The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Introduction

(NOTE: This is true. All of this happened.)

Recently, an anthropologist from another universe showed up at my local coffee shop.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: I’m an anthropologist from another universe.

ME: Cool.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: I’m from another universe, and that’s what you’re going to say? Cool? Aren’t you wondering how I got here? Don’t you think I might have something very important to talk to you about?

ME: [not really interested] Sorry, yeah. You’re right.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Good. I mean, yeesh. We’re not off to a great start—[Notices the look on my face… or maybe reading my mind] You’re zoning me out. Aren’t you? You’re waiting for me to stop talking so you can go back to your work.

ME: I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m under deadline. I’m editing this anthology, and I have to read a whole bunch of short stories—

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: It looks like you’re browsing pictures of baby pandas.

ME: I suppose you’re not leaving this universe until I talk to you.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Nope.

ME: All right then. What’s this about?

The interdimensional anthropologist (who, it turns out, goes by Susan) said she had come here on a Fulbright. Susan had gotten some research money to study our little universe. I asked why ours was worth studying.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Not the whole universe. Just a subset.

ME: Oh. I think I know where you’re going with this.

Yeah, Susan said. Susan pulled out a manila folder (they have Office Depot in her dimension) and slapped it on the table (we were at Starbucks—like I said, this is all true; you can tell because I’m adding details and also because I’m asserting that it’s true).

CASE STUDY IN BIFURCATED REALITY:

AMERICA EARLY 2017

proto-civilization demonstrating multiple indicia of having reached early Phase 2, with satisfaction of the Filbert criterion. Reports and field data suggest there are currently two distinct subrealities coexisting within the same space-time region. Situation highly unstable. Funding granted to enable exploratory investigation. Inquiry will focus on how human inhabitants of this bifurcated reality will be affected and whether they will be able to come up with a solution to resolve the problem, or, in the absence of such a solution, what the psychological and emotional consequences will be for these humans (in the event of a negative outcome).

I took a moment to process this.

ME: I don’t like the sound of “negative outcome.”

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Yeah. You shouldn’t like it.

ME: So. Okay. What the hell does this all mean?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Basically, America in 2017 isn’t one reality. It’s two separate ones, mostly distinct but with some overlap.

ME: That… seems… correct. Ridiculous. But correct.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: You say it’s ridiculous, but you have a rich academic literature about this topic already.

ME: We do? I mean, this doesn’t sound like science. It sounds like science fiction.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Exactly.

Susan handed me a book. I looked at the title page:

The Best American SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASYTM 2017

Edited and with an Introduction by Charles Yu

John Joseph Adams, Series Editor

ME: Huh. [then] Is that… me?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: It’s one possible you, yeah. You picked these stories?

ME: I guess I did. I mean, I will.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Then I have come to the right place. The humans in this book are demonstrating a kind of technology.

ME: They’re writers.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Okay. These human writers are demonstrating a kind of technology.

ME: Stories?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Stories. [scribbling in her interdimensional notepad] Right. That’s your word for it. A narrative technology of a specific kind. Genre stories, science fiction and fantasy. Speculative fiction, some call it. The ability to create imagined realities.

ME: I’m sorry—hold up, Susan. Are you telling me that science fiction and fantasy writers caused reality to fragment this way? Caused America to split into two? That SF/F writers are the root cause of all of this craziness, with no one knowing what’s true? Or, worse, that we’re the reason serious people are starting to have serious doubts about whether or not there is such a thing as truth anymore? We’re the problem?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Actually it’s the opposite. Writers of these imaginative realities are not the problem. They’re the solution.

ME: Huh?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: I will admit, it’s a bit of a contradiction. Or an irony? One of those things—you humans with your primitive rationality and logic still have trouble with some of these complexities. [Takes a breath out of one of her nineteen lungs] Okay, let me try to explain it this way.

Susan took the book and flipped to the table of contents. I eyed them with great interest, which did not go unnoticed by Susan.

ME: Would you mind if I…

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Took a picture of the table of contents? Nah. I figured you would.

