what “through” might look like—​in another dimension, on another planet, or in a world just as surreal as our own.