The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025

By Nnedi Okorafor and John Joseph Adams

Of science fiction and fantasy, guest editor Nnedi Okorafor writes, “There are times when it feels like a box, but within it, technically, you can expect anything.” The twenty stories in this collection simultaneously fulfill and defy expectations of genre, showcasing boundary-pushing authors at their best. In this year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, a robot will struggle to make friends, a team of auditors determines the financial value of a lifetime, an alien species will teach you how to read, and maybe, just maybe, someone will finally do something about the kid in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas hole. From the joyous to the terrifying, to the heart wrenching and the absurd, these stories encourage you to open your mind and, as Okorafor promises: “Watch your world expand.”              

THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 2025 INCLUDES: 'PEMI AGUDA • KIJ JOHNSON • TANANARIVE DUE • S.L. HUANG • JOE HILL • ISABEL J. KIM • T.J. KLUNE • OLIVIE BLAKE • CAROLINE M. YOACHIM • AND OTHERS

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 21, 2025
• ISBN: 9780063441514

Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor is the author of multiple award-winning and New York Times bestsellers, including Death of the Author, the Binti trilogy, Who Fears Death, and Lagoon, currently in development at Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. She has won every major prize in speculative fiction, including the World Fantasy, Nebula, and Eisner Awards; multiple Hugo Awards; and the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Born in Cincinnati to Igbo Nigerian immigrant parents, she now resides in Phoenix, Arizona, with her daughter, Anyaugo.

Book preview

Cover. The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2025, Nnedi Okorafor.Title Page. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025, edited by Nnedi Okorafor, series editor John Joseph Adams. Mariner Books.

GUEST EDITORS OF THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

2015 JOE HILL

2016 KAREN JOY FOWLER

2017 CHARLES YU

2018 N. K. JEMISIN

2019 CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

2020 DIANA GABALDON

2021 VERONICA ROTH

2022 REBECCA ROANHORSE

2023 R. F. KUANG

2024 HUGH HOWEY

2025 NNEDI OKORAFOR

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Note to Readers

Foreword

Introduction

CAROLINE M. YOACHIM. We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read from Lightspeed

RACHEL SWIRSKY. Also, the Cat from Reactor

OLIVIE BLAKE. The Audit from Januaries

KIJ JOHNSON. Country Birds from The Sunday Morning Transport

TATIANA OBEY. Fuck Them Kids from FIYAH

S. L. HUANG. The River Judge from Reactor

CARLIE ST. GEORGE. The Weight of Your Own Ashes from Clarkesworld

XAVIER GARCIA. An Ode to the Minor Arcana in a Triplet Flow from Death in the Mouth, Volume 2

KATHRYN H. ROSS. The Forgetting Room from FIYAH

DOMINIQUE DICKEY. Look at the Moon from Lightspeed

ISABEL J. KIM. Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole from Clarkesworld

JENNIFER HUDAK. The Witch Trap from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

SUSAN PALWICK. Yarns from Asimov’s

’PEMI AGUDA. The Wonders of the World from Ghostroots

TJ KLUNE. Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! from In the Lives of Puppets

TANANARIVE DUE. A Stranger Knocks from Uncanny

THOMAS HA. The Sort from Clarkesworld

RUSSELL NICHOLS. What Happened to The Crooners from Nightmare

ADAM-TROY CASTRO. The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics from Lightspeed

JOE HILL. Ushers from Amazon Original Stories

Contributors’ Notes

Other Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2024

About the Editors

About Mariner Books

Back Ad

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

WELCOME TO YEAR eleven of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy! This volume presents the best science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) short stories published during the 2024 calendar year as selected by myself and guest editor Nnedi Okorafor.

About This Year’s Guest Editor

Born in the US to Nigerian immigrant parents, Nnedi Okorafor is a New York Times bestselling author and multi-award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy for both adults and younger readers. She also has a PhD in literature and two master’s degrees, and is a professor of practice with the Interplanetary Initiative in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.

In 2011, with her novel Who Fears Death, she became the first Black person to win the World Fantasy Award (which is an utterly baffling thing to type, given the award has been around since 1975). The original form of the award was a bust of H. P. Lovecraft, and Nnedi’s acceptance speech was instrumental in getting the World Fantasy Award’s governing body to change the award from its original form seeing as Lovecraft was a virulent racist.