ME: [grateful] Thanks. It’d just make it so much easier for me to pick the stories if I already knew what I was going to pick. Er, you know what I mean.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: No prob. Always happy to help form a stable causal loop. [then] Within this book, parallel planes of flattened wood pulp and ink markings, arranged in a particular configuration in this volume of space, are maps, instructions, detailed blueprints of the multiverse.

ME: I mean, sure. But those aren’t really… real. Are they?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Depends on what you mean by real.

ME: Factual. Corresponding to an agreed-upon reality.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Given the current state of the American polity, I’m wondering whether you are overestimating the level of agreement. But that’s not the point. You’re right, they’re not real in your universe. But these alternative realities do exist. And they’re closer than you think.

ME: [looking around] Close? How close?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: They are what is known as the adjacent possible. If you can imagine it from this universe, then they must, as a matter of definition, touch your universe.

ME: So all twenty of those stories are actually other possible worlds that border this one.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: [nodding] You’re a quick study. Yes, they not only surround this world, they buttress it. They actually define it.

ME: What do you mean, they define it?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Imagine your universe on a map. To the left, an ocean. To the right, mountains. Above and below, other features of the topology.

ME: We’re bounded on all sides by our imagination. Leaving us in the middle.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Your universe is the negative space defined by these natural boundaries.

ME: Our reality is defined by what we can imagine.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: All these imaginary worlds are fundamentally grounded in your consensus reality. They depend on it.

ME: So the bigger our imaginations, the richer and more stable our own reality becomes. But then, what about…

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Right. So you can see why this current situation is so dangerous. What’s happening now is that the imagination is being challenged. The diversity of viewpoints, the ability to create stories, to have different perspectives, is being systematically destroyed. In its place, a narrative is being decreed.

ME: They’re trying to legislate and enforce a single master narrative.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: And that master narrative is not coherent. It is unconnected from the base reality. It does not depend on consensus. It is an impoverished substitute for reality. The destruction of truth can’t go on indefinitely. Reality will continue to fragment, until reality itself loses use as a meaningful term.

ME: This sounds pretty bad. Is it too late?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: It’s not too late. That’s where this anthology comes in. The stories, this technology you have invented, they are engineering solutions for structural repair of micro-realities. This is the material science creating an invisible structure that actually strengthens because it depends on the underlying consensus reality. By connecting to the substructure, the foundational reality, it reinforces and delineates, giving a shape to truth. A mosaic, created by the imagination, of independent and pluralistic voices, which form in the aggregate a hidden framework, protecting your world from collapse. They don’t assert the truth, they depend upon it. [Checks her interdimensional gadget] Whoops, sorry, I was wrong. Looks like it’s too late after all. Bye!

At this, Susan disappeared out of existence.

Turns out the bifurcated reality collapsed, so only one was left. You know what happened next, probably.

The other reality took over. It won. There was just one reality. This one.

(NOTE: This is also completely true. All of this also happened.)

I was just getting over the whole Susan of it all when another interdimensional being showed up.

ME: Let me guess. Anthropologist.

INTERDIMENSIONAL BEING: Actually, no. I’m a cop. My name is Stan.

ME: This seems bad.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: I’m not going to lie, sir. It’s not good.

ME: Are you going to arrest me?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Not you. You’re not very important. And anyway, if I were going to arrest someone, it’d be all of you.

ME: So then what are you here for?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: You people have a lot of explaining to do.

ME: I suppose by “you people” you mean humans.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Not all humans. Just Americans. Are you an American?

ME: Please don’t talk to me. I don’t know anything. Really. You could not have picked a worse person to speak on behalf of humanity. Go talk to that lady over there, with the earbuds, pretending not to notice you. Or maybe that guy with a little bit of cream cheese on the corner of his mouth. Anyone but me.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: It’s good that you’re just sort of an average person. A nobody. Someone at random. That way we can be sure we’re getting a representative sample.

