The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Contributors’ Notes

A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award and has been adapted for Showtime television. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

# “Teenagers from Outer Space” and “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” are siblings, both born from my abiding love of the ultra-cheap sci-fi movies of the 1950s and both part of a larger project to use the risible titles of those films as inspiration for stories that engage the source material with some emotional nuance and thematic complexity. These particular titles (it seems to me) are endearing both for their absurdity and for their essentially innocent exploitation of a then-new niche in the ecology of the American consumer—the one inhabited by the teenager, a word that, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, did not come into usage until the 1940s.

In retrospect, of course, the teen culture of the 1950s—from Blackboard Jungle to Buddy Holly—seems tame, but middle-class parents of the era must have felt as if their kids had undergone a transformation no less radical than Michael Landon’s in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Though the anxieties attendant upon that transformation are here veiled in nostalgia, they remain no less relevant today. Despite their titles, these are not—or were not intended to be—camp stories. In the note appended to the original publication of “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” I said that I was pretty sure that my own teenage daughter was a werewolf. I wasn’t entirely joking.

Leigh Bardugo is the best-selling author of Six of Crows (a New York Times Notable Book and CILIP Carnegie Medal nominee), Crooked Kingdom, the Shadow and Bone trilogy, Wonder Woman: Warbringer, and most recently The Language of Thorns, an illustrated collection of original fairy tales. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Best of Tor.com, Slasher Girls & Monster Boys, Last Night a Superhero Saved My Life, and Summer Days and Summer Nights. She lives in Los Angeles.

# I had a college roommate from Penticton, a small town in British Columbia. When she would describe it—the cottage she shared with her dad, the fruit she picked off the trees for her breakfast—my city-kid imagination painted her hometown as some kind of idyllic haven between Avonlea (wrong coast, I know) and Bradbury’s Green Town, Illinois. Years later I got to visit, and despite the miles of pristine pine forest we traveled through to get there, the town itself was a disappointment, full of fast-food drive-thrus and bargain water parks. But I was still obsessed with Penticton—the Ogopogo they claimed lived in the lake, the giant fiberglass peach where town kids worked part-time serving pie and smoothies, the rowdy tourists who found a way to roll that peach into the lake every summer until the owners finally weighted its base down with concrete. I like places like Penticton that are one thing to visitors and another to the people who live there year-round. I like the haunted feeling of towns where half the businesses shut their doors through the winter and the whole world seems to wait. When you’re young, summer has power. It’s this strange gap in the year that requires new routines and operates by its own rules, a time when you can be someone else, and maybe see yourself transformed. In Little Spindle, that magic is real. Many thanks to Stephanie Perkins, who edited this story and who has been known to cast spells down at the DQ.

Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, where he grew up surrounded by the arts and education: Both his parents were teachers, three of his uncles were world-renowned gallery painters, and his immigrant grandfather was a respected writer, in Hebrew, of Jewish fiction and folktales. As a child Peter used to sit by himself in the stairwell of the apartment building he lived in, staring at the mailboxes across the way and making up stories to entertain himself. Today, thanks to classics like The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place, and “Two Hearts,” he is a living icon of fantasy fiction. In addition to his novels and over one hundred pieces of short fiction, Peter has written many teleplays and screenplays (including the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn), six nonfiction books (among them the classic travel memoir I See By My Outfit), the libretto for one opera, and more than seventy published poems and songs. He currently makes his home in Oakland, California. His latest novel is Summerlong.

# There is one origin story for “The Story of Kao Yu” that I’ve never mentioned to anyone—even myself. I knew a lady long ago who was no pickpocket, no thief, no murderer, but for whom I would have come across the world—I did, more than once—to do her bidding, without the slightest issue of right or wrong ever raising its head. James Thurber ends one of his fairy tales with the moral, “Love is blind, but desire just doesn’t give a good goddamn…” As with Kao Yu himself, she was my only true experience of not giving a good goddamn. I miss her still.

