The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 Read Online Free

jerseys, showed their fangs at every passing lady, and barked at anyone who looked shy or weak. When we roared into a tunnel, it was all too easy to imagine them leaping on someone in the dark and tearing out a throat. As it happens, we reached our destination undevoured, and I got a good fantasy story out of the experience (“Wolverton Station”).
    Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Donna Tartt? Fantasists all. Even those readers who would turn up their nose at a collection like this (perhaps to buy a copy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s
The Best American Short Stories
instead) are fantasy enthusiasts, whether they know it or not.
    But for the purposes of this collection, our interest is not fantasy in the broadest sense but tales of the
fantastic.
The defining trait of such narratives is that the challenges in them are unreal or otherworldly. Familiar dangers have been rendered in mind-bending new forms, to help us see the problems of our lives afresh. For example, lots of stories explore workplace seductions, but in a book like this, the company is operated by vampires and the issues raised are not just moral but
mortal.
Children who fall far from the tree may test the love and patience of their parents in the extreme, but only in a collection such as this will a mother find herself looking after a gelatinous, mysterious cube.
    If stories of the fantastic are a kind of firework, then their red glare may show you your own life in a truly new light, revealing who around you is a demon lover and who a ghost, who is the plaything of faeries and who has fangs.
    Science fiction, on the other hand, might describe any literary work set in the modern day. Anyone with a smartphone in their pocket knows we’ve been living in the future for a while now. At the time of this writing, a man has only just moved into a small flat located 250 miles above the Earth. He plans to live there for a year. As has been noted by others, there is a planet in our solar system entirely populated by robots: Mars! How science fiction is that? Ray Bradbury would love it.
    Anyone who writes a story in which someone sends a text or an email is writing science fiction. In a world where people own self-driving electric cars and maintain close relationships by way of daily video chats, it is not unreasonable to say every author is a science fiction author now. Again: Franzen, Smith, Tartt, etc. But go back even further—weren’t the first stories to account for the Internet, circa 1990, working in a science-fictional mode? Weren’t novels that mentioned the moon landing trying to reckon with a world in which the incredible had been calculated, computed, processed, and made credible?
    Well. Leave it. As with fantasy, we will pass on the broadest possible definition of science fiction, and examine the genre only in its most potent form. Our interest is in those stories in which the science has been projected out from the marvels of now to the head-swimming possibilities of what might be
next.
We stand on the near shore of the twenty-first century, with the vast terrain ahead unknown, unmapped, only dimly apprehended. Science fiction stories are the dazzling flares we launch into the darkness, to catch a glimpse of the country before us and show us our way.
    Both genres, really, are flashbangs to drive back the shadows. Fantasy shines its eldritch glare within, illuminating the contours of our dreams, our half-formed desires, and our irrational fears. Science fiction casts its blazing glare outward, into the brilliant night, at the smashed crystal ball of the moon and the future waiting beyond.
    Put another way, fantasy explores the self, whereas science fiction asks you to leave selfhood behind and see your life for what it is—a bright mote of dust adrift in a vast and beautiful and terrifying universe.
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    The writers assembled herein—nineteen, with two incredibly different and equally breathtaking stories by a young