The Best Sci-Fi Short Stories

Short stories are a really important form for sci fi. Could you tell us about the role of short stories in the sci fi world, and why they work so well together?

With short stories you get a lot more room to experiment. Science fiction, for me, is really a study of humanity in extraordinary circumstances. And for a lot of other people, it’s about exploring an idea – usually a technological idea that has an impact on humanity. Short stories allow you to just play with that in a little sandbox, and you don’t have to worry about pacing… You know, how much character development can you really stick in 3,000 words? You can just play with the pure idea.

You see so much innovation in SFF short stories, because we are the genre of the imagination. You would think the word limit would be a problem; I think for a lot of people, including myself, it’s freeing. I definitely started out as somebody who wrote books – I learned writing by writing books, and I did a whole bunch of them, almost a dozen, and had convinced myself I could not do anything short. And then I went through a period in my life where the words were not coming the same way, because of life pressures and changes, and I said, “Let me try doing a short story, because I have this great idea. Let’s see if it works.” And that was how I got into short story writing.

I had been appreciative of them before that, because they were one of my first real introductions to SFF. I had a library in my school in Trinidad and Tobago, and I picked up this massive tome called The Best Science Fiction of the Year – I think Gardner Dozois was the editor at that time – and my mind was blown, thoroughly blown, by the short stories inside it. I never forgot the very first story: it was Second Variety by Philip K. Dick.

Sometimes the short stories link into books – as in the Murderbot series, or the novelette that then birthed Master of Djinn, which went on to win the Nebula. Could we talk about how that works – do people tend to write a short story and then expand it, or is it more of a back and forth…?

In the case of Murderbot, that’s a collection of novellas that turned into a book; and definitely with P. Djèlí Clark’s work, it’s a short story that turned into a book. I think that’s a popular modern way to do it – a lot of our current successful book authors started out on short stories. But I don’t think that was always the case…

The short story is its own art. It’s a skill: you have to develop it, the same way you have to develop writing a book. Learning with short stories can help you explore things, experiment with formatting and prose, but I think the art of creating a book is a completely different business. So when you read a short story, you’re not reading a little book; and when you read a book, you’re not reading a big short story. I do think that people erroneously sometimes approach both art forms in the same way. But make no mistake, these are two completely different arts, and there are very few authors who can do them both well.

“Why couldn’t this have just been an email?” is very popular nowadays – and I think that’s why it’s a good time to introduce people to short stories. If you are having that issue where you just can’t make yourself sink into a long book, short stories are such a great way to get that lovely fix, that escapism, without having to commit.

I’m curious, is there a particular deadly sin that novelists make when they try and do short stories for the first time?

God yes! I think as novelists, we get used to the character development and the pacing and the scenery. You do not have to begin your novel at an inciting incident. But in a short story you don’t have a lot of time. You have to let go of the setting sometimes (unless you’re doing novellas, in which case, best of both worlds! Which is why I love them…); you have to let go of the desire to play in somebody’s head, unless the short story is all about being in somebody’s head.

But you see, that’s the beauty of it as well. You do get to choose in short stories: maybe I just want a short story to be all about character development. Maybe I want the short story to be all about the world building or the setting. I’ve read short stories that were nothing but setting and were incredibly effective; and short stories that were nothing but somebody’s internal monologue, also incredibly effective. With short stories, you’re generally working toward a very clear goal.

Tell us about your first short story choice: “Last Stand of the East 12th Street Pirates”, by L. D. Lewis

What I loved about this story is the theme… I’m a black individual from Trinidad and Tobago, and black communities, mixed race communities like my country, we have a way of coming together, being resilient and dealing with what we have to deal with. We’re a small nation state of marginalized persons who have rebuilt everything in the ashes left to us after the period of enslavement ending, and then colonization. In a post-colonial society, oftentimes you’re dealing with circumstances that you had nothing to do with, but you have to build a life out of it. We often fall back on building community and supporting each other, because we don’t have enough by ourselves.

