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A review by norvis13
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 by N.K. Jemisin, John Joseph Adams
5.0
The 2018 edition of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy is a powerful and inspiring collection, carefully curated by John Joseph Adams and this year's guest editor, the luminous N. K. Jemisin (whom SFF fans will know from her Hugo-winning "Broken Earth" trilogy as well as other books). The stories contained within have been carefully selected to reflect a wonderfully diverse array of subject matters, writing styles, and worldviews, though Jemisin is clear in her introduction about what influenced her view of the "best" in 2017: she refers to the collection as, "the twenty most revolutionary short stories from the year 2017," adding that while some of the stories treat the subject of revolution in familiar ways, she was particularly attracted to, "those that revolted against tradition, revolted against reader expectation, or revolted against the world entirely."
The result is a deeply enjoyable collection, with names that are now both familiar to many fans of the genre (a short story by Carmen Maria Machado is included) and relatively new to the scene. I found practically all of the stories fascinating and rewarding in one way or another, and now that I'm reviewing the table of contents I find that despite reading it over a fairly long period of time, I remember each clearly--surely a mark of quality. The opening story, Charles Payseur's "Rivers Run Free," is one of the most delightful in its creativity and its world-building, and the second, "Destroy the City with Me Tonight" by Kate Alice Marshall, is a wonderful and thoughtful romp through a completely new perspective on superheroism. I loved the structure of Kathleen Kayembe's "You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych," (spoilers, it's a triptych), and Gwendolyn Clare's "Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast" is a smartly crafted, chillingly real-feeling meditation on power that unfolds slowly and expertly. I loved almost all of the stories, although my favorite is probably A. Merc Rustad's "Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn." Just a beautiful, moving meditation on the need to take action, and the storytelling is pitch-perfect both in mood and in the way that both the world and the action unfold at just the right pace. I also enjoyed both of Maria Dahvana Headley's stories (she's the only author to have two stories in the collection), which had the bonus of showing extremely different--and very engaging--sides of the same writer.
A few of the stories were, I admit, less gripping: this was my first encounter with Machado's writing, and though I enjoyed her story ("The Resident") I found it a bit elliptical for my tastes. Lettie Prell's "Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities" raises important and resonant points about our criminal justice system, but feels at times like a bit of a formal writing exercise; there's less poetry and pure linguistic spark in this than in some of the other stories in the collection. Samuel R. Delany's "The Hermit of Houston" was an enjoyable read, but fundamentally hard to understand--of all the imaginary worlds in this collection, this was the one I felt I could access the least, not because it was foreign but because I simply didn't know what I was supposed to be reading into it and what was unreliable narration.
Even these stories, however, were worth my time, and I'm happy to have picked up the collection when I did--it was a good way to close out 2018 and get move into 2019! I'll be keeping an eye out for future collections in this line (this is the first I've picked up, mostly because Jemisin was the guest editor), and I encourage everyone to read it and follow these writers. I plan to.
The result is a deeply enjoyable collection, with names that are now both familiar to many fans of the genre (a short story by Carmen Maria Machado is included) and relatively new to the scene. I found practically all of the stories fascinating and rewarding in one way or another, and now that I'm reviewing the table of contents I find that despite reading it over a fairly long period of time, I remember each clearly--surely a mark of quality. The opening story, Charles Payseur's "Rivers Run Free," is one of the most delightful in its creativity and its world-building, and the second, "Destroy the City with Me Tonight" by Kate Alice Marshall, is a wonderful and thoughtful romp through a completely new perspective on superheroism. I loved the structure of Kathleen Kayembe's "You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych," (spoilers, it's a triptych), and Gwendolyn Clare's "Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast" is a smartly crafted, chillingly real-feeling meditation on power that unfolds slowly and expertly. I loved almost all of the stories, although my favorite is probably A. Merc Rustad's "Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn." Just a beautiful, moving meditation on the need to take action, and the storytelling is pitch-perfect both in mood and in the way that both the world and the action unfold at just the right pace. I also enjoyed both of Maria Dahvana Headley's stories (she's the only author to have two stories in the collection), which had the bonus of showing extremely different--and very engaging--sides of the same writer.
A few of the stories were, I admit, less gripping: this was my first encounter with Machado's writing, and though I enjoyed her story ("The Resident") I found it a bit elliptical for my tastes. Lettie Prell's "Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities" raises important and resonant points about our criminal justice system, but feels at times like a bit of a formal writing exercise; there's less poetry and pure linguistic spark in this than in some of the other stories in the collection. Samuel R. Delany's "The Hermit of Houston" was an enjoyable read, but fundamentally hard to understand--of all the imaginary worlds in this collection, this was the one I felt I could access the least, not because it was foreign but because I simply didn't know what I was supposed to be reading into it and what was unreliable narration.
Even these stories, however, were worth my time, and I'm happy to have picked up the collection when I did--it was a good way to close out 2018 and get move into 2019! I'll be keeping an eye out for future collections in this line (this is the first I've picked up, mostly because Jemisin was the guest editor), and I encourage everyone to read it and follow these writers. I plan to.