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drewsof's review
5.0
The best installment of BASFF so far - and not just because last year was some kind of banner year for SFF (although I guess maybe it was), but because Charles Yu brought a truly different glance to the editing. No disrespect to Joe Hill or Karen Joy Fowler, authors I love and admire, but it was nice to have a non-white author, to have an author who writes deep within the genres in question, and the results show: I recognized maybe five or six of the authors on this year's list and nearly every single one of the rest was a delightful discovery for me. This iteration of BASFF showed the depth and breadth of the speculative genres and renewed my passion for both of them.
kylieqrada's review
Favorite stories:
Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail by Leigh Bardugo
Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home by Genevieve Valentine
The Future is Blue by Catheryne M. Valente
Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 by Caroline M. Yoachim
Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail by Leigh Bardugo
Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home by Genevieve Valentine
The Future is Blue by Catheryne M. Valente
Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 by Caroline M. Yoachim
spygrl1's review
3.0
The collection overall was OK -- a few fantasy stories I skipped, a few sci-fi stories I felt were repetitive. The five-star standout is The Venus Effect by Joseph Allen Hill, in which a writer keeps trying to tell a science fiction or fantasy story, only for his protagonist to repeatedly be shot by a cop. Science fiction is often about the anxieties of its time, and Hill captures the sickening dread and queasy unease of 2015/2016 with a lively, fresh voice.
danmc's review
5.0
I found Charles Yu’s metafiction introduction to this anthology self-indulgent and digressive, so I went into the selection with lower expectations than the ones for the previous two years. But I left thinking he'd probably chosen the strongest set of stories of the three anthologies available so far.
First let me get the ones I don’t give a damn about out of the way: “Smear,” is about a guy plugged into a spaceship who wakes from long-spaceflight stasis, sees a random smear he can’t clean away, climbs out of his chair and dies. Essentially nothing happens.
“I’ve Come to Marry the Princess” had a promisingly funny voice. The POV is left at summer camp for two years tries to have a relationship with a girl. Also a dragon’s egg was involved some way I didn’t understand. But the story didn’t resolve.
“Welcome to the Medical Clinic…” is structured as choose-your-own-adventure. But no matter what you choose, you die in a dystopic alien medical system. It was supposed to be funny, but didn’t earn out its formal conceit. Bad medicine sucks, especially in the world you created specifically to make your POV suffer horribly and then die. So? “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” didn’t earn out its throwback campy horror conceit, either. Spoiler: all the teenagers are werewolves. Something of a cliché and what’s the point?
“Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do?” had questionable SF elements (“mediaterrorists” who are never revealed make media around the POV show pictures of mutilated people in a war some place that is never identified for reasons unexplained).
The witch of “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” manages, at great magical cost, to defeat dragons to the benefit of a knight who acts like a psychologically abusive boyfriend. Unpleasant reading for much the same reason sad-sack main characters are unpleasant, which shouldn’t be possible of a woman who’s a dragon-killer.
“The Future is Blue” by Catherynne Valente is technically SF—after climate change has drowned everything and all the characters live on a giant floating island of garbage. Only, even in the worst sea-level-rising catastrophe scenario, that’s not what would happen. And like with other Valente work (like Deathless, which I’d planned to read this semester and couldn’t get even halfway through) it felt jammed full of stuffclutter. Like what you’d get if you asked the most precocious 8-year-old on Earth what she’s playing pretend about. She gives you amazing phantasmagoria unlinked by any cause-and-effect. You leave smiling and thinking “what an imagination!” but never “what tightly plotted suspense!”
“Vulcanization” was about Belgian king Leopold II haunted by guilt-ghosts of black people murdered by his administrators in Congo. The Mallet of Message was wielded so hard it was difficult to see the story behind it, and that story was weak. One minor issue to stand for the whole: Leopold refers to blacks using the n-word. Only, that’s a Southern USA racist term. He’s Belgian nobility. That word does not exist in that form in French. Clearly the author was cut-pasting her mental image of a racist overlord on Leopold rather than doing the research to work from the actual man. “Teenagers from Outer Space” is about alien refugees coming to 50s America, a la District 9, except most of it is a high school drama. It almost succeeds, but ultimately slips into the Mind Projection Fallacy—in which even goopy reptilian aliens are attracted to cute human women. (see Yudkowsky, “Mind Projection Fallacy”) “When They Came to Us” is also about aliens coming to US suburbs and combines the failings of both the previous stories. The Mallet of Message is wielded (people think they are decent, but commit atrocities against the Other at the drop of a hat). And the squidgy aliens wasting their time in human high schools were ultimately not alien enough.