Helena Bell lives and writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her fiction has previously appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, The Indiana Review, and Strange Horizons, among other places.

# “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess” began with the thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if a boy found a dragon egg, and instead of helping the boy save the kingdom, the dragon ate the boy in the end? Eventually I settled on the idea of setting it at the summer camp my brother and I went to as kids because, again, the thought of it amused me. But the core of it came from some advice that Joe Hill gave me at Clarion West about a completely different story. He’d suggested that I make a character do something really terrible, unforgivable even. That advice stayed with me, and I liked the idea of framing a story around an apology that needs to be given.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren. His story collection Windeye and novel Immobility were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the ALA-RUSA award for best horror novel of 2009, and his novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Persian, and Slovenian. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

# I’d had the idea for “Smear” some time ago, stemming partly from Kelly Link’s terrific story “Two Houses,” partly from Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” and partly from reading M. John Harrison’s and Samuel Delany’s work that describes body modification of starship pilots. I like too the idea of there being something we’re semiconscious of, something that’s there hovering just beyond perception or that might operate more along our neural pathways than out in the open. For such a being, if being is the right word for it, the distinction between a human mind and the artificial mind of a ship might not be as distinct as it would be for us, and we might perceive it only as a shift or torque in reality, always doubting whether anything was there at all.

Joseph Allen Hill is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in Lightspeed, Liminal Stories, the Cosmic Powers anthology, and this anthology, which you are reading right now.

# I’ve always liked metafiction, from Looney Tunes to Italo Calvino to comic books proclaiming in bold-print narration that the superheroes will die if I don’t turn the page. It always gets me, no matter how corny or pretentious. Stories about stories are meaningful because our lives are made of stories. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and how the world works and what it is to exist and act in the world. I wrote “The Venus Effect” because I was exhausted by a real-life story. Let’s call it the police brutality story. The names change, the setting jumps around the United States, a few plot details get switched up, but it’s always the same structure and always the same ending. I imagine the police brutality story will play out at least a couple times between me writing this now and you reading this. I hope very much that I am wrong in this assertion, but history suggests that I will not be. It was this sense of inevitability that drove me to write the story, the slow, dull grind of knowing exactly what is going to happen and not being able to do anything. I wanted to capture that feeling of exhaustion and powerlessness. The story is about other things—who is and is not a part of society, respectability politics, the value of fiction in confronting real-world issues—but the core of it, I think, is that feeling, the agony of the inevitable.

N. K. Jemisin is the author of several novels, including The Fifth Season, which won the Locus and Hugo Awards (making her the first black author to win either award for best novel). Her short fiction and novels have also been nominated multiple times for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards and shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree. Her speculative works range in genre from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West workshops. She lives in Brooklyn, where in her spare time she is a biker and a gamer; she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her obnoxious ginger cat. Her essays and fiction excerpts are available at nkjemisin.com. Her newest novel, The Stone Sky, came out in August 2017.

# Back in 2014 or 2015, there was a debate about the H. P. Lovecraft bust that embodied the World Fantasy Award, and substantial discussion of just how much Lovecraft’s fear of “the other” informed his work. I’d read some Lovecraft a long while before, but somehow hadn’t realized that his “sinister hordes” were immigrants, poor people, and people of color like me. Once I saw it, though, I couldn’t unsee it. I started to notice Lovecraftian paranoia not just in his work but in the reactions of bigoted people in the everyday: the police officer who imagines that an unarmed black child is a terrifying monster; the doctor who believes his Latina patient can’t feel pain the way ordinary (white) human beings can; the parent who sees a trans child as an unnatural freak. I’m also well aware that despite the paranoid fantasies of Lovecraftian bigots, historically it’s marginalized people who have the most to fear from “the other”… yet we seem to manage without seeing every stranger on the street as a monster from beyond.

