The Year’s Best Fantasy, Volume 2
Paula Guran, ed.
Paperback
ISBN: 9781645060499
Pyr, August 15, 2023, 406 pgs

When I was younger, I was eager to devour Year’s Bests/Best Ofs, seeing them as not only a concise survey of what’s out there, but also feeling as if they gave me quick access to the very best stories the world had to offer. Now, considerably older and far more knowledgeable about the publishing industry, I see them very differently than I did back then. I’m more aware of trends and transitions, of the tides of genre politics, and of women and marginalized folks being historically overlooked.

Best Ofs/Year’s Bests have long histories, traditions both implied and explicit. If you search “Year’s Best” in ISFDB [the Internet Science Fiction Database] filtering for “fiction titles” you get 257 results, publications going back to the 1950s, and even this is probably an incomplete set of all the Year’s Bests genre has seen (and doesn’t include the many Best Ofs). Most of the notable editors who put them together when I was younger are no longer around. And, importantly, if you flip through those tables of contents of years gone by, including books by celebrated editors, you’ll get the impression that many of them didn’t see the word “best” as applying to women or people of color.

Nowadays we have newer editors and newer publishers offering their own Year’s Bests/Best Ofs, such as Neon Hemlock’s The Best Queer Speculative Fiction series and Lavie Tidhar’s The Best of World SF series. Our own John Joseph Adams edits The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, pulling in guest editors (such as Rebecca Roanhorse, R.F. Kuang, and more) to make the final selections. We also have a few folks who edit Year’s Bests/Best Ofs—books that are, in theory, broader in scope, some editors with a huge list of publications to their name. Paula Guran is such an editor, having put out anthologies for decades, and currently running both The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series as well as The Year’s Best Fantasy series. This is the second year for the current iteration of The Year’s Best Fantasy, and hopefully it will be a long-running series featuring a strong array of work. Many of the selections spoke to me, and I found the book to be worth celebrating. This one is stuffed with notable selections! I’ll discuss a sampling of a few of them and leave the rest for your discovery.

“3 A.M. Eternal”—well. As a rule, Eden Royce can be counted on to flex as a masterful storyteller. Here, Royce grounds the reader in details, quickly sketching a scene with believable characters, while also threading in world building pieces. Running through this is an undercurrent of lovely tension. Longtime friendship is counter-positioned with a mom who might be missing, and before you know it Royce has you tangled up in the story, needing to know what happens next. The way Royce plays with tropes is a delight, giving enough of the recognizable to let readers smile in familiarity, while also touching things up with fun but thoughtful embellishments. Witches, haints, and more—oh my! But Royce never forgets that the narrative itself is important. As protagonist Mik and friends search for the might-be-missing mom, she starts to learn that she might not have known her mother as well as she thought. During the search, we get a sense of a fairly complex relationship, and the complex feelings that go with it. Royce brings things to a satisfying, somewhat heartwarming conclusion, which is about discovery, while also being a very relatable story.

Let’s talk about “The Massage Lady at Mungjeon Road Bathhouse” by Isabel J. Kim. It’s awesome when stories center folks that are essentially treated like extras in so many narratives. The world is comprised of numerous perspectives, and there are far more flight attendants, cashiers, and Massage Ladies than princes and princesses. They deserve to be in stories, too! This particular Massage Lady scrubs the future from a client’s skin, a fantastic story idea in itself. Clean prose and grounded dialogue allow the ideas to shine. Main character Jinah is relatable and interesting, even when her interiority starts to lean dark. The tale becomes a meditation on choices, expectations, opportunities—or lack thereof—and one’s lot in life, as Jinah is offered an opportunity which feels to her like a trap. Kim brings everything to a beautiful place, one which will have you reflecting on your own life.

Tanvir Ahmed’s “The Miraculous Account of Khaja Bairaq, Pennant-Saint of Zabel” is about a sentient banner, Khaja Bairaq, and let’s face it, making a flapping pennant the hero of a story—a story that works, mind you—is in itself quite a feat. The oral storytelling style helps, as well as moments of humor; and the tale itself is captivating. The pennant acts against the king of Zabel, who has a dragon helping him to defend the kingdom, but the king also lets the dragon eat his own people. This isn’t the end of the king’s terrible habits, of course. Strong themes about power and hope and resistance run through the narrative, making it a worthwhile read.

Wen Yi-Lee’s “Love-Heart Soup” begins with a basic soup recipe, then adds the literalization of love as a seed that Sama can spill from her heart to cook into the soup. What makes the story initially interesting is the introspective journey through various kinds of love, and the expectations others have (and pressures others exert) about what love is supposed to look like or be. The soup serves as a focus of sorts, drawing out Sama’s story of the loss of her family. It’s also an important metaphor for the way she engages with the people of her village, in relation to loss and the way it affects her love on particular days. As can be expected, some days are harder than others. Running through it all is the notion of food as love, as connection, and this leads right up to a peaceful ending.

