The New Voices of Science Fiction

INTRODUCTION ^{JACOB WEISMAN}

The New Voices of Science Fiction collects stories by writers whom Hannu Rajaniemi and I believe will become increasingly important in the years to come. All the stories in this volume were published quite recently, after 2014, and the writers themselves for the most part are new to their success. Many of these writers will be writing and publishing their first novels in the next few years, while some, including Rebecca Roanhorse, Sam J. Miller, Sarah Pinsker, and Rich Larson, are already on their way.

Another talented group of up-and-coming writers was featured in The New Voices of Fantasy, which I co-edited with the legendary fantasist Peter S. Beagle. It came out in 2017 and won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology. The book collected stories by several authors whose careers have taken off, including Carmen Maria Machado, Brooke Bolander, and Hannu Rajaniemi, to name just a few.

In 1977, a youthful George R. R. Martin took up the mantle of anthologies dedicated to younger writers, publishing several volumes centered around the John W. Campbell Award, which is given at the annual Hugo Award ceremony to the best new writer. Martin published work by himself, Lisa Tuttle, George Alec Effinger, Suzy McKee Charnas, Spider Robinson, and John Varley, among others. Martin’s series ran five volumes in all, ending in 1987.

The New Voices of Science Fiction is very much of this particular moment in the genre. If we had commissioned it ten years earlier, you would perhaps have seen such now-famous stories as Charles Stross’s “Accerlando” (or my personal Stross favorite, “Tourists,” which Stross calls “a case of hit-and-run amnesia”). You may have found “Calorie Man” or “The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Bacigalupi, early in his career. And, if the anthology had been truly attuned to what was happening at the time, you just may have discovered a truly breathtaking story, “Deus Ex Homine,” by an unknown writer named Hannu Rajaniemi.

So, what is the new generation of science-fiction writers up to? With Jamie Wahls, it’s the witty “Utopia, LOL??” about an everyman who finds himself in a future that he is incapable of comprehending. Alice Sola Kim takes Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” on a test drive through time, “One Hour, Every Seven Years.” In “Mother Tongues,” S. Qiouyi Lu shows to what new lengths a mother may go to sacrifice for her daughter. And with “Openness,” Alexander Weinstein demonstrates the ultimate potentials of social media.

With these twenty fabulous stories, writers Amal El-Mohtar, Kelly Robson, Lettie Prell, Suzanne Palmer, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, and others show that the future of science fiction is in sure hands—and that, like the real future, it’s only a brief matter of time before it arrives.