This short story looks at a climate change world. This community had nothing to do with the waves that have encroached upon their city, but they’re living on top of it. And in that unfair way that often happens, authorities are just letting it happen. It’s easier to just ignore the problem and let other people deal with it than to actually find a solution, so that human beings don’t have to work their way through the horror of living in a drowning city… This story looks at what devotion to capitalism as a solution to everything can create, but it also speaks specifically to issues that black society has to deal with. There’s often a reduction of our places as a threat, our people as violent – we are not human beings, we are a collective unknown to be scared of. This story is told through the eyes of someone who’s intimately familiar with her community – the bad seeds, the good seeds, the indifferent seeds – and she’s just trying to get through her day doing what needs to be done to keep the community going, which is what a lot of black women have to do. She’s just trying to get the mail delivered, and the day takes a horrible turn – because when you’re just trying to get the mail delivered in a neighbourhood that nobody cares about, and which is just an obstacle to getting the important business of the rest of society done, there will be many of these.

We’re intimately familiar with what violence from authorities can look like, and how brutally unfair it can be. The story takes an unflinching look at it. It’s a mic drop of a story, and that’s why I recommend it so highly.

There must be so many people right now trying to write about what our future might look like in a changing climate… It’s these other, related truths that make this story stand out in that crowd?

I think so. I think it’s important that at the heart of the story is a kernel of truth. It may not be for every reader, but it’s definitely got to be a truth for the author. That’s what the great stories have. You don’t have to write a great story always – it’s actually really freaking difficult to do that! You can write very many lovely stories, relatable stories, emotive stories. And then there are actually great stories, that when you introduce them to people, everybody thinks –  “Ah!”. Even if they don’t like it. And that truth is what causes that thought.

That’s very liberating for a writer – the reminder that not every story needs to be a great one!

Yes! People spend their time worrying about audience reaction. Reaction is important, because you are trying to make a living, and you do want to sell. But social media has really taken a hit at the understanding that art is, at the end of the day, a lonely endeavour, and an expression of an individual. To expect it to please everyone is beyond ridiculous, right? Not every artistic endeavour is meant to be mass marketable, You can be a perfectly relatable, important voice without pleasing everyone. I think we’ve lost a lot of that.

I love that short stories give people a chance to enter without having to commit. The more people invest time in something that they don’t feel connected to, the more immediately they jump to, “Everything about that was awful. No one else should indulge in it”. But with a short story, you can go, “Hey, here’s 15 minutes. Consider this” –  and people are more charitable. Maybe they didn’t like it that much, but they’re not going to go out on Goodreads and make it their whole personality.

It’s a great advantage for a reader, that you can try on a lot more worldviews that you maybe don’t want to spend a whole month inside…

Exactly, yes!

L. D. Lewis is another novelist-to-be, with her debut forthcoming; but she’s also an editor. Editors often seem to have a porous, hybrid role in the sci fi world, where editors of the big magazines are names in their own right…

Yes. I think SFF is one of the most welcoming genres. We’re such a small community, basically built out of a fandom with more respect for what the genre was trying to do than most of the mainstream world, so we got used to supporting ourselves and telling stories to each other. A great many of the authors who work in this genre came up as part of that community. It’s many different little communities sometimes. There’s the much older community of the world-con-ers, people who have been fans for a very, very long time; and then fandom is very different now, usually connected on social media, on Reddit or WattPad.

It’s a skill that some people have: they can move back and forth from creating their own art, to helping others find their way forward. L. D. has been a huge voice in our community: a voice for change, for activism, for inclusion. She worked very hard, along with Suzan Palumbo – who I really wish I could have added to this list, but she does fantasy, and she’s only just doing her first space opera novella – they created the Ignyte awards, and really try to have a voice for black creation in SFF. She’s really, really important. It’s another reason I included the story.

There’s also room for people who are just editors, and are really good at what they do. One of the persons who gave me a big break was Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld. He published one of my earlier short stories, and three of my novellas. All Neil does is edit, and he does a damn good job. Clarkesworld is one of the biggest SFF magazines in the Western Hemisphere (of course, we have bigger SFF magazines in China, for example, where I think the biggest one is Sci Fi World.) The best of the short fiction, honestly, is coming from these magazines. And a lot of them, due to the way that social media works, are forced to put their work up for free in order to get an audience. It boggles the mind. How many young people don’t realize you can just read short fiction for free all day long on the internet? Something by people who are doing this professionally; who are doing something that is intentional and important.