Which brings us to the low point of the collection: “On the Fringes of the Fractal,” by Greg Van Eekhout. A boy in a future in which everything is determined by status (like Cory Doctorow’s Whuffie popularity currency system from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom only greatly exaggerated). The guy who works next to him in the fast-food place gets unlucky and loses all his status, so he will soon die. The POV tries to help and I’ll let him foreshadow what happened:
Can’t tell you precisely what happened, because shortly thereafter I stopped reading (except to make sure everything ended badly, which it did). Head-in-the-oven and also SBA—screwed by author—the term I use of a POV who fails quite clearly and exclusively because the author wishes them to fail.
“This is Not a Wardrobe Door,” “The Story of Kao Yu,” and “The City Born Great” were all good stories. The first was gentle fairytale (a person trying to get back through the magic portal of their childhood), the second straight fairytale by Peter S Beagle, one of my favorite authors. I’m not a fan of N.K. Jemison, what I’ve read of hers. And you could see her grinding axes in “The City Born Great” pretty hard. But ultimately her premise (each major city has an avatar, and a young black streetkid is the new avatar of New York) was strong and well executed enough that I have to acknowledge the story despite my priors.
“Everyone From Themis Sends Letters Home” and “Openness” are both stories I liked very much for their well executed premises: the first is about a VR world product-tested on prison inmates without their knowledge. The second is about technology to let you share thoughts with others, and the agonizing retraction and disappearance of shared thought as a couple disagrees, fights, and then separates.
“Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail” (a girl at a tourist town falls in love with an odd boy who turns out to be a disguised cryptid) and “Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass” (everyone on Earth suddenly gets a magic portal, except for the POV character) were both about regular, decent people trying to get by and care for others and do good, told in enjoyable voices. Both had happy endings, too. Loved them both.
“The Venus Effect,” by Joseph Allen Hill, and “Successor, Usurper, Replacement” by Alice Sola Kim were well above all the other stories, tied for my favorite pieces. Each broke one of my foundational rules of good writing with such brio that I applaud them for it. “The Venus Effect” is metafiction, which I generally disdain as, at best, one step removed from good. But it’s about a young black man in a genre story (sometimes SF, sometimes thriller, sometimes blaxploitation…) who keeps getting shot by a random cop before the story gets going. Then the narrator talks to you, expresses frustration, and it starts again. It was deeply moving, and so good at expressing Hill’s fury and frustration and heartache at police violence against blacks.
“Successor, Usurper, Replacement” is about a writing group joined by a weird eldritch horror disguised as a young woman. To me, writing about writers has always seemed narcissistic, ingrown, maybe even inbred. I’d much rather a writer look outward. But Kim is so funny. It’s chock full of one-liners like “Huynh had brought a box of pinot grigio that had a picture of an actual bottle of wine on the front, which seemed like an unintuitive marketing choice, to remind you so baldly of what you weren’t getting.” Or “Huynh, in fact, was terrible at physical contact in general; Huynh hugged like a haunted porcelain doll that had come to life.” Or “back-of-the-fridge Parmesan that had gone the texture of Comet.” Or “The elevator opened directly into Lee’s apartment, as it did for every unit in the building, which was supposed to be a fancy amenity but felt more like having a giant hole that led right into your guts.” Or many others. And as a mark of the perfection of the humor, the elevator quote was also the set-up for an errant boomerang joke—it came back later in the story in a much more serious moment that was far stronger for the association. Delightfully enjoyable.
All in all, I will definitely continue reading this series, and Hill and Kim go right to the top of my to-read list.
First let me get the ones I don’t give a damn about out of the way: “Smear,” is about a guy plugged into a spaceship who wakes from long-spaceflight stasis, sees a random smear he can’t clean away, climbs out of his chair and dies. Essentially nothing happens.
“I’ve Come to Marry the Princess” had a promisingly funny voice. The POV is left at summer camp for two years tries to have a relationship with a girl. Also a dragon’s egg was involved some way I didn’t understand. But the story didn’t resolve.
