The Best of World SF: Volume 1 comes out in the US on June 1—tomorrow—and I am thrilled to be giving away a copy and sharing an excerpt from it today! This anthology contains stories by authors from twenty-three countries and includes works by Aliette de Bodard, Tade Thompson, R.S.A. Garcia, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Zen Cho, and more (see the book description below for a list of the stories, authors, and translators). Read on for an excerpt from the introduction by editor Lavie Tidhar and to learn more about entering the giveaway.
About THE BEST OF WORLD SF:
Twenty-six new short stories representing the state of the art in international science fiction.
The future is coming. It knows no bounds, and neither should science fiction.
They say the more things change the more they stay the same. But over the last hundred years, science fiction has changed. Vibrant new generations of writers have sprung up across the globe, proving the old adage false. From Ghana to India, from Mexico to France, from Singapore to Cuba, they draw on their unique backgrounds and culture, changing the face of the genre one story at a time.
Prepare yourself for a journey through the wildest reaches of the imagination, to visions of Earth as it might be and the far corners of the universe. Along the way, you will meet robots and monsters, adventurers and time travellers, rogues and royalty.
In The Best of World SF, award-winning author Lavie Tidhar acts as guide and companion to a world of stories, from never-before-seen originals to award winners, from twenty-three countries and seven languages. Because the future is coming and it belongs to us all.
Stories:
“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard
“Debtless” by Chen Qiufan (trans. from Chinese by Blake Stone-Banks)
“Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
“Virtual Snapshots” by Tlotlo Tsamaase
“What The Dead Man Said” by Chinelo Onwualu
“Delhi” by Vandana Singh
“The Wheel of Samsara” by Han Song (trans. from Chinese by the author)
“Xingzhou” by Yi-Sheng Ng
“Prayer” by Taiyo Fujii (trans. from Japanese by Kamil Spychalski)
“The Green Ship” by Francesco Verso (trans. from Italian by Michael Colbert)
“Eyes of the Crocodile” by Malena Salazar Maciá (trans. from Spanish by Toshiya Kamei)
“Bootblack” by Tade Thompson
“The Emptiness in the Heart of all Things” by Fabio Fernandes
“The Sun From Both Sides” by R.S.A. Garcia
“Dump” by Cristina Jurado (trans. from Spanish by Steve Redwood)
“Rue Chair” by Gerardo Horacio Porcayo (trans. from Spanish by the author)
“His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi
“Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys” by Nir Yaniv (trans. from Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar)
“The Cryptid” by Emil H. Petersen (trans. from Icelandic by the author)
“The Bank of Burkina Faso” by Ekaterina Sedia
“An Incomplete Guide…” by Kuzhali Manickavel
“The Old Man with The Third Hand” by Kofi Nyameye
“The Green” by Lauren Beukes
“The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir” by Karin Tidbeck
“Prime Meridian” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“If At First You Don’t Succeed” by Zen Cho
Excerpted from the introduction of The Best of World SF, by Lavie Tidhar. Head of Zeus, 2021. Reprinted with permission.
They say the more things change the more they stay the same, but things do change, and science fiction has to change in order to survive. For too long, the future was dominated by one country and one viewpoint: the future was white, male and American, and it was going to stay that way: until it didn’t.
I look at The Best of World SF with something like awe, because it doesn’t feel real. As I write this, it isn’t yet real. I look to the future and imagine holding the book, reading the introduction. I have read anthologies and I’ve been published in anthologies but I never thought I would see one like this. The sheer breadth of talent from across the planet gathered here is something no one could imagine twenty years ago. Publishing certainly wasn’t interested. And it wasn’t just then. I spent ten years trying to get someone, anyone, to publish this book, or one like it. The last time I tried it took the publisher an hour to turn it down.
Less than an hour, if I’m being honest.
