Best of British SF 2018 Read online

  Best of British

  Science Fiction

  2018

  Edited by Donna Scott

  NewCon Press

  England

  First edition, published in the UK August 2019 by NewCon Press

  NCP 210 (hardback)

  NCP 211 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Donna Scott

  Cover Art copyright © 2019 by Les Edwards

  This compilation copyright © 2019 by Ian Whates

  “Providence” copyright © 2018 by Alastair Reynolds, originally appeared in 2001: An Odyssey In Words

  (NewCon Press)

  “Talking to Ghosts at the Edge of the World” copyright © 2018 by Lavie Tidhar, originally in Infinity's End

  “The Miracle Lambs of Minane” copyright © 2018 by Finbarr O’Reilly, originally appeared in Clarkesworld

  “Territory Blank” copyright © 2018 by Aliya Whiteley, originally appeared in Interzone

  “Throw Caution” copyright © 2018 by Tim Major, originally appeared in Interzone

  “Golgotha” copyright © 2018 by Dave Hutchinson, originally appeared in 2001: An Odyssey In Words

  (NewCon Press)

  “Salvation” copyright © 2018 by Dave Bradley, originally in The Hotwells Horror & Other Stories (Far Horizons)

  “Waterbirds” copyright © 2018 G.V. Anderson, originally appeared in Lightspeed

  “Buddy System” copyright © 2018 by Mike Morgan, originally appeared in Mind Candy (CreateSpace)

  “Do No Harm” copyright © 2018 by Anna Ibbotson, originally appeared in Shoreline of Infinity

  “A Change of Heart” copyright © 2018 by Hannah Tougher, originally appeared in Idle Ink

  “Birnam Platoon” copyright © 2018 by Natalia Theodoridou, originally appeared in Interzone

  “Good” copyright © 2018 by Sunyi Dean, originally appeared in Flash Fiction Online

  “Hard Times in Nuovo Genova” © 2018 by Chris Barnham, originally appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show

  “The Escape Hatch” copyright © 2018 by Matthew de Abaitua, originally appeared in 2001: An Odyssey In Words

  (NewCon Press)

  “P.Q.” copyright © 2018 by James Warner, originally appeared in Interzone

  “The Purpose of the Dodo is to be Extinct” copyright © 2018 by Malcolm Devlin, originally in Interzone

  “Cat and Mouse” copyright © 2018 by David Tallerman, originally appeared in Bubble Off Plumb (Feral Cat) “Before They Left” copyright © 2018 by Colin Greenland, originally appeared in 2001: An Odyssey In Words

  (NewCon Press)

  “Harry's Shiver” copyright © 2018 by Esme Carpenter, originally appeared in Shoreline of Infinity

  “The Whisperer” copyright © 2018 by J.K. Fulton, originally appeared in Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Anthology 2018 (Dahlia Publishing)

  “Death of the Grapevine” copyright © 2018 by Teika Marija Smits, originally appeared in Café Stories

  (Comma Press)

  “Rainsticks” copyright © 2018 by Matt Thompson, originally appeared in Aliterate

  “The Veilonaut's Dream” copyright © 2018 by Henry Szabranski, originally appeared in Clarkesworld

  “F Sharp 4” copyright © 2018 by Tim Pieraccini, originally appeared in Triangulation: Harmony And Dissonance (Createspace)

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  ISBN: 978-1-912950-35-5 (hardback)

  978-1-912950-36-2 (softback)

  Cover art by Les Edwards

  Cover design by Ian Whates

  Text layout by Storm Constantine

  Editor’s Acknowledgement

  A huge thank you to Ian Whates and Newcon Press for once more inviting me to edit a Best of British Science Fiction anthology. I can’t describe the immense pleasure seeking out these stories brings me. Thanks to all the editors and publishers who have allowed me to reprint their stories; Pete Sutton and Neil Williamson who also gave me recommendations, and to Tom Jordan, my beta reader. Thank you all for your invaluable help.

  2018: An Introduction

  Donna Scott

  I am writing this introduction shortly after a flurry of genre shortlists have been announced, and the writing community is abuzz with excitement and anticipation.

  It makes a change from a couple of weeks ago when there was more of a sense of outrage and scorn, after a big-name literary author deigned to dip his toe in genre waters proclaiming that he was going to be writing “not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you.” The old ‘silly spaceships’ argument about the shallowness of genre is inferred once again. We see it again and again in many forms, like remakes of War of the Worlds, which is in itself fought over by those who would claim it to be a ‘classic’ or ‘genre’ work of fiction from time to time.

  So, Ian McEwan sounds just like a real science fiction writer – like an Ursula Le Guin, or a Stephen Baxter, or a Gareth L. Powell! – but he is also not a real science fiction writer, because he’s turned out to be superior in his thinking to all the actual science fiction writers, just like the Adams in his novel Machines Like Me are to men. So, is he saying he is in fact a robot? And always has been… Wow, that’s meta.

  There is an additional motivation to review his book (a lot of them are good) from the ton of extra hype such fuss generates, and for a while it has been practically the only book I’ve seen advertised on railway station posters. So how wonderful that all the great stuff that was written in 2018 is now coming along in a burst of news to eclipse it.