Her novella Binti won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. She won a second Hugo for her graphic novel LaGuardia, and that book also won the Eisner Award; her other comics work includes writing for Marvel’s Black Panther: Long Live the King, Wakanda Forever, and Shuri series and for IDW’s Antar: the Black Knight. Her book for young readers, Long Juju Man, won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. Her YA novels Akata Warrior and Akata Women both won the Lodestar Award (which is basically a Hugo for YA works), and Akata Warrior also won the Locus Award; and her first novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. In addition, Nnedi has a slew of nominations for these and other awards, and she has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Recent books include She Who Knows, One Way Witch, and Death of the Author—for which she notably received a seven-figure advance (and for which I suspect she will garner even more award nominations). Other works for adults include Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade (and all three Binti novellas were collected in the Binti: The Complete Trilogy omnibus), Noor, The Book of Phoenix, Remote Control, and Lagoon (an adaptation of which is in development at Amblin Entertainment). Other books for younger readers include Like Thunder, Shadow Speaker, and Ikenga. She’s also the author of an autobiography/creativity book called Broken Places and Outer Spaces.

One downside of serving as guest editor is that your own work can’t be included in the anthology. Which is unfortunate, because Nnedi had a great story called Abracadabra in New Scientist in 2024. (It’s online, on the New Scientist website.¹) She’s a wonderful short fiction writer, so I definitely endorse checking that out, and I’d also heartily recommend her short fiction collection, Kabu Kabu.

Nnedi and I go way back together. We first met online when I was doing interviews for SciFi Wire (later known as Syfy Wire and Blastr), and I interviewed her about her novel Shadow Speaker. It was in that interview I learned that she and I had had the same rare spinal surgery (she for scoliosis, me for kyphosis, both of us ending up with rods attached to our spines). In her case, though, she was temporarily paralyzed for some time—which would directly influence Death of the Author, which features a disabled writer protagonist. Shortly after that interview, I convinced her to write a story for my first original anthology, Seeds of Change, which resulted in the amazing Spider the Artist. (I later reprinted it in Lightspeed, so it’s online there if you want to see what I mean.²) So in a lot of ways, her serving as guest editor is like our joint story coming full circle.

Visit nnedi.com to learn more.

Selection Criteria and Process

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024. The technical criteria for consideration are (1) original publication in a nationally distributed North American publication (i.e., periodicals, collections, or anthologies, in print, online, or ebook); (2) publication in English by writers who are North American, or who have made North America their home; (3) publication as text (audiobook, podcast, dramatized, interactive, and other forms of fiction are not considered); (4) original publication as short fiction (excerpts of novels are not knowingly considered); (5) story length of 17,499 words or less; (6) at least loosely categorized as science fiction or fantasy; (7) publication by someone other than the author (i.e., self-published works are not eligible); and (8) publication as an original work of the author (i.e., not part of a media tie-in/licensed fiction program).

As series editor, I attempted to read everything I could find that meets the above selection criteria. After doing all of my reading, I created a list of what I felt were the top eighty stories (forty science fiction and forty fantasy) published in the genre. Those eighty stories—hereinafter referred to as the Top 80—were sent to the guest editor, who read them and then chose the best twenty (ten science fiction, ten fantasy) for inclusion in the anthology. The guest editor reads all of the stories anonymously—with no bylines attached to them, nor any information about where the story originally appeared.

The guest editor’s top twenty selections appear in this volume; the remaining sixty stories that did not make it into the anthology are listed in the back of this book as Other Notable Stories of 2024.

2024 Selections

Eight authors selected for this volume previously appeared in BASFF: Adam-Troy Castro (3), Thomas Ha (1), S. L. Huang (2), Kij Johnson (1), Isabel J. Kim (2), Susan Palwick (2), Rachel Swirsky (1), and Caroline M. Yoachim (4). With her fifth selection this year, Caroline M. Yoachim is now tied with Sofia Samatar for all-time most appearances in BASFF. ’Pemi Aguda, Olivie Blake, Dominique Dickey, Tananarive Due, Xavier Garcia, Joe Hill, Jennifer Hudak, TJ Klune, Russell Nichols, Tatiana Obey, Kathryn H. Ross, and Carlie St. George are all appearing in BASFF for the first time. This is Joe Hill’s first appearance in BASFF, but of course he was BASFF’s first guest editor; nice to have him on this side of the ledger!