If you make yourself enough of a pain, eventually people notice. Or so I tried to tell myself. In 2008, I convinced my friend Jason Sizemore to publish an anthology of international speculative fiction. Jason runs a small press out of Kentucky, of all places, and is a stubborn man, and I told him he will make no money doing this but that it will be good. We put together The Apex Book of World SF out of string and sticks and polish and buttons and it came out in 2009. No one had done a book like that before, not in this way, not with an editor who himself didn’t belong to the Anglo world. And I was right: we didn’t make any money, but the book was good.
It was a ridiculous thing to do. And no one was interested. Reviewers didn’t even know how to talk about the book. It wasn’t exotic, it wasn’t strange: it was just a collection of stories written by people from places like Malaysia and China, Croatia and the Philippines, and the only thing they did share was that they weren’t a part of Anglo-American science fiction. And they were good.
So we did it again. I edited The Apex Book of World SF 2 in 2012. And then we did it again with The Apex Book of World SF 3 in 2014. We published writers no one had heard of – then. Aliette de Bodard and Tade Thompson and Lauren Beukes and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Nnedi Okorafor’s in there. So are Hannu Rajaniemi and Amal El-Mohtar. Between them, now, these writers are science fiction. They have the awards and the hardcovers in the bookstores and the film and TV deals. It was easy to see this is how it should be, back then, because they were good. But then you’d talk to publishers and they’d say things like, ‘Oh, we don’t publish books set in Nigeria.’ And that would be the end of the discussion. I had never heard a more ridiculous thing. I went and wrote a science fiction novel set in Israel in the sure and liberating knowledge no one would publish it, and it came out from an independent press and won a couple of awards and ten editions in translation, at last count. And I had to face up to the fact that maybe the world really was changing.
Mahvesh Murad came on board to edit The Apex Book of World SF 4. I think she is the first editor from Pakistan to edit a genre anthology, and she went on to do more, and get nominated for a World Fantasy Award, though not for that book, because still no one cared.
Cristina Jurado came on board to edit The Apex Book of World SF 5, and it was great, and there we stopped. And I tried to sell a bigger version of those books to publishers large and small, and kept hearing that familiar ‘no’ – or, more commonly, not hearing anything at all. I watched those writers I published early on become established, and I watched talented new writers pouring in to the new magazines and the electronic publications, and they were terrific. Some of them are in this volume. And some of the old gang are here too.
Science fiction has to change to stay relevant. It deals in futures, after all. And the Internet was a great liberating force for those of us who lived elsewhere, who spoke English in a strange accent, who wrote in it as a second language or not at all. There are more translators now, enthusiasts mostly, but there are more places open to those stories now. They weren’t there before. The editors weren’t there and the publications weren’t there and we had to create them somehow. The future couldn’t stay uniform or it would die.
And we weren’t there. There was a time where every year Aliette de Bodard and me would be placed on the same panel at the same SF convention to talk about the same thing in front of the same people, and one year a guy accused me of taking publication spots from native speakers and why can’t we publish in our own countries? And the next year he repeated the question because he said he didn’t think I understood him the first time he’d asked.
But I did understand. And I never did that panel again after that. In fact I try not to do panels at all and let other people speak instead, and I refuse to talk about translation. I have my own body of novels now and my own awards, but for some reason I never get asked to talk about that – that privilege is still reserved for ‘proper’ writers. Things change, but slowly…
Giveaway Rules: To be entered in the giveaway, fill out the form below OR send an email to kristen AT fantasybookcafe DOT com with the subject “The Best of World SF Giveaway.” One entry per household and the winner will be randomly selected. Those from the continental US are eligible to win. The giveaway will be open until the end of the day on Monday, June 7. The winner has 24 hours to respond once contacted via email, and if I don’t hear from them after 24 hours has passed, a new winner will be chosen (who will also have 24 hours to respond until someone gets back to me with a place to send the book).
Please note email addresses will only be used for the purpose of contacting the winner. Once the giveaway is over all the emails will be deleted.
Update: The giveaway has ended.