So then I got the idea to write a story about (basically) Cthulhu attacking New York City, as one does. And I decided that New York—the New York of my experience, which is filthy and “ethnic” and full of “perverts” and poor people and basically everything Lovecraft despised, by his own word—would tell the big C exactly where he could put his eldritch abomination. Maybe, just maybe, all the people Lovecraft hated, all us sinister hordes, are exactly what humanity needs in its direst hour. And maybe, just maybe, I could use Lovecraft’s own material to battle the ugliness he helped to foment in the fantasy zeitgeist. Plus: giant monster fight! Those are always fun.

Alice Sola Kim‘s writing has appeared in publications such as McSweeney’s, Tin House, BuzzFeed READER, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, the Village Voice, and Lenny. She is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award and has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Elizabeth George Foundation.

# I belong to a writing group that has existed since I was in college. The group has gone through many transformations—people have joined, left, and moved, necessitating both an East Coast and a West Coast branch—but it’s essentially still the same group. When the BuzzFeed editors Karolina Waclawiak, Saeed Jones, and Isaac Fitzgerald solicited a story from me for BuzzFeed READER on the theme of being almost famous, I knew right away that I wanted to write something inspired by my gorgeous long-running miracle of a writing group—except completely scary and evil, which my writing group is only sometimes.

As in the story, a lot of us are East Asian and South Asian, and when we all started writing in college, there was this sense that there wouldn’t be enough room for all of us—that our place in the white-dominated literary world would be as tokens and therefore maybe only one of us would make it. But literary publishing has slowly become, is still in the process of slowly becoming, more reflective of the actual diverse world, and I’m happy to say that, unlike in the story, all of us in the group are seeing each other succeed. It is unbelievable and wonderful and everyone has worked so hard for it—no one took the shortcut of feeding their friends to a giant snake woman, for which I am thankful.

A. Merc Rustad is a queer nonbinary writer who lives in Minnesota. Merc is a Nebula Award finalist for “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door”—definitely a highlight of the year! Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Gamut, and other fine venues. Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or on their website, amercrustad.com. Their debut short story collection, So You Want to Be a Robot, was published in May 2017.

# I almost didn’t write this. No, that’s not quite right—I wrote it, and it scared me because it felt true and honest. This was all-out me on the page. I had read a lot of portal fantasies, and none of them seemed to follow through on the aftermath. The trauma of being locked out of your found-home, cut off from all your friends and the life(s) you built, unsure why you could never go back. I refused to let this be a downer, either; it needed a happy ending, and I had these nagging doubts that Serious Genre would want that. So I trunked the story for six months, and only at the last minute of Fireside‘s sub window did I send it out. Well. You know the rest. I like happy endings. I’m so pleased by the warm, welcoming reception “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door” has gotten. It’s the most rewarding aspect of being a writer: when you see people connect with a story, the characters, and find hope in the end. Let’s all build lots of doors.

Nisi Shawl‘s alternate history/AfroRetroFuturist novel Everfair was a 2016 publication and a finalist for the Nebula Award. Her 2008 collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and she has been a guest of honor at WisCon, the Science Fiction Research Association, and ArmadilloCon. She is the coauthor of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and she coedited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Recently she guest-edited Fantastic Stories of the Imagination‘s special People of Color Take Over issue. Since its inception she has been reviews editor for the feminist literary quarterly Cascadia Subduction Zone. Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in the fantastic genres, and she serves on Clarion West’s board of directors. She lives in Seattle, taking daily walks with her mother, June, and her cat, Minnie, at a feline pace.

# Located adjacent to Everfair rather than functioning as its sequel or prequel or holding any other position on that novel’s timeline, “Vulcanization” is told from a viewpoint I deliberately excluded from all other Everfair-related fiction: that of Leopold II, king of the Belgians. The historical Leopold my character is based on was a nasty piece of work, and I had a hard time inhabiting his head even for these few pages. I didn’t really want to use the racial slurs that came so easily to his lips, but that’s what his entitled callousness demanded.