“Welcome to the Medical Clinic…” is structured as choose-your-own-adventure. But no matter what you choose, you die in a dystopic alien medical system. It was supposed to be funny, but didn’t earn out its formal conceit. Bad medicine sucks, especially in the world you created specifically to make your POV suffer horribly and then die. So? “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” didn’t earn out its throwback campy horror conceit, either. Spoiler: all the teenagers are werewolves. Something of a cliché and what’s the point?
“Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do?” had questionable SF elements (“mediaterrorists” who are never revealed make media around the POV show pictures of mutilated people in a war some place that is never identified for reasons unexplained).
The witch of “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” manages, at great magical cost, to defeat dragons to the benefit of a knight who acts like a psychologically abusive boyfriend. Unpleasant reading for much the same reason sad-sack main characters are unpleasant, which shouldn’t be possible of a woman who’s a dragon-killer.
“The Future is Blue” by Catherynne Valente is technically SF—after climate change has drowned everything and all the characters live on a giant floating island of garbage. Only, even in the worst sea-level-rising catastrophe scenario, that’s not what would happen. And like with other Valente work (like Deathless, which I’d planned to read this semester and couldn’t get even halfway through) it felt jammed full of stuffclutter. Like what you’d get if you asked the most precocious 8-year-old on Earth what she’s playing pretend about. She gives you amazing phantasmagoria unlinked by any cause-and-effect. You leave smiling and thinking “what an imagination!” but never “what tightly plotted suspense!”
“Vulcanization” was about Belgian king Leopold II haunted by guilt-ghosts of black people murdered by his administrators in Congo. The Mallet of Message was wielded so hard it was difficult to see the story behind it, and that story was weak. One minor issue to stand for the whole: Leopold refers to blacks using the n-word. Only, that’s a Southern USA racist term. He’s Belgian nobility. That word does not exist in that form in French. Clearly the author was cut-pasting her mental image of a racist overlord on Leopold rather than doing the research to work from the actual man. “Teenagers from Outer Space” is about alien refugees coming to 50s America, a la District 9, except most of it is a high school drama. It almost succeeds, but ultimately slips into the Mind Projection Fallacy—in which even goopy reptilian aliens are attracted to cute human women. (see Yudkowsky, “Mind Projection Fallacy”) “When They Came to Us” is also about aliens coming to US suburbs and combines the failings of both the previous stories. The Mallet of Message is wielded (people think they are decent, but commit atrocities against the Other at the drop of a hat). And the squidgy aliens wasting their time in human high schools were ultimately not alien enough.
Which brings us to the low point of the collection: “On the Fringes of the Fractal,” by Greg Van Eekhout. A boy in a future in which everything is determined by status (like Cory Doctorow’s Whuffie popularity currency system from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom only greatly exaggerated). The guy who works next to him in the fast-food place gets unlucky and loses all his status, so he will soon die. The POV tries to help and I’ll let him foreshadow what happened:
I felt something surging within me like high-pressure burger slew through a lunch rush gun. This was a new feeling. A powerful feeling. The feeling that I could do something to break the patterns of my life and take Sherman along with me. The feeling that I could make a difference.
I was such an idiot.
Can’t tell you precisely what happened, because shortly thereafter I stopped reading (except to make sure everything ended badly, which it did). Head-in-the-oven and also SBA—screwed by author—the term I use of a POV who fails quite clearly and exclusively because the author wishes them to fail.
“This is Not a Wardrobe Door,” “The Story of Kao Yu,” and “The City Born Great” were all good stories. The first was gentle fairytale (a person trying to get back through the magic portal of their childhood), the second straight fairytale by Peter S Beagle, one of my favorite authors. I’m not a fan of N.K. Jemison, what I’ve read of hers. And you could see her grinding axes in “The City Born Great” pretty hard. But ultimately her premise (each major city has an avatar, and a young black streetkid is the new avatar of New York) was strong and well executed enough that I have to acknowledge the story despite my priors.
“Everyone From Themis Sends Letters Home” and “Openness” are both stories I liked very much for their well executed premises: the first is about a VR world product-tested on prison inmates without their knowledge. The second is about technology to let you share thoughts with others, and the agonizing retraction and disappearance of shared thought as a couple disagrees, fights, and then separates.
“Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail” (a girl at a tourist town falls in love with an odd boy who turns out to be a disguised cryptid) and “Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass” (everyone on Earth suddenly gets a magic portal, except for the POV character) were both about regular, decent people trying to get by and care for others and do good, told in enjoyable voices. Both had happy endings, too. Loved them both.