So magazines perform this incredible function of giving a voice to those persons. The people who choose to take the time to both be an author, and then turn around and extend the hand to the people who are coming up behind them as editors and curators, are important people. Without them, where would the genre go? All editors are not created equal, and not every anthology or magazine is looking to be as inclusive as some of the best of them, but every single one of them forms part of the community.

Let’s talk about your next choice, authored by Nebula-nominated Wole Talabi: “Performance Review.”

Wole is a fantastic rising voice from the African continent, and a fabulously wonderful person as well, having had the luck to interact with him a little. He’s an  engineer. SFF, in its early forms, was really scientists writing about the technologies that they were working on, or had seen coming because of where they were in their industry. So hard science is one of the older forms of modern sci fi – some people believe that it’s not really SFF unless it’s hard science, but I would say the definition of science needs looking at, because hard science readers tend to pretend the only thing that’s a science is anything that involves technology. Other things are sciences as well – biology, palaeontology, archaeology – and the study of who we are as humanity is always part of the sciences. Talabi is that rare writer who understands people, and who wants to talk about the intersection of technology and people in a fast-moving world.

At the same time he’s also talking about his ancestors, and writing as somebody who has come from a continent that can trace thousands and thousands of years of history and godhood and religion and tribal interaction; so it’s this wonderful, interesting mix in his work, exploring tradition and progress, and how that will look going forward. How do you reconcile the reverence of your past and your ancestors with progress, in a way that respects all that has come before, and all that we’ve been taught about respecting the world around you?

This particular story highlights something that I find very interesting, and that has been a real problem for the ‘Global South’, as we are now called. Capitalism assumes that the best possible form of anything is efficiency and productivity. And humanity is not about productivity and efficiency! We weren’t put here to be productive elements for an employer, and yet we have somehow turned a method of economic distribution into not only our political system, but our entire social foundation. Tthere are tremendous negatives coming out of that, which we’re trying to grapple with. We’ve known this for a while, but the positives of trade and expansion have distracted us for a very long time; and now you’ve gotten to a point where, inevitably, you begin to have blowback.

With this story, you have someone who – and I think this is something people can deeply relate to in today’s world – is just trying to keep their job. You’re just trying to please the faces you don’t see when you work for global conglomerates. So you don’t often see your bosses, and you’re just trying to make sure that your performance meets these parameters they put in place without ever considering your humanity. The story, which is a very short one, says: what do you do if your survival is tied to pleasing these people – and they say to you, “Will you do this thing, this untested brand new thing? You will have pleased us, and you will have upped your game”… and you’re left with this unspoken ‘or else’. It’s a choice a lot of people are having to make nowadays. Do I continue to work for people using technology that I can see is harmful, not only to myself, but to everything around me that I value?

What disturbed me about this choice in “Performance Review” was that there was nothing wrong with this employee’s performance. The problem was that their mindset wasn’t right – they weren’t wholeheartedly invested.

Exactly. That’s what I love most about the story: it points out that these things are always sold to us as an improvement, but if the employee is already performing above expectations, why do they need to improve anything?  Why does every moment of their life have to become a referendum on their productivity? It’s a dehumanization that people accept nowadays – it’s just what we have to do to move forward. I have done it, many people have done it. We’ve all had that great review coming, and heard the ‘but’ and been anxious about it – “What can I do to fix this?” Then in later years, when you look back, you say to yourself, “Why was I so desperate for that extra plus next to the A? What did that change, really? I wasn’t getting a raise out of it; I wasn’t happier; I couldn’t physically work more. So what exactly was I fretting over?” But that, of course, comes with time and distance.

I love the immediacy of this story, and I also love that he placed it on the African continent, because so many of these experimental methods of how to run society and get people to do things were tried out on the global south and on colonies first, and then refined and used elsewhere.