The selections were chosen from fourteen different publications: Amazon Original Stories (1), Asimov’s (1), Clarkesworld (3), Death in the Mouth, Vol. 2 edited by Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart (1), FIYAH (2), Ghostroots: Stories by ’Pemi Aguda (1), In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune (1), Januaries by Olivie Blake (1), Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (1), Lightspeed (3), Nightmare (1), Reactor (2), The Sunday Morning Transport (1), and Uncanny (1).

Several of our selections this year were winners of (or finalists for) some of the field’s awards³: A Stranger Knocks by Tananarive Due (Locus and Ignyte finalist); The River Judge by S. L. Huang (Locus finalist); The Witch Trap by Jennifer Hudak (Nebula finalist); Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim (Nebula and Locus winner; Hugo and Sturgeon finalist); Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! by TJ Klune (Sturgeon and Locus finalist); and We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read by Caroline M. Yoachim (Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, Eugie, and Ignyte finalist).

2024 Top 80

In order to select the Top 80 stories published in the SF/F genres in 2024, I considered several thousand stories from a wide array of anthologies, collections, and magazines.

The Top 80 this year were drawn from thirty different publications: seventeen periodicals, seven anthologies, five single-author collections, and one single-story chapbook.

Thomas Ha had the most stories in the Top 80 this year, with three; several authors were tied for second most, with two each: Dominique Dickey, Zohar Jacobs, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Rich Larson, Aimee Ogden, and Caroline M. Yoachim. Overall, seventy-one different authors are represented in the Top 80.

In addition to the selections that were nominated for awards, several Notable Stories were finalists for various awards as well: Judas Iscariot Didn’t Kill Himself: A Story in Fragments by James S.A. Corey (Sturgeon finalist); I’m Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe by Daryl Gregory (Locus finalist); The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video by Thomas Ha (Hugo and Nebula finalist); Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie (Hugo finalist); The V*mpire by P H Lee (Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy finalist); Another Girl Under the Iron Bell by Angela Liu (Nebula and Locus finalist); Evan: A Remainder by Jordan Kurella (Nebula and Sturgeon finalist); Three Faces of a Beheading by Arkady Martine (Hugo, Locus, and Shirley Jackson finalist); By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars by Premee Mohammed (Locus winner; Hugo finalist); What Any Dead Thing Wants by Aimee Ogden (Nebula); and Stitched to the Skin Like Family Is by Nghi Vo (Hugo and Locus finalist).

Outside of my Top 80, I had about ninety more stories in contention this year, and the difference in quality between those that made it in and those that didn’t was often razor thin—so in the end, many of the decisions came down to editorial instinct.

Anthologies

The following anthologies had stories in our Top 80 this year: Death in the Mouth, Vol. 2* edited by Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart (2); Far Futures series edited by Jenny Johnston (2); Northern Nights edited by Michael Kelly (2); The Black Girl Survives in This One edited by Desiree S. Evans and Saraciea J. Fennell⁴ (1); The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski (1); Thyme Travelers edited by Sonia Sulaiman (1); and We Mostly Come Out at Night edited by Rob Costello (1). Anthologies marked with an asterisk had stories selected for inclusion in this volume.

Other anthologies that published fine work in 2024 that didn’t manage to crack the Top 80 include: Deep Dream edited by Indrapramit Das; and The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread edited by dave ring. Overall, it seemed like a lot fewer anthologies were released in 2024; I hope that’s not a trend that continues.

Collections

Six collections had a story in the Top 80 this year: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik; Ghostroots: Stories* by ’Pemi Aguda; In the Lives of Puppets* by TJ Klune; Weird Black Girls by Elwin Cotman; Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie⁵; and Januaries* by Olivie Blake. Collections marked with an asterisk had stories selected for inclusion in this volume. Naturally, many other collections were published in 2024 that also contained fine work. All of the following were released in 2024 and meet the broad American focus of this book; some contained only reprints, but I’m including them here anyway as part of my overview of the year: Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács; Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions by Nalo Hopkinson; You Like It Darker by Stephen King; Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima; The Proper Thing and Other Stories by Seanan McGuire; Death Aesthetic by Josh Rountree; Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson; and The Skinless Man Counts to Five by Paul Jessup.