“The Venus Effect,” by Joseph Allen Hill, and “Successor, Usurper, Replacement” by Alice Sola Kim were well above all the other stories, tied for my favorite pieces. Each broke one of my foundational rules of good writing with such brio that I applaud them for it. “The Venus Effect” is metafiction, which I generally disdain as, at best, one step removed from good. But it’s about a young black man in a genre story (sometimes SF, sometimes thriller, sometimes blaxploitation…) who keeps getting shot by a random cop before the story gets going. Then the narrator talks to you, expresses frustration, and it starts again. It was deeply moving, and so good at expressing Hill’s fury and frustration and heartache at police violence against blacks.
“Successor, Usurper, Replacement” is about a writing group joined by a weird eldritch horror disguised as a young woman. To me, writing about writers has always seemed narcissistic, ingrown, maybe even inbred. I’d much rather a writer look outward. But Kim is so funny. It’s chock full of one-liners like “Huynh had brought a box of pinot grigio that had a picture of an actual bottle of wine on the front, which seemed like an unintuitive marketing choice, to remind you so baldly of what you weren’t getting.” Or “Huynh, in fact, was terrible at physical contact in general; Huynh hugged like a haunted porcelain doll that had come to life.” Or “back-of-the-fridge Parmesan that had gone the texture of Comet.” Or “The elevator opened directly into Lee’s apartment, as it did for every unit in the building, which was supposed to be a fancy amenity but felt more like having a giant hole that led right into your guts.” Or many others. And as a mark of the perfection of the humor, the elevator quote was also the set-up for an errant boomerang joke—it came back later in the story in a much more serious moment that was far stronger for the association. Delightfully enjoyable.
All in all, I will definitely continue reading this series, and Hill and Kim go right to the top of my to-read list.
suncokret's review
3.0
Stories of note:
‘The witch of Orion waste and the boy knight’ by E. Lily Yu
‘Vulcanization’ by Nisi Shawl
‘The future is blue’ by Catherynne M. Valente.
‘The city born great’ by N. K. Jemisin
‘Successor, Usurper, Replacement’ by Alice Sola Kim
´The Venus effect’ by Joseph Allen Hill
‘The witch of Orion waste and the boy knight’ by E. Lily Yu
‘Vulcanization’ by Nisi Shawl
‘The future is blue’ by Catherynne M. Valente.
‘The city born great’ by N. K. Jemisin
‘Successor, Usurper, Replacement’ by Alice Sola Kim
´The Venus effect’ by Joseph Allen Hill
rorikae's review
3.0
This anthology had a few stories I really liked but none that I completely fell in love with. A decent smattering of stories but I finished it a little bit disappointed that it wasn't better considering that it is supposed to be the best short stories in these genres from 2016.
bookish_sabrina's review
2.0
I feel like I just don't get on with Charles Yu's taste in SFF. I should have known from the overwrought introduction, written in the form of a dialogue between Yu himself and two time travelers who help him finalize the collection and suss out the true purpose of the SFF genres. It was not the kind of meta, self-aware fiction I enjoy, meaning that it went out of its way to make a rather unoriginal point that could have been better expressed with much less effort and fewer words.
The use of meta-narratives and unique narrative structure is also present in many of the stories he chose to feature in the collection. While sometimes they were interesting, more often than not I felt like the stories needed to be expanded and read like underbaked drafts. The three stories I really liked out of the twenty were by Alexander Weinstein, Catherynne M Valente, and N.K. Jemisin, respectively. While I had hoped to find some new authors to explore further after reading this collection, it turns out the three I enjoyed most were by authors I've already read. Sort of a failed experiment on my end. I hope the next one of these I read is better.
The use of meta-narratives and unique narrative structure is also present in many of the stories he chose to feature in the collection. While sometimes they were interesting, more often than not I felt like the stories needed to be expanded and read like underbaked drafts. The three stories I really liked out of the twenty were by Alexander Weinstein, Catherynne M Valente, and N.K. Jemisin, respectively. While I had hoped to find some new authors to explore further after reading this collection, it turns out the three I enjoyed most were by authors I've already read. Sort of a failed experiment on my end. I hope the next one of these I read is better.
kevinjfellows's review
3.0
"Vulcanization" by Nisi Shawl and "The Story of Kao Yu" by Peter S. Beagle are the standouts I found in this collection.
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