The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 Read Free Page B

inspire, enlighten, and ultimately, like Gully Foyle, transform ourselves.
    It is my immense privilege to be your guide and curator. I hope you enjoy the exhibit.
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    Editors, writers, and publishers who would like their work considered for next year’s edition, please visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american for instructions on how to submit material for consideration.
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    â€”J OHN J OSEPH A DAMS

Introduction: Launching Rockets
    W ONDER IS A blasting cap. It is an emotion that goes off with a bang, shattering settled beliefs, rattling the architecture of the mind, and clearing space for new ideas, new possibilities. Wonder is often thought of as a peaceful emotion, a sense of resounding inner quiet. Of course we would associate it with silence. The world always assumes an eerie hush after an explosion.
    Awe is TNT for the soul.
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    My own first experience with wonder came in the candy-coated package of science fiction: Richard Dreyfuss chasing aliens in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In some ways I never recovered from that first great detonation of amazement.
    In one pivotal scene, Dreyfuss is stopped at a malfunctioning railroad crossing when an alien spacecraft passes overhead, spearing him with a great shaft of light and causing objects to blow about the cab of his pickup in a frantic storm. Afterward, the side of his body that faced the driver’s side window is badly sunburned, although the incident occurred at night.
    And this is very like the effect the movie had on me. After it was over I felt irradiated, aglow,
charged.
    I never looked at a starry night the same way. The
clank-clank-clank
of the bell at a railroad crossing still evokes in me a shivery frisson of anticipation.
Close Encounters
shook loose a marvelous idea in my seven-year-old head: we are fish in the ocean of the universe, and there may be grand ships moving above us.
    I experienced another of these walloping explosions of feeling a few years later, when I first read
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, Ray Bradbury’s classic story of a carnival stocked with monsters and poisoned rides. No one who buys a ticket to Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show ever forgets what they saw there: the carousel that ages you, the illustrated man with a book of living stories inked onto his flesh.
    My awe, though, was not merely a reaction to Bradbury’s thrilling ideas. It was just as much a response to the shock of his sentences, the way he could fold a few words to create an indelible image, much as an origami artist may make a square of paper into a crane. One great verb, I discovered, had almost as much explosive power as any marvelous concept. The language of fiction could be as exciting as the subject matter. After
Something Wicked
, I could never look at my own sentences without asking myself if they were really packing their maximum charge. I had not known until then what a few words could do—that like gunpowder, they could ignite with a shocking crack.
    This is the truth of science fiction and fantasy: it is the greatest fireworks show in literature, and your own imagination is a sky waiting to catch fire. And here is the truth of this book: we’ve got all the best, brightest, bangiest fireworks a person could want.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy
is not just a book but also an explosive device . . . one that is, fortunately, entirely safe to bring on a plane.
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    Science fiction and fantasy: two different but closely related compounds, both highly combustible.
    Fantasy, it has been argued, could well describe all literature. Any work of fiction, after all, is an act of sustained invention—a fantasy—and a dragon is a dragon, whether it sleeps in a cave on a pile of gold or wears a human face and works for Goldman Sachs, destroying lives by moving numbers from one column to another. I once sat in front of two werewolves on a train to Liverpool. They wore Manchester United