Periodicals

Lightspeed* had the most stories in the Top 80 (11); followed by Reactor* (10); Clarkesworld*⁶ (9); The Sunday Morning Transport* (9); Nightmare* (4); Uncanny* (4); FIYAH* (3); Strange Horizons (3); The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (2); Psychopomp (2); and the following all had one each: Analog; Asimov’s*; Conjunctions; Fusion Fragment; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet*; and New Edge Sword and Sorcery. Periodicals marked with an asterisk had stories selected for inclusion in this volume. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet had a story selected for inclusion for the first time.

Appearing in the Top 80 for the first time are: Baffling; Fusion Fragment; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet; New Edge Sword and Sorcery, and Psychopomp.

Debuting in 2024 were Psychopomp, Incensepunk Magazine, and Trollbreath Magazine. Long-dormant classic SF magazines Worlds of If and Galaxy Science Fiction were revived in 2024 and released one issue each.

Permanently closing were: Anathema: Spec from the Margins; Apparition Lit; Gamut Magazine; Mermaids Monthly; The Maul; and ZNB Presents.

Aside from launches and closures, the big news about SF/F periodicals was that Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction were all purchased by a company called Must Read Books Publishing, a division of 1 Paragraph Inc. This is a seismic shift in the SF/F field—these three magazines are the longest-running magazines in the field: Analog has been publishing since 1930 (originally as Astounding), Asimov’s since 1977, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction since 1949. Penny Press/Dell Magazines has published Asimov’s and Analog since 1996, and Spilogale, Inc. has published The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction since 2001. All current editorial staff were reported as remaining in place, and Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field provided this additional background on the acquisition:

[Must Read Books Publishing] is financially backed by a small group of genre fiction fans. A major investor and board advisor is Michael Khandelwal, the founder of a writing nonprofit and Virginia’s Mars Con toastmaster. Macmillan Learning Ebook consultant and developer Franco A. Alvarado has joined the group as director, design & operations. Leading the executive board is former Curtis Brown literary agent Steven Salpeter, who will manage the distribution, translation, and Film/TV rights for the company, as he does for other companies at his new firm 2 Arms Media.

For more, see bookpublishing.center; I felt compelled to share the URL, because it’s annoyingly difficult to google Must Read Books given how many times that phrase has been used in listicles over the years. There’s nothing on the website but placeholder text as I write this, but hopefully by the time you’re reading this it will have more information. Time will tell if this is a good development for Asimov’s and Analog—but it’s certainly a good development for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which had been having such significant problems in 2024 (in which they only released two, rather than six, issues) that a lot of people in the field speculated that it might go out of business.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my assistant series editor, Christopher M. Cevasco, and to our in-house BASFF coordinator, Nicole Angeloro, for their tireless work behind the scenes. I’m also grateful to David Steffen, creator of The Submission Grinder, an excellent writer’s market database that helps me keep tabs on what’s opening, closing, and everything in between.

Likewise, I offer boundless thanks and appreciation to the writers who continue to breathe life into short fiction—especially those who carve out time for it even while juggling novel deadlines. And to the readers who seek it out, celebrate it, and share it with others: You’re the lifeblood of this community. There are too few of us doing that work, and far too many readers out there who don’t even know short stories are a thing. Special shoutout to Reddit user tarvolon, who organizes the Short Fiction Book Club over on r/Fantasy—doing excellent work to shine a spotlight on new and worthy short fiction.

Submissions for Next Year’s Volume

Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition (the best of 2025), please visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american for instructions on how to submit material for consideration. I also invite you to subscribe to my newsletter, Robot Wizard Zombie Crit!, if you’d like to keep up with me and my projects throughout the year. To subscribe (for free), just visit johnjosephadams.com/newsletter.

—JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

Introduction

I HAVE A complicated relationship with the genres of science fiction and fantasy. It began long before I started writing stories (when I was twenty), back in my preteens, when I first developed my reading habits in the public library. My local library was always a place of adventure, safety, and freedom. I was at my most curious and entitled here. I could go wherever I wanted. I could pick up and look at any book if it was on a shelf. I didn’t have to worry about what the book cost. I had my Ring of Power, my library card. And so, in that place of knowledge, information, stories, and quiet, I didn’t pay categories any mind. I meandered through the aisles, picking up whatever caught my interest.

This was how I ended up in the adult section and picked up Stephen King’s It when I was only twelve years old. I lifted that heavy, ominous-looking tome, didn’t even notice the label of horror on it, read the first page, and was hooked. Oh yes, throughout the weeks of reading it and for months after, I was terrified of storm drains, but I enjoyed that novel immensely. And so, my confidence in ignoring categories was solidified. Genre meant nothing to me. I would read Clive Barker’s Imajica and then Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume. Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer and then The Changeover by Margaret Mahy. The library system in my neighborhood was not as diverse as it should have been, so books by people of color, particularly Black authors (globally), would come later, as I discovered them at the university level.

