The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Read Online Free Page A

share our planet and about whom, for all our centuries of cohabitation, we still know so little, even of the ones who actually speak our language.
    Sometimes the nonhumans were familiar fictional characters, like the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.
    Sometimes the nonhumans were machines, and some of these machines helped us with our human tasks, and some of them were inscrutable, just as if we hadn’t manufactured them ourselves, and some of them even wanted to hurt us. In some stories, they constituted the entire world.
    Sometimes the nonhumans were corporations and sometimes
they
were the world in which we lived.
    Sometimes the nonhumans were creatures who used to be humans but had changed.
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It hurt so much to see both sides.
    â€”“Three Bodies at Mitanni”
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    The Turing test continues to preoccupy science fiction writers. Where and when might machines become so human that the difference no longer matters? I read several stories dealing with this.
    But I also read a great many with the opposite trajectory. How much bodily modification can a human undergo, how many enhancements, replacements, reductions, before ceasing to be human?
    And one final critical theme: where and when does our empathy run out?
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Walk toward the point halfway between the moon and the cottage, and eventually you’ll come to the well.
    â€”“Things You Can Buy for a Penny”
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    For all the important, inexhaustible thematic richness of the issues above (and all the others that science fiction and fantasy are uniquely able to illuminate), I’ve come to realize that my particular attachment is often simply a matter of setting. These are the only modes of literature in which a story can happen absolutely anywhere. Here are stories set on planet, off planet, underwater, underground, in the jungle, in the village, in the apartment, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the liminal space of Iram, in the corporate offices of Geneertech, in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, in the Stonewall Riots, in the post-apocalypse, and in the 0s and 1s of the virtual world. The stories collected here take place in the near and far past, in the future, and in the present. Some of them are set outside of time altogether.
    As a result, you are never so aware of being completely inside the expansive, curious, and astonishing imagination of the writer in any other literature.
    A few months ago, I got a lovely letter from an uncle I’d lost touch with. He’d read my most recent novel and wanted to tell me so. It was the first novel of mine that he’d ever read. By way of explanation or possibly apology, he said that he rarely reads fiction. I hear this a lot. There are a great many readers who stick to nonfiction. They want to learn real things, they tell me, with a touching faith in the honesty of memoir and history.
    But my uncle’s reason was different. I never want my own mind overwhelmed with someone else’s mind, he said. I read that sentence over several times, so struck with the strangeness of it, the surprise.
    Because that being overwhelmed with someone else’s mind—that’s the whole reason I read. That’s the part I like the very best. In all the stories that follow this introduction, that was always the part I liked the very best.
    It’s exactly what I hope will happen here to you.
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As he once wandered the great expanse of the Gobi in his boyhood, so he now roams a universe without boundaries, in some dimension orthogonal to the ones we know.
    â€”“Ambiguity Machines”
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    ï»¿â€”K AREN J OY F OWLER

SOFIA SAMATAR
Meet Me in Iram
    FROM
Meet Me in Iram/Those Are Pearls
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    W E ARE FAMILIAR with gold, says Hume, and also with mountains; therefore, we are able to imagine a golden mountain. This idea may serve as an origin myth for Iram, the unconstructed city.
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    The city has several problems. (1) It is lacking in domestic objects. (2) It is lacking in