Your own story is also about the future of labour – and it just won the Nebula prize for Best Short Story, congratulations! Could you introduce us to Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200, and tell us about the origins of the idea?

There’s so many influences, because I am that complex wretch who has to put a million ideas into things, and that’s why I tend to write novellas. First of all, Tantie Merle is an homage to Tanti Merle, the almost folkloric character that was created by Paul Keens-Douglas, who is the preeminent storyteller of the West Indies. This is a gentleman who has a lot of ties to my country Trinidad and Tobago, but was originally born in Grenada, where my family originally came from as well. A lot of Trinbagonians have ties to Grenada, and of course because of that with Hurricane Beryl a lot of us are worried and upset – I do hope that everybody realizes they need a lot of help, and that they’ll contribute in what way they can.

Keens-Douglas used to tell these stories, which I grew up on and which many people could probably repeat for you, and which are available on YouTube. They’re about a middle-aged black woman called Tanti Merle, who lived her life the way she wanted to, and told everybody what to do, because she was always right; and she had these adventures. I loved and grew up with women exactly like this. They knew what they were doing. They held their community together. They commanded everybody’s respect, whether they wanted to give it or not. And it was hilarious. Those stories would leave me in tears on the ground, because we saw ourselves reflected in that. I was very lucky growing up in a country where I saw myself reflected everywhere I looked, in the highest office in the land to the lowest office – it was never said to me that I couldn’t be anything, or I couldn’t do this because I was a girl, or because I was a person of colour. I grew up watching TV shows and listening to media and reading books that were focused on people like myself; or listening to the very talented storytellers like Paul Keen-Douglas, who told us who we were, and how fabulous and funny and engaging and smart and adaptable we were.

Tantie Merle started with a conversation… I got a question once from someone about what Caribbean sci fi was like. I was really shocked by the question, because I said to myself, I wonder if anybody has ever approached an American sci fi writer and said, “What is American sci fi?” You would never! Science fiction does not have a nationality; it’s something that we are all engaged in. There are viewpoints you can come with because of your nationality, your society, your cultural outlook, but as an endeavour, science fiction has no nationality. In the course of a conversation about that question, we were laughing about how Trinidad is very much a place in which you see both sides – I will see the coconut vendor that has been selling coconut water since the dawn of time, and he’s on his cellphone taking orders, while he’s chopping coconuts up with the same cutlass he’s always chopped up his coconuts with. And instead of a cart, now it’s motorized. So I’m living in a world where technology is just something we accept and assimilate, but it doesn’t remove the old things all the time. And then somebody said, “Just imagine trying to raise goats in the future. Maybe that’s Caribbean sci fi.” And the story fell into my head, I swear to God, almost entirely. I said to them, “I have to stop this conversation. I’m going to go write this down.”

It’s very rare for me to write an entire story in one sitting, unless it’s a fire in my head. This has happened to me a few times, and this was one of those times: I literally sat down and wrote the entire story within a few hours; then went to bed, woke up the next day, and worked on it. I was hoping to give it to someone who had commissioned the story, but it was too long for them, and so I ended up sending it in elsewhere – and thankfully they bought it at Uncanny Magazine.

The thing I wanted to talk about, amongst many other things, was labour: the way we perceive labour, and identity, intelligence and life – and what is worthy of respect. You have a very old woman who is in a community that used to be a community, used to support each other; but through the ravages of climate change, many people have moved away – because they’re afraid of what could be coming down the pipeline next in terms of hurricanes. But she’s lived there her entire life, she doesn’t want to move. Many older people don’t want to: they see no reason, this is what makes them happy, and to ask them to adapt in the twilight of their years is very unfair, I think, when we could easily assist… So this woman’s complaining to her daughter about not being able to take care of her little garden anymore. And when we say garden, we do not mean a plot in front of your house. We can sometimes mean an acre, two acres; and people plant. She has just too much of a garden for herself to handle, as well as this goat; so the daughter, who lives in Germany, sends her a Farmhand 4200