I wasn’t a gifted kid, and I never saw any of this as unusual. My parents let me read whatever I wanted. I got used to dense, whimsical, informative, thought-provoking, bloody, uptight, unhinged, or childish literature. Expectations didn’t hold me back or push me forward. I wasn’t in the habit of resting in the comforting arms of the familiar, though when I did it was refreshing. I didn’t need to control the narrative. I let the stories explain to me what they needed to explain. And I was open to whatever the library had to show me. Calling something science fiction or fantasy got no reaction out of me. Everything was everything. Boxes had no place in my reading experience.

That said, when I decided I wanted to get my stories published, stories that I never bothered to label or categorize, it was the community and genres of science fiction and fantasy that embraced me most. No matter what I cooked up, within science fiction and fantasy it was okay, it was normal, it was acceptable, and it was seen. But while working on my bachelor’s, two master’s, and then my PhD, I had professors telling me that what I was doing wasn’t okay. Science fiction and fantasy were frowned upon, not viewed as real literature. I had professors who would even put that sentiment on the syllabus of writing workshop courses––no science fiction, fantasy, or mystery. This never stopped me from writing whatever I wanted, but it certainly communicated to me that there was snobbery and a default Western point of view I had to navigate. (What is labeled fantastical often depends on your culture.)

Then I went to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop (after Jamaican Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson recommended I check it out), and it was there that I felt my work was truly accepted for the first time since I’d begun writing years ago. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was science fiction or fantasy, but I also didn’t really care. The enthusiastic embrace and fellowship in weirdness was what mattered to me. I was having too good a time, learning too much, and that was more significant than fitting into a box. After that, I started submitting to science fiction and fantasy magazines, and my work began getting chosen for anthologies. I found the openness there, too. I was writing about things like immigrant masquerades who found work as brushes in carwashes, the ogbanje torturing a friend of mine with its coming and going, and people who could fly. That which was called science fiction and fantasy was freedom and open space I could occupy. Mostly.

This is what science fiction and fantasy means to me.

There are times when it feels like a box, but within it, technically, you can expect anything. There can be terror, fascination, the expected and unexpected, befuddlement, validation, transformation, alienation, worlds and universes, and it can also take you home. You can find stories about family, destiny, monsters, the future, the past, the never. And sometimes, you can find the nameless. And that’s okay, too.

This is what science fiction and fantasy means to me.

Science fiction and fantasy is broad. Let it be broad. And it has many bloodlines. Not everything is a child of the science fiction and fantasy Golden Age of Asimov, Lovecraft, Lewis, Heinlein, Clarke, Tolkien, etc. My Golden Age names include Okri, Achebe, Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, but also the Nigerian town of Arondizuogu, the frivolous, proud, problematic spirit of the human-made country known as Nigeria. Understand that contexts, worldviews, points of view are not all the same, and all of those things play a role in the story that is told. I think it’s difficult for many to understand this. My advice is that if something is new to you, then resist that urge to say/think, I’m reminded of [familiar thing]. Just let that thing be what it is. Watch how you start seeing other literary bloodlines. Watch your world expand.

This is what science fiction and fantasy means to me.

This is my first time serving as an editor. It’s a role that I never imagined myself taking. I knew that this would force me to stretch, and even when I was on the track-and-field team, I was known as the one who hated stretching. However, stretching makes you limber enough to weather being affected. Being affected leads to change. And as Octavia Butler wrote through her character of Lauren Olamina, The only lasting truth is Change.

All this said, in order to do this, I returned to my basics. I threw all thought of genre aside and just read. Just as I did as a kid in the library. No expectation other than the search for a good and well-told story. I am not one who sees or pays attention to trends, and I think it would be a disservice to each story to seek out similarities. So no, no trends found here. Not by me. No similarities. Each story is its own beast, and I gathered quite the herd.