Researching “Vulcanization” was a lot easier than writing it. I looked into rubber processing, the Royal Museum for Central Africa’s layout and architecture, and the personal foibles of this particular Belgian monarch. But then I had to put on a Leopold-shaped suit and wade into his story.

Did I construct the suit well enough? Was it proof against the ick? I hope that as you read you didn’t get any on you.

Jeremiah Tolbert is a writer, Web designer, and photographer. His work has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, and numerous anthologies. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and son.

# “Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass” required more time to get right than any other story I’ve written. I began tinkering with the idea nine years before and even completed a draft, but I didn’t know how to end the story. I was certain that my poor protagonist could never find what she desired most (a rabbit hole of her own), and in my relative youth, I could see this leading to nothing but despair. The original ending was too cliched to even describe here. It didn’t work, and I couldn’t see how I could make it, so I set the story aside and moved on.

Years later, after having a child, my perceptions of life shifted in very profound ways. One day, while waiting for another story idea to percolate, I went through my folder of unfinished and unsatisfactory work. I found this early manuscript and remembered my past frustrations. Upon rereading, I realized with one of those rare lightning bolts of insight that what my protagonist required wasn’t for her world to change; she needed to change her perspective of the world. It took going through a similar change of perspective in my own life to see what she truly needed most, and not just what she (and I) thought she needed. As a writer, this realization that my understanding of my own stories can change as I age has helped me feel less urgency in getting stories perfect right away. Sometimes they require a period of hibernation.

Debbie Urbanski‘s stories have appeared in The Sun, the Kenyon Review, Interfictions, Highlights Magazine, Cicada, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, Terraform, and The Southern Review. She lives with her husband and two kids in Syracuse, New York, and is permanently at work on a linked story collection concerning aliens and cults.

# I wrote “When They Came to Us” at a time when I was convinced that ordinary people (such as myself, and perhaps you as well) were capable of great evil but we were all pretending otherwise. “Oh no, that would never be me,” I felt we were telling ourselves falsely when watching, on the news, whatever horrors were being committed that day. Why did I think this? Perhaps it was the beginning of a bout of depression. But also I was reading some really heavy nonfiction. Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, for starters, about 1933 Germany as seen through the American ambassador’s eyes—a study in, using Larson’s words, “what allows a culture to slip its moorings.” At the same time I was researching Abu Ghraib and war crimes in general for a bleak novella. Some of the soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib—one in particular, a woman who took certain photographs—seemed so normal and recognizable in interviews, and I wondered with dread whether, in such an environment, I could have done what she did. I became interested in Robert Jay Lifton’s idea of “atrocity-producing situations” in which ordinary people—“indeed, just about anyone,” Lifton writes—“can enter into ‘the psychology of slaughter.’” Eventually, after reading way too many books, I realized I was never going to figure it all out, so I should just write a story about it. That story became “When They Came to Us.” I was interested in telling this story using the collective voice as a way to invite the reader to step closer toward the narrators—the reader becoming, perhaps, for a little while, part of the town. An act not done by them but by us. Thank you to the editors of The Sun for giving this alien story its first home.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times best-selling author of over thirty works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice, and Hugo Awards and the Prix Imaginales. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

# “The Future Is Blue” came from a fairly simple assignment: Jonathan Strahan asked me to write a story about global warming, about the rising sea levels and how we would live in the new world they will almost certainly create for us, for an anthology called Drowned Worlds. I turned the idea over in my mind for several months and kept returning to two things: a line I’d had in my notebook for about five years, and the idea that we would live as we always have, with the same dramas and shortsightedness and lonely children and longing for entertainment above almost all other things, only there would be much, much fewer of us and we would be sea-bound. The line was, “When I grow up, I want to be the Thames.” And the idea became Garbagetown. I’ve always been fascinated with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in part because it sounds like something out of a children’s book, but it is heartbreakingly real, a roving patch of garbage in the ocean the size of Texas. And how much bigger will it become when coastal cities are inundated? How much will it be a testament to everything we had and threw away? If I was going to write a story about the ruin of our world, I couldn’t think of a better place to set it than on top of all our flotsam and jetsam, full of humans doing the same stupid and sublime things they’ve always done, the same tribal foolishness, the same hoarding, the same extremes of violence and revenge, the same fear of change and yearning for it.

