The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023

I really wanted to read this Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 collection because it included stories from Theodora Goss and Malka Older. I really loved The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, a gaslamps gas giant scifi/mystery duology by Malka Older.  I discovered Goss ages ago, but when I tried to link my 2012 review of The Thorn and The Blossom, I discovered that Dialect Magazine is defunct now. Somehow, the internet is forever when it comes to embarrassing photos, but also very, very temporary for lit and culture journals.

Predictably, Goss and Older wrote my very favorite stories in the whole collection. Theodora Goss’ short story, Pellargonia, imagines students speaking a fantasy kingdom into existence, through term papers and research, and that takes on a life of its own. It has the fairy tales vibes I enjoyed in her other stories, with an edge.

Malka Older’s Cumulative Ethical Guidelines imagines a world of interstellar travel, but without seamless stasis (or cold sleep of a recent read, Ghost Station). The long hours of transit must be lightened by a servant class of storytellers, who bring entertainment and help maintain harmony among the travelers. This has one of my favorite vibes in scifi — and one that Older does particularly well —  of a wildly different world, and a strong sense of a character having a typical day in that world.

I wasn’t familiar with this author or this piece, but I also loved The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World, by MKRNYILGLD. It’s a hi-tech how-to that somehow felt like a Seventeen magazine home spa day instructional or maybe a friend of a friend’s hacks for the menopause symptoms that gynos ignore. The story is not nearly as heavy-handed as the title implies, instead it describes the underground connections and future science of sterilization, in a darkly realistic world. Lots of DIY biohacking, in a world where women are checking in with their pregnancy officers and their male partners are really, really gonna help out just as soon as this busy time at work slows down. This description sounds like a downer, but the final paragraphs are oddly hopeful and uplifting.

A few other standouts: I enjoyed Sparrows, by Susan Palwick, both for the worldbuilding (is pre-apocalyptic a genre?) and the character development. You’ll like it even if you didn’t teach classes and mark papers through a pandemic. Another standout was Pre-Simulation Consultation by Kim Fu, another story with a strong sense of a different technology and of a full character just trying to get through the day in that world.  The real enjoyment for me in short scifi is discovering a new world and/or character in just a few pages, and all the ones I’ve mentioned here did both.

There were also some very experimental stories in this collection, and editor R F Kuang’s introduction talks about deliberately selecting glorious nonsense. “I chose a lot of these stories despite their sheer absurdity. I chose them because of their absurdity. I’m easily charmed these days by a premise that makes me mutter, “What the fuck?”” (Kuang). I think absurd WTF was very much accomplished in parts of this collection.

Unfortunately, it turns out I’m a dully conventional reader who likes a narrative,  so I didn’t find the nonsense particularly memorable. I need a bit more than cool images to engage with fiction, I like to meet an engaging character or get involved in an interesting conflict or hear a new side of an old story, so the pieces here that were essentially a collection of images didn’t make much impression on me. 

Kuang, R F, and John Joseph Adams. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023. HarperCollins, 17 Oct. 2023.