Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the End of Earnestness

Siobhan Maria Carroll reviews The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, edited by Hugh Howey.

By Siobhan Maria CarrollJanuary 18, 2025

• SF

NOW IN ITS 10TH year, the annual Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology provides an excellent overview of short genre fiction published in the United States. Each year, series editor John Joseph Adams selects 80 short stories from SF magazines and literary journals for blind review by a guest editor, who chooses their favorites from among them. This process maintains a high level of quality and consistency, while also allowing the guest editor to make a distinctive mark on each collection.

Hugh Howey, the 2024 guest editor, rose to fame after his self-published dystopian story “Wool” (2011) became an online sensation, leading to his stories’ distribution by Simon & Schuster and their adaptation into the Apple TV+ series Silo (2023– ). As might be expected for an author with a good eye for the market, Howey’s choices for the 2024 collection steer more toward the crowd-pleasing than those of my favorite series entry—the 2019 volume edited by Carmen Maria Machado. The result, however, is an impressive array of stories that will likely appeal both to casual readers and would-be writers.

The Best American anthologies are ideal collections for aspiring writers to read. They bring together a diverse range of stories published in the previous year, allowing readers both to understand the wealth of possible approaches to science fiction and to sample the output of different magazines. Teachers (like myself) are increasingly turning to them in university courses: after all, one of the pedagogical bonuses of reading contemporary fiction is that it often renders ChatGPT useless, requiring readers to do the work of literary analysis themselves. Given my interest in these anthologies for classroom use, I can’t help but read this entry with an eye as to which short stories I would want to teach, as well as to the cultural trends they manifest.

For me, the highlights of the collection are stories that seem like they would provoke robust conversations in the classroom. On that score, one of the standouts is Sam J. Miller’s “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak.” Known for stories about queer identities under pressure, Miller here tackles the social costs of addiction. After hearing of his addict brother’s death and subsequent rebirth as a vurdalak (a vampire that feeds on love rather than blood), Faraday, a young gay man, tries to track down his estranged twin brother. As he follows in his brother’s footsteps, Faraday begins to suspect that the mental walls he’s built to defend against his brother’s manipulations may have made Faraday himself into a cynical user of people—a different kind of monster. As in his other work, Miller handles difficult subject matter with compassion, a brilliant command of language, and a nuanced approach to character.

Another highlight, Thomas Ha’s “Window Boy,” depicts a socially stratified world where the rich shelter in houses sealed off from postapocalyptic terrors outside. Jakey, a young boy, forges a secret bond with a child survivor taking shelter outside his window. Or does he? Is friendship between the privileged and unprivileged possible, or is Jakey being used? Ha’s evocative narrative allows us no solid answers in a story that is ultimately about the ways that complicity is developed and maintained.

Far simpler, and far more delightful, is Ann Leckie’s “The Long Game.” In a story that recalls Ray Bradbury’s “Frost and Fire,” a snaillike alien realizes that its species’ short lifespan makes them vulnerable to human exploitation. Armed with a can-do attitude and a hilarious degree of narcissism, the protagonist Narr sets out to extend the lifespan of his species. In a few pages, Leckie conveys the perspective of a naive, self-centered creature. Many of the stories I find myself highlighting are downers; this one is endearing, amusing, and upbeat, and it showcases what a writer can accomplish with a strong narrative voice.

“Falling Bodies” by Rebecca Roanhorse is a bleak science fiction story about the colonial politics of adoption. Ira, the main character, is a human adopted by one of earth’s colonizing aliens. After arriving at what is essentially a university in space, Ira is befriended by members of a human student group, and they find themselves reluctantly “passing” as a fellow earthling. Roanhorse (herself a transracial adoptee) captures the ambiguities of identity in this tale, which examines what it feels like to be constructed as a member of a visible minority while simultaneously feeling that one’s more complicated, “real” identity is being rejected. While the downbeat ending lacks the complexity of the rest of the narrative, I think college students will find this story particularly engaging.

Finally, Sloane Leong’s “The Blade and the Bloodwright” is a grimdark fantasy about a military unit guarding a witch who is used as a weapon of war. Inspired by the story of Kamehameha’s unification of Hawaii, this story stands out for its visceral body horror and brutal depictions of violence. Early on, we learn that the witch’s nominal allies slit her throat every night to protect themselves, knowing that, “by morning, the sawn red threads of meat and muscle will have restitched her banyan-brown neck and she’ll wake them with gritstone curses.” Is this an image of patriarchal silencing? Should the monstrous magic inflicted on conquered peoples be read as indictments of imperialism, nationalism, or something else? Unlike some of the more obviously allegorical stories in this collection, Leong’s fantasy is open to multiple, perhaps contradictory, interpretations. I suspect many readers won’t like this story, but they will remember it, which is itself a mark of distinction.