I’d intended to explore Garbagetown in a third-person point of view, describing the world as much as the characters. But Tetley’s voice took over, and her first line, “My name is Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown,” demanded to be left in charge of everything. I couldn’t let go of that line, of the question it asked—when the world has already ended, what can a person do that is worse than everything that’s already happened? And so it was her voice, her inexplicable cheerfulness, her crime, her punishment, and a child whispering that he wanted to become the Thames (appropriately, all clinging together like floating detritus of the mind) that I followed through a beautiful and horrible world of half-understood rubbish, which is, naturally, a perfect descriptor of the world at any time period. Beautiful and horrible and full of half-understood rubbish. That seems unlikely to ever really change. In “The Future Is Blue,” it just becomes literal. How we will live if the seas take back the land will be only different in setting, because we are tragic animals in the end, and the seed of our downfall is buried deep in our nature, never to be entirely thrown away, along with teabags and spent candles and old earrings and advertising circulars and kerosene cans…

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. Her short fiction has appeared in over a dozen best-of-the-year anthologies, and she has written Catwoman for DC Comics. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The A.V. Club, NPR.org, and elsewhere.

# A lot of things found their way all at once into “Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home”; some of them were concerns I knew I had, and some of them, as usual, are obvious only in retrospect. As someone who imagines herself to be a curmudgeon with a poor track record of correspondence, I didn’t know how interested I was in the epistolary form, and how it affects the reading experience, until I started writing this story.

Greg van Eekhout has so far published six novels whose audiences range from adult to middle grade. His most recent work is the Daniel Blackland trilogy, beginning with California Bones, a modern-day fantasy about wizards who gain powers by eating the fossilized remains of extinct magical creatures. Upcoming work includes a middle-grade novel about dogs in space. Find him at writingandsnacks.com.

# Among the biggest influences on my work are the crappy things I grew up on. Fast food. Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Corner convenience stores. Shopping malls. Hardly a Bradburian childhood to mine for material. Nevertheless, I keep coming back to the extruded product of my youth and examining what it turned me into and what about it is interesting, valuable, mythological, magical. When I was asked to write a science fiction story for an anthology inspired by the music of the awesome Canadian rock trio Rush (who never recorded extruded product, who are not crappy, who are in fact, as I said, awesome), I immediately thought of their song “Subdivisions,” which evokes the stultifying existence of suburbia. The trick was writing something that would not only appeal to Rush fans but would also speak to people who hate Rush, or are indifferent to Rush, or have never even heard of Rush. These people exist. I can’t even. The other challenge was to write something more than just a fan letter to my favorite band, but rather to make a statement of personal concern to me. So I wrote about extruded food product, social status, pets, commercial real estate development, quests, and friendship. For research I looked to Tempest, the video game featured in the early-’80s MTV video for “Subdivisions.” I got the high score because hardly anybody else had played the game in a while.

Alexander Weinstein is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (2016). He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prizes. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University.

# “Openness” was a story that took three years to write. The idea for the psychic technology came quite quickly. I was on a crowded bus in Boston, and I suddenly thought of how useful/horrifying it would be if we could project our likes/dislikes/preferences onto a visual aura around our bodies. You could look across a room and know that a stranger enjoyed Tom Waits, or hated cats, or was originally from Maine, and in turn you could psychically message people who shared your interests. So the technology of the story was fully formed, but I couldn’t yet place its human conflict. For my stories to feel successful they need the human element, so the technology becomes backgrounded (and part of the setting) and the humanity of the characters is foregrounded. Since I didn’t yet have this element, the story was put on the back burner.