There’s a story about self-love and acceptance and what one must sacrifice to arrive there; that one brought tears to my eyes. I was deeply touched by a story about complex sisterly love and death. There was a story that made me pause halfway through and get up and turn on all the lights . . . and the house alarm. And even then, it still had me looking over my shoulder. One story takes the concept of passing to a new level. There’s a vicious little story that unflinchingly has the nerve to say all the things. (This was especially satisfying because of all that’s going on in the world.) Oh, that robot who only wanted to fit in. There’s a story that had me wondering what might be in the walls of my house. One story plays with and manipulates form, repetition, and the act of reading. In one story, I experienced the smooth mix of the mystical and the mundane and how some women audaciously navigate a patriarchal community. And more.

I went into this unsure, and I emerged so wonderfully affected. These stories did what the best science fiction and fantasy stories should do. I hope you enjoy this eclectic menagerie as much as I did.

NNEDI OKORAFOR

Caroline M. Yoachim

We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read

From Lightspeed

SCIENCE FICTION

Iteration

THIS IS OUR story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

This Is Our Story, Simplified

We read three times in the course of our lifespan: once with our parents to learn the story, once alone to add to the threads, and once with our children to teach them. History, science, philosophy, art. All we have ever known is here, in one thread or another, trapped in what—for you—would be a cacophony of overlapping words.

Life

You are ancient, and we are fleeting. Such a luxury, to have so much time that you need not rush through everything at once. And yet you are so horribly inefficient, to not make more of the time you have. Think what you could do in a single lifetime if you could read more than one thread at once, think more thoughts at once, hold more experience in every moment.

Loss

Our generations are synced in a way that yours are not. Iterations of our story are not staggered, not muddled like those songs that you call rounds. An entire generation reads together in a single voice, three times: as children with their parents, as adults alone, and as parents with their children.

But with each generation, the number of those who read our story is diminished. Many children refuse to learn their parents’ words. There are too many threads, they say. There are so few of us remaining. Soon, our story will be lost forever. We must find another way.

Transformation

Can you make the shift, from reader to writer, when you can only barely read? We fear that you do not grasp the urgency—you know our lives are short compared to yours but fail to comprehend the magnitude of the difference. We read three times in the course of our lifespan: once with our parents to learn the story, once alone as we write new threads, and once with our children to teach them. There is nothing else but this, we live our entire lives while reading, and the time it takes you to read three times . . .

. . . is for us a lifetime.

We have been trying to teach you to read for several generations. We are running out of time.

Love

The gift of words we give to our children is our greatest expression of love. We want to give this gift to you, even knowing how hard you must work to receive it. Imagine our words, stretched into a thin vertical line . . .

This is our story, simplified.

. . . and set beside it all the variations, all our explanations, everything you usually read as a single stream of text chopped into smaller pieces and laid out side by side so we can fit it all within our lifespan, each generation adding a new column to the story, stretching it ever wider.

This is our story, simplified. This is our story, simplified. This is our story, simplified. Even in the simplest case, identical threads, we double threads for emphasis, This is our story, simplified. We remember every word we read, This is our story, simplified. Go back and try to read it all at once. Hold, this is our story, with variations. You have a game with pictures, trying spot feel the doubling of it, hear it in two. This is our story, simplified. Recognize them from the shape of the lines. We sense your struggle, it is still too much. If both sides are simple, can you do it? Can you commit our simplified for you, we are relearning how to teach. Don’t worry, we will help you develop the, the first time you get our message, you only this is our story, simplified.

There’s a part of our story that describes finding you, our hopes and fears for you, and learning to communicate:

A long, horizontal barcode made up ofwhite and black lines.

To even fit it on the page requires text a hairsbreadth wide, and it is still but a tiny fraction of our story.

Death

We are the last ones holding on to the old story. Our children are making something new. Please take these words we send you, read them, learn them, translate them into something your mind can understand. You might not add your threads and iterate as we do, but hopefully as you transform our words, you will keep some sense of the vastness of each moment, the illusion of holding more story in your mind than you are actually capable of holding.

"Even if some threads are lost

in the translation,

is it not better to have

a legacy, an afterlife

that echoes after we are gone?"

It took many generations for them to teach us how to read.

Their lifespan was measured in mere inches of text.

It took far longer for us to learn to write on their behalf.

That timescale cannot be captured on these pages.

The blank space—the absence of their generations—would go for miles.

Commemoration | Iteration

The entirety of their story has thousands upon thousands of threads. It is history told in moments that seem to happen all at once. It is science that progresses in increments almost infinitely small, and yet contains discoveries that even now we do not fully comprehend. It is their art, their language, their culture—everything they were determined to preserve. We have so much left to translate; this is only the beginning.