ME: [gulping] A representative sample for what?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: This universe is taking up a lot of space. And not producing much in the way of interesting ideas. We’re thinking of shutting it down. Plus America seems to have really caused some distortions in reality. The whole place is really just not working out.

ME: Please don’t shut down our universe. We like existing. You just caught us at a weird time. Could you maybe come back, like, four years ago? Or maybe a few thousand years from now?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: [looking around] This is a bad situation.

ME: I know. We know. We know it is.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Can you justify your existence? Give me one good reason not to collide this whole place with antimatter and toss it on the junk heap.

I was sort of at a loss for words. I’d never been great under pressure, and this was a little bit above my pay grade. Stan raised his universe-annihilation gadget, set to Total Annihilation. I closed my eyes and said to everyone, Sorry. I did my best, but I guess my best wasn’t good enough.

And then I realized: I was still holding the book.

I dropped to my knees, pleading for not just my own feeble existence but that of everyone in the cosmos.

ME: If you’d just… read this.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: [holding the book] What am I supposed to do with this?

I hear a deafening noise. I close my eyes, fearing the worst.

Nothing.

And then I hear a voice.

VOICE: Read it.

I opened my eyes. Susan!

ME: Susan! I’ve never been happier to see an interdimensional anthropologist. Why did you come back?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: To make sure Stan read that book. And also, it’d be bad for my research proposal if he destroyed this place before I published.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: What’s so special about these twenty stories?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: They represent what the species is capable of. A cross-section in space and time, and look at this. Their actual tech might be primitive, but their conceptual machinery shows promise, shows the potential of what they can do. They investigate selves and others, minds and bodies, differences. Truth and illusion. Universes, large and small, extensive and interior. Slip expertly from their own consciousness into another, inhabiting it. These are empaths, all of them, that I’d put right up there with the Teleflugans.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Bullshit. The Teleflugans. Right. Wait… really?

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Really. Just read it, Stan.

Stan pressed it to his cheek for a few milliseconds. Susan watched him expectantly, waiting for his reaction.

SUSAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Well?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Well.

Stan started crying. And laughing.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Well, shit, Susan. I guess you were telling the truth.

Stan turned to me.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Human idiot—why didn’t you tell me you had this technology?

ME: Um, I didn’t realize it was so important?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: That’s why you’re an idiot. You can come up with this and yet not realize how important it is.

ME: Wait a minute. Are you telling me that but for the existence of our literature, you would have thought this whole universe was worth destroying?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Dude, now you’re talking crazy. The stories won’t save the world. But they are evidence of something. They are evidence that despite the tenuous grasp on reality you all seem to have here, the collapsing of objective truth that’s going on, and the instability it’s causing at this particular point in space and time—despite all of that, you still seem to have at least a few people interested in imagining better worlds, other worlds, the existence of alternative points of view. Based on these twenty stories, this narrative speculation, we have… something to go on. A scrap of hope, for you as a civilization. As a species.

ME: So… you’re not going to annihilate us?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Not yet. But you’d better keep this up. You’re on thin ice. [to Susan] You hungry? I could go for a slice of pizza.

And with that, Susan and Stan disappeared from this universe. For at least another year.

This is all true. All of this really happened. I mean, to the extent that “truth” and “reality” still exist.

After the whole thing with Susan and Stan was over, I finished my coffee. Then I went and got a sandwich. Self-fulfilling timelines make me hungry. As I ate my sandwich, I dove back into my work, with renewed vigor and an appreciation for the stakes involved. Time hardly moved—I must have entered some kind of vortex, as I read the remarkable stories that make up this collection. These stories we tell ourselves, the best of them, they tell us something about what parts of reality we understand well enough to question. About who we are now. And about what we are capable of when we let ourselves imagine the people we could be. These stories, taken together, might be sufficient evidence to persuade the cosmic overlords that despite our shortcomings, we merit an extension pending further consideration. That on some anthropological rubric, we pass a minimum test for proof of civilization. Or better yet, at their very best, they might be (in the words of Stan the Interdimensional Cop) a scrap of hope.