“The Short History of My Mother” proves yet again that Priya Sharma can write. In fact, Sharma makes beautiful storytelling seem effortless. Here Sharma invokes a tentative sense of the fantastic from the beginning, alluring readers with possibilities. This is blended with captivating details of an immigrant experience: a mom and dad going from India to England in the late 60s, with very little money and not much more than that. From there, the narrative shifts perspectives, slipping in and out of storytelling styles, but always setting the reader firmly in the experiences of its characters. It’s an absolutely engrossing read, punctuated by the surreal and the magical, which leaves you feeling as if you’ve been on a deeply personal journey.

“The Book of Unwritten Poems” by Curtis C. Chen is a clever piece told in direct address, where a person is telling you (the reader) about a mysterious book. The technique works really well here because Chen folds the speaker’s personal story into the address, so it’s not just someone describing a thing, but also someone relating their experiences in a somewhat reluctant way—experiences which are connected to the central idea, but not immediately directly. The voice of the piece is conversational, and convincing, which goes far in making the story so good. It’s thoughtful and interesting and a great example of writing about an idea but interweaving something relatable, producing an engaging and entertaining story.

“March Magic” by WC Dunlap is a brilliant story about a witch who has more or less become part of the swamp. She uproots from her peaceful state for a battle which is about to take place across social, physical, spiritual, and political fields. Dunlap’s style and voice provide both readability and strong visual and tactile details, steeping the reader in the narrative. Subtext? YES: the places that some see as dangerous are, for her, home, a safe haven, away from “yoke and the whip”. In other words, the real dangers are not gators and muck and strangely shaped tress, the real dangers are people. The narrative leads to a gathering of witches, a scene which vibrates with creativity, everyone coming together to stand against racism on a certain eventful day in 1963. If you didn’t read this one in Africa Risen, Guran is doing you a favor by giving you another shot.

It would almost be weird for me to not mention “Potemora in the Triad” by Sara S. Messenger, but I will only mention it briefly. It’s beautifully written, super inventive, seriously engrossing, and it’s a story Christie Yant and I published in Fantasy Magazine, so I’m far more than a little biased.

As with many long-running anthology series, or anthology projects headed by editors in general, staying in the anthology game is not always easy. Publishers can pick you up but they can also drop you; anthology projects often make the editors very little money; and it can be a tremendous amount of work (and stress!) just to make an anthology happen, from concept, through all the steps along the way, and up to final production. Different anthologies put together by different people will have different demands, of course; and no two anthologists are the same. That said, the anthologists with a slew of books out who are still in the game are quite often succeeding by virtue of a lot of hustle/hard work, dedication, and a readership which has learned to trust their taste.

There are many more stories in The Year’s Best Fantasy Volume 2, of course: 28 in all, including an array of sparkly names most readers will recognize (such as Sofia Samatar, Elizabeth Bear, Aliette de Bodard, Alix E. Harrow, and more), plus notable writers whose short fiction delivers time and time again (such as Theodora Goss, A.T. Greenblatt, Kaaron Warren, Sam J. Miller, and more) I began this column by talking about how my view of Year’s Best/Best Of anthologies has changed. I see them now as limited by the taste and scope of the particular anthologist. The word Best in these books always represents an opinion, a way of reading. With the wealth of fiction available to read out there, no one will read literally every eligible short story. Best will tend to mean, “the best according to this person, based upon their reading of and feelings about a particular set of works.” In this sense, a Year’s Best or Best Of says more about the editor than it does about the field, and could probably be titled something like “My Favorite [Fantasy] Stories of the Year”—albeit with the understanding that the editor in question is usually someone who reads far more short fiction than most folks. The more that your taste lines up with a given editor, the more you are likely to agree, saying enthusiastically to whomever will listen: these are the best stories! This person got it right.

If you have read my reviews, even if you’ve only read a few of them, then you will know that there is a world of diverse perspectives out there, of amazing stories told by all kinds of people. These days, I am suspicious of “Bests” that fail to embody diversity, that have, for example, very few or no works by authors of color, by queer folks, by trans folks, by women and nonbinary authors, and so on; for it means that either the editors aren’t reading from a decent range of sources, or they aren’t able to appreciate a range of experiences—because y’all, the stories are out there, and they are wonderful.

Looking through the copyright notes for this book, I would have liked to see more surprises, to see more works pulled from interesting or unexpected places, and to see one or two voices—perspectives that are underrepresented in genre in general—in the table of contents that, to me, are missing. That said, I’m here to say that this is a great book. It has heaps of lovely fiction by talented and skilled authors. It feels like Guran put in a lot of work and thought, infusing this project with heart. Importantly, in my opinion, it’s a massive improvement compared to the glaringly homogenous tables of contents of so many books published across decades gone by. Strongly recommended.

What are you waiting for? Get a copy, settle in, and enjoy!