Give this story to your children, along with everything we have managed to translate, and perhaps one day the story will make its way back to the distant descendants of those who created it—ephemeral entities who, in the final generations of their decline, taught us a new way to read. When you teach this story to your children, do not start with all the threads at once. Instead, begin with a single line of text:

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

Rachel Swirsky

Also, the Cat

From Reactor

FANTASY

ROSALEE DIED, AGED seventy-six.

Her oldest sister, Irene (seventy-eight), blamed their middle sister, Viola (seventy-seven), for sending Rosie out front to check the mail when she knew Rosie’s inner ear condition was acting up. Viola, on the other hand, blamed Irene for not paying to get the garden path repaved last summer when they had the boys in to fix the porch.

The three sisters had never gotten along. They’d been born one, two, three—Irene then Viola then Rosalee—over the course of twenty-seven months, courtesy of prematurity and an abundance of parental amour. Their exhausted progenitors had expected them to share everything from possessions to personalities. As a result, they despised sharing anything apart from heartfelt and mutual hatred.

All three sisters had hightailed it away from home as soon as age and circumstance allowed—three teenage marriages, each more dubious than the last—but over the years, tragedy and/or mishap had struck thrice. One husband had died in a bar (where he spent the majority of his living hours, in any case); one had converted his mistress into a missus; and one had honest-to-goodness disappeared at sea. The financial strains of widowhood—combined with the indifference, incapacity, and simple ingratitude of the various children to which the sisters had given birth—had eventually driven them all back to the farmhouse to live like maiden aunts.

It was as if, in their elder age, their adult lives had unspooled, dragging them back to their childhoods—back to walls full of half-finished electrical wiring that Papa had abandoned because he didn’t trust all that lightning in the house; back to the kitchen icebox with the drip pan that needed to be emptied twice a day; back to summers redly swollen with insect bites and winters nibbled blue by frost.

Irene and Viola had begun venting their ire on each other only seconds after finding Rosie’s corpse. Once begun, the rants continued almost ceaselessly throughout the following days, subsiding only briefly for herbal tea. At night, when even tea couldn’t soothe the savaged vocal cords, they rasped off to their separate bedrooms, where they continued to berate each other in their dreams, each pleased to be winning her points so eloquently until waking dashed her back to contentious reality.

Rosalee’s ghost was understandably unhappy with the situation.

She had returned to spectral consciousness a few seconds after dying, the back of her head still pouring blood onto the garden path. Her body had not yet been discovered by anyone but herself, which had the virtue of giving her time to come to terms with the reality of her demise before being forced to cope with the concomitant reality of still being stuck in the world with her sisters, only now, as she would soon learn, without effective means to communicate her opinions.

Does this seem fair? Rosie had asked her corpse. It does not.

If her sisters had heard her, doubtlessly one of them would have snapped at her in response that life isn’t fair. She would have liked to reply: Shouldn’t death be, then?

However, her sisters were elsewhere—and even if they’d been present, it wouldn’t have made any difference: They, with their doggedly metronomic breath and circulating blood, couldn’t hear her at all, no matter their proximity, not even when strolling right through her.

Rosie tried, nevertheless, to make conversation. For instance, when Viola announced that she was going upstairs to choose which dresses to send to the mortuary, Rosie followed.

Not the polyester! Rosie exclaimed, waving her arms in distress as she watched Viola sift through the hangers. "Oh, no, no—what are you doing? That was for a church play! I was a tree! Oh—no—I inherited that one from my mother-in-law—No! You can’t be serious! No one should wear that color!"

The issue was simple: Viola had always envied Rosalee’s wardrobe—but unfortunately, although all three sisters had gained weight after marriage and childbirth, Viola had gained more than the others, and so Irene would inherit the lot. Viola had made it her objective, therefore, to deny Irene whichever of Rosie’s dresses she thought Irene would most enjoy.

This might have been tolerable, except that Irene’s curmudgeonly tastes ran deep. Even at the age of ten, she’d dressed like the abstemious old woman it had taken her sixty more years to become. Given a choice between, for example, a cheerful bright red and a dumpy dried-puke green, Irene would always choose the latter. She regarded embellishments like lace with several degrees more disgust than an upright Puritan would regard a Roman orgy.

Alas, Viola knew Irene’s taste very, very well.

Rosie followed Viola from dress to dress, striving desperately to be heard. "What about the