  Not least, that one of the stories in this volume made it onto the shortlist for the BSFA Best Short Fiction Awards this year: Malcolm Devlin’s “The Purpose of the Dodo is to Become Extinct”. Another contributor, Aliya Whiteley, has found her novel Loosening Skin on the shortlist for the 33rd Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Alastair Reynolds’ Elysium Fire and Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land are on the Locus 2019 Finalist Science Fiction Novel shortlist. I extend my congratulations to all of them.

  It almost goes without saying that science fiction writers do write about the human condition; about our present situation. And yet, we do need to be reminded of this it seems, because of the scrutiny invited by those big-name literary authors who come along to play in the sandbox every so often and cast a little shade in the process.

  In choosing stories for this volume, I did feel inclined to avoid the sorts of stories that made big pronouncements in the narration about the way things are. Instead, there were plenty of great stories to choose from that evoke real human relationships, tangible characters facing soul-shattering dilemmas, imbued with emotional realism; stories which placed us in the heart of uncannily familiar worlds. This is the zeitgeist of 2018, turning to 2019 and looking beyond. We have stories that offer dreamlike glimpses of pristine worlds that will destroy us before we destroy them; we have stories of work-based friendships, mistrust and isolation; of alienation and othering; we have stories of slavery given an acceptable face through beautiful voice and the ever-present need to keep fighting injustice; we have stories of bodily choice being made a crime; we have stories of rebellions we thought we’d already had but need to have again; we have another end to childhood. And we have the murder of story itself… involving an AI.

  Many of the writers selected for this anthology aren’t big names backed up by huge marketing departments, but hopefully discovering them here will pique your interest. If story is a mirror, reflecting ourselves back to ourselves, welcome to the hall of mirrors.
Be entranced by skilful storytelling and beautiful language; be immersed in fascinating landscapes; be inspired to seek out more work by these wonderful storytellers… In fact, I suggest you make that your mission for 2019. Do believe the hype.

  Donna Scott

  Northampton, May 2019

  Providence

  Alastair Reynolds

  They threw petals into the capsule before sealing me in. Pastor Selestat hammered the door, the final signal for departure. I nodded, read his lips:

  Goodbye, Goodwoman Marudi.

  I braced. The ejection sequence shot me out of the hull, into interstellar space.

  The capsule wheeled, trimming its orientation. I had my first good view of the Dandelion since being packed aboard with the other pilgrims, before they showed us to the dormitories.

  Ten kilometres long, whale-bellied, speckled with ten thousand tiny windows. And at the far end, where there should have been the swelling of its Inflator Drive, a scorched and mangled stump.

  “This doesn’t have to be the end,” I said, voice trembling as I took in the desperation of my fellow crewmembers. “We can still make something of the expedition.”

  “Maybe you haven’t been paying attention,” said Selestat, falling into the sarcasm that had served him well since the faultlines appeared. “We have no engine. Not since you and your technician friends decided to run a systems test without adequate …”

  “Don’t blame Marudi,” said Goodman Atrato, one of the propulsion clerics. “Whatever decisions were taken, she wasn’t part of them. And she’s right to look at ways in which we can salvage something. We have an obligation – a moral prerogative.”

  “Don’t talk to us about morals …” started Goodwoman Revda, open and closing her fist.

  Before someone lashed out, I strode to a wall and brought up a schematic I’d pre-loaded. It had a drunken, sketchy look to it, my coordination still sluggish.

  “Say we’re here,” I said, jabbing at a point two thirds of the way along the line that connected Earth and Providence. “Doesn’t have to be exact.” A smudge-like representation of the Dandelion appeared under my fingertip, skewered by that line. “Given the engine damage, there’s no way for us to slow down now. Any sort of settlement of the target system is out of the question.”

  “Tell us something we don’t know,” Selestat said.

  “But we can still redeem ourselves,” I said, tapping at the wall again, making the ship zip along the line. “When we reach the target system we’ll sail through it in only a few days. We can use that time to gather information.”

  “No use to us,” Revda said.

  “No,” I agreed. “But one day Earth will send out another ship. We’ll be able to give them the data we didn’t have. Maps, surface conditions …weather systems, atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, detailed biomarkers … they’ll be able to shape the expedition much more efficiently.” I swallowed, knowing that the truth needed to be stated, however unpalatable. “We’ll die. That’s inevitable. But we can do this one good thing for the pilgrims to come.”

  “One chance,” Atrato said, looking grim. “Better make sure we get it right.”

  I touched the wall again, making the ship spring back to its earlier position. “No. Two chances. We commit the Dandelion to one approach. Most of our eggs in that basket, yes. But if we launch a service capsule now, it can give us a second pair of eyes, an observational baseline.”

  A slanting line peeled away from the ship. As the ship moved, a dot diverged along the line. That was the capsule, putting more and more distance between itself and the mother vessel.

  “Just one snag,” Revda said. “The service capsules don’t run themselves. Some fool would need to be inside that thing the whole time. Or did you forget that?”

