The New Voices of Science Fiction

FOREWORD ^{HANNU RAJANIEMI}

I certainly did not feel like a new voice when my first novel, The Quantum Thief, came out almost a decade ago. I only had the faintest idea that I even had a voice, except for the chorus of worry, self-doubt, and guilt in my head. I simply wrote about my obsessions—physics, gentleman thieves, chocolate, game theory—and filtered them through the idiosyncrasies of a second-language writer grappling with translating Finnish idioms into English. Somehow, that mess resonated with a wide readership across the world, and I am forever grateful for that.

But even now, several books and many stories later, I find the concept of a writerly voice elusive. The most adroit writers have the power to disappear, existing only as people and worlds conjured in our heads like waking dreams. And if the voice is the distillation of one’s worldview, an approximation of one’s consciousness, then finding it may be as difficult as locating the seat of the self—or its absence—in deep meditation.

But I do know what the writers who have shaped me sound like. What was novel in my own voice was a distorted echo of Finnish mythology, Jules Verne, Maurice Leblanc, Tove Jansson, Roger Zelazny; British space opera writers like Iain Banks and Charles Stross; and many more. I fell in love with them and was changed by them. The truly new voices—whether chronologically recent or simply discovered by the reader for the first time—do that, and more. A new voice says something previously unspoken and true about the world around us. A new voice makes us want to imitate it, to amplify it, to join it in a chorus. A new voice wakes us to the fact that things are no longer the same.

All the stories in this volume have that power of waking: an original thematic scope, a tonal freshness. They make you a little uncomfortable. These writers are native to a strange world where science-fictional inventions are injected into the veins of the mundane on a daily basis, and political reality out does satire. It is a world of contradictions: of vast slow-burning threats and sudden bone-cracking transformations. It is a world that mixes utopian dreams with brutal greed, that embraces diversity while walking over the weak. It is a complex world that cannot be defined by a single new perspective.

This anthology assembles a chorus of storytellers who are up to the task of capturing the essence of our world’s present and future. They refuse to be contained in one genre, but what they do is unmistakably science fiction. Yet they are not satisfied with using well-worn tropes of SF, such as time travel—or shinier speculative machinery, such as the Singularity—just as cold thought experiments, but they repurpose these ideas into deep explorations of gender, love, and identity. There are stories about contemporary nightmares like social media and climate change, but they have a clarity and attention to human detail that go beyond Black Mirror–esque cautionary tales. They don’t hesitate to confront pain and willingly walk into the dark, but they also guide us back from it—and sometimes to laugh uproariously at the absurdity of it all.

And finally, these authors show us the new new things, from global cataclysms to personal transformations that get us lost in entirely unprecedented landscapes. They will, no doubt, inspire fresh writerly talent, and make us readers hungry for new kinds of stories we did not even know we wanted.

They are here to wake us, by giving us new waking dreams. Read them, and be changed.