It was about two years later, as I was going through a breakup with a woman I loved dearly, that the human element of the story took shape. The breakup dealt with putting up emotional walls—and as we were navigating this, I suddenly understood how the psychic technology of layers could work in the story as a metaphor for the emotional barriers that arise in a romantic relationship. This became the central theme of “Openness,” which explores the way in which we can retract our “layers” from those closest to us. Once I had this element, I was able to start drafting the story. As for the idea of “total openness,” I’m fascinated by the question of how much we share of ourselves with our romantic partners and our ability to be compassionate for our partners’ flaws and their most deeply held secrets.

Nick Wolven‘s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and various other magazines and anthologies. He’s particularly interested in near-future science fiction with a strong flavor of social commentary, not because he thinks anyone benefits from the commentary but because he’s so often bemused by society. His favorite authors in the science fiction genre are Samuel Delany, Margaret Atwood, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Wolven has a shabby-looking, sporadically updated blog at nickthewolven.com. He’s on Twitter, rarely, as @nickwolven. He lives in New York City with his family.

# A political spoof like “Caspar D. Luckinbill…” is too easily spoiled with explication. I’ll say only that I think there’s a natural affinity between science fiction and satire, since both depend in some sense on the art of exaggeration. Perhaps I can venture an exaggeration of my own, then, and say that science fiction sets out to make the strange seem ordinary—or anyway, plausible—while good satire often succeeds at making the ordinary seem strange. When the two are brought together, the effect can be dizzying. As Vonnegut reminds us, we all now and then come unstuck in time, unsure how we got to be where we are, dreading where we seem to be going. Nothing gives me this sense of being out of joint, out of place, and out of workable options like today’s multimedia blizzard of ads, fads, and admonitions.

Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold, cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, which have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories, came out in August 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

# I have terrible seasonal allergies, and for about a year I got allergy shots a couple times a week in hopes of reducing my symptoms. Allergy shots increase people’s tolerance to an allergen by injecting them with gradually increasing doses of whatever it is they are allergic to. After getting an allergy shot, you have to sit in the waiting room of the clinic for thirty minutes, just in case you have a serious anaphylactic reaction. Local reactions (giant itchy welts) on the arm where they’ve injected the allergen are quite common. “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” was inspired by the many hours I spent waiting in a medical clinic with itchy arms.

E. Lily Yu received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Her short fiction appears in a variety of venues, from McSweeney’s and Boston Review to Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, as well as multiple best-of-the-year anthologies. Her stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards.

# “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” paced my mind for days before pouring itself onto paper one March afternoon in a coffee shop decked in War of the Worlds kitsch. Conscious inspirations for this story include Richard Siken’s “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” Norman Rockwell’s Boy Reading Adventure Story, Connie Converse’s “Man in the Sky,” an illustrated edition of “The Red Shoes” in Chinese that terrified me as a child, a dragon borrowed from a Patricia McKillip novel, and a long list of books on family systems, attachment theory, and insight meditation. This is not a complete inventory, since good stories, like thieves, rifle their writer’s pockets and snap up all kinds of unconsidered trifles of life and mind.

In a sense, I wrote “The Witch of Orion Waste…” from a loving dissatisfaction with all of the aforementioned sources. For centuries we have insisted on punishing, on the one hand, Ladies of Shalott and Elaines of Astolat and girls who would dance in red shoes or ride as knights, or demanding, on the other, bottomless forgiveness and patience from wronged women, in the pattern of Griselda, Penelope, and more recently the second half of Lemonade. However pleasing each individual tale, the body of work as a whole, in constantly retreading these narrative paths, has worn them into a deep labyrinth, whose end remains suffering or death. I have written one way out.