  I met her scorn with a smile. “I didn’t, no.”

  I watched the Dandelion diminish, fading to a dim grey speck.

  Ahead was a red star only a little brighter than any of the others. Still much too far for the naked eye to make out its accompaniment of planets, much less any useful details. But that would change by the time I emerged from hibernation.

  As I readied the capsule for the long sleep, Selestat asked me how I was doing.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ve got a job to do, something useful. That’s enough for me. Just make sure you get a good set of observations from your end of the baseline, and we’ll give Earth something to really make them grateful.”

  “It’s a good thing that you’re doing, Goodwoman.”

  “Duty,” I answered, moving my hand to close the communication link. “That’s all.”

  I opened my eyes to silence and loneliness. And squinted them shut just as quickly.

  A sun’s brightness flooded the capsule. I raised my palm to the window glass, trying to catch some of that life-giving warmth. That was the light we had been promised, the light that should have been giving us sustenance as we made a home on Providence, establishing a human foothold around another star.

  But this distant warmth, conveyed to my skin through glass, was the closest I would get to feeling that star’s nourishment. Providence would never be ours. The best we could do now was turn our long-range instruments onto that planet, imagining the breezes we would never feel, the shorelines we would never touch. But we do so dutifully, pouring our souls into that work, making the best observations we could, and committing our findings back to Earth, so that a second expedition might begin their journey with a huge advantage compared to our own.

  My own part in this endeavour was trivially small. I was under no illusions about that. At best, I’d be filling in a few unimportant gaps in our coverage.

  What mattered was the symbolism of my journey. By proposing the idea of the capsule, and then volunteering to crew it, I had provided a unifying focus for the crew. Selestat, Atrato and the others had pulled back from the brink. My sacrifice was visible, unarguable. It had inspired cooperation and reconciliation across the divisions. The ship’s destiny remained unchanged, but at least now we had found a purpose, a common dignity.

  I felt a quiet contentment. I had done the right thing. We had done the right thing.

  A comms squirt came in from the Dandelion.

  “Thought you’d appreciate these images of Providence,” Selestat said, after some awkward preliminaries. “We’ve been weeping over them for hours, so it’s only fair to share some of our sorrow. It’s more beautiful than we ever imagined, Goodwoman Marudi. Pristine, untamed – an Eden. It’ll make a lovely world for some other pilgrim.”

  “But not us,” I whispered.

  He was right. The images were gorgeous, heart-breaking. Azure seas, gold-fringed coasts, green forests, windswept savannahs, diamond-bright mountain-ranges. A world we could have lived on, with little modification. A world that could have been ours.

  I swallowed down my sadness. It was wrong to be envious of those who would come after us, those who would actually know the airs of their world, its fragrances and evening moods. Better to do something that would guide their passage, something that would help them. They would be grateful, I was sure. They would build monuments to our generosity.

  Something caught my eye.

  It was from the capsule’s own sensor summary, nothing to do with the images Selestat had sent.

  The capsule had picked up something on the unlit face of Providence. It was on an area of that world which would never be visible from the main ship, one of the blindspots I was supposed to fill-in for the sake of completeness.

  A thermal signature.

  I stared at it, waiting for some transient fault to clear itself. But the signature remained. If anything, it was growing brighter, more distinct against background darkness.

  I told the capsule to concentrate its sensors on that area, while it was still in view.

  The image sharpened.

  The thermal smudge was on a coastal inlet, exactly where we might have chosen to place a settlement. It was a harbour cit
y, with spidering lines radiating out to more distant communities. These too were warming, beginning to glow against darkness. Lava-lines of communication and travel and energy-distribution. Hot moving sparks of vehicles, returning to the sky.

  I understood.

  They had dimmed their lights, turned off their power, during the period when they would have been a risk of detection, even when they were out of direct sight of the main ship. But now they thought they were safe. They were bringing their city and its surroundings out of dormancy, restarting generators, resuming normal patterns of life.

  I felt puzzlement at first.

  Then suspicion.

  Finally, a slow rising fury.

  Earth had already got here. By some unguessable means they had come up with something faster than our Inflator Drive. While we were sleeping, they had reached Providence and settled it.

  Our efforts were pointless, our noble intentions irrelevant. The people on Providence knew of our existence. They were aware of our survival, aware of our plight, and still they wished to hide their presence from us.

  Not because we were a threat to them, or of any larger consequence.

  I think we were an embarrassment.

  We were like shabby old relatives stumbling out of the night, bringing unwanted gifts and favours. Our existence made them uncomfortable. They wanted us to go away. So they damped their fires, battened their doors, shuttered their windows and kept very, very still, pretending no one was at home.

  All of which would have been theirs to know, their secret to hold, their shame to live with, except for one thing.

  They had not known of me.

  So, something of a dilemma.

  My fury hasn’t gone away. It boils in me like a hot tide, demanding release. I want to send this news back to the Dandelion, so that they can share in my righteous anger. That would be the proper, dutiful thing. My fellow pilgrims do not deserve to remain in ignorance about this callous, calculated act of deception.