There are other stories in this collection that work well as illustrations of certain facets of genre-writing craft. Isabel J. Kim’s “Zeta-Epsilon,” about the relationship between a pilot and a sentient spacecraft, is a deft example of a tightly structured narrative. A. R. Capetta’s weird fantasy “Resurrection Highway,” in which necromancers drive cars fueled by the spirits of the dead through a Mad Max–ish hellscape, is an inventive example of world-building. Then there are stories that translate materials from other media into short story form: Alex Irvine’s “Form 8774-D,” a sweet story about a bureaucrat documenting the powers of would-be superheroes, strikes me as a useful text for helping students more familiar with movies understand how the interiority afforded by the short story form can enhance subgenres more typically depicted on film. 

I’m always fascinated by the trends that the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies reveal. Short stories are (usually) quicker to write than novels, which means that they tend to be more responsive to current events than books published during the same period. Judging from the stories collected in this volume, imperialism and class divisions remained ongoing concerns for science fiction writers in 2023. In contrast to previous volumes, however, environmental concerns have receded into the background, appearing in the ambiguous imagery of “Window Boy” or as energy allegories like “Resurrection Highway” rather than in stories of overt environmental catastrophe.

The trope of trans or autistic identity being allegorized via robots (a trend exemplified in recent works like Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit and A. Merc Rustad’s “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps”) returns in V. M. Ayala’s “Emotional Resonance,” a “cozy” military science fiction that also seems to speak to a Gen Y or Zoomer alienation from unfeeling workplaces. There are no clear #MeToo stories in this volume, but at least two stories—Kel Coleman’s “Disassembling Light” and Amal El-Mohtar’s “John Hollowback and the Witch”—explicate the psychology of abusers. Meanwhile, the always-interesting P. Djèlí Clark’s entry is a neo-Victorian riff on Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) told from the point-of-view of an obtuse British imperialist.

As these summaries might indicate, the stories in this year’s Best American volume focus more on characters implicated in unjust systems rather than on rebels or victims. I found myself wondering if this represented a defiance of discourse on writer’s social media: in recent years, YA Twitter spawned viral assertions calling into question the morality of writers who wrote morally dubious characters. As Oren Ashkenazi asserted, “Without any additional context, a protagonist’s actions receive authorial endorsement by default.” However, the short stories collected here mostly depart from such social media–prescribed mandates, trusting the reader to interpret characters and situations for themselves.

A related reflection: The high-water mark of the new millennium’s Age of Earnestness (the supposed successor to the 1990s Age of Irony) was directly tied to the rise of Twitter, as well as to a reading culture where attempts at nuanced expression could swiftly fall victim to dogpiles and hot takes. At least 12 of the 20 stories included in this volume (several of them from writers outspoken on social justice issues) were published in online magazines in 2023 in the wake of Twitter’s post-Musk exodus. Writing this review in the aftermath of the American election, I cannot help but perceive these stories as anticipatory responses to a changed technological and social culture. They are less overt in their depiction of “good” politics than previous entries in the Best American series, more interested in the psychology of “bad” and morally ambiguous characters, and more interested in depicting characters whose ability to change oppressive systems is limited or nonexistent.

Of course, the stories gathered in a Best American volume may merely reflect the preferences of an individual guest editor as opposed to field-wide trends. (And I have no doubt that a writer like N. K. Jemisin, who edited the 2018 volume, would have selected some different stories from Howey’s picks.) Nevertheless, insofar as the Best American volumes provide a snapshot of the field in a given moment of time, this one depicts worlds and characters fraught with ambivalence, where solutions are hard to find and victories a long way off. For genres often credited with imagining alternative futures or decried as escapist, it is a notable pattern.

As with previous entries, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 has brought together a remarkable set of stories that illustrate a range of approaches to speculative fiction. I have some quibbles: I would have liked to have seen a story or two from a literary magazine make the cut, as I think the juxtaposition of stories from popular genre magazines with those from The New Yorker and Granta better captures the larger conversations happening in the field. For teaching purposes, I would have loved an introductory essay that contextualizes the stories within the larger field of SF publishing, as one finds in Ellen Datlow’s excellent Best Horror of the Year anthologies. The Best American series format works against such comprehensive introductory essays, but as a teacher, I (unfairly) want one anyway.

But these are quibbles, not defining complaints. This edition of the Best American series is as strong as any of its predecessors, and the stories assembled here serve as excellent examples of inventive genre storytelling. The most striking of these stories invite readers to follow characters as they try to sustain relationships and a sense of self in uncertain futures—as good a theme as any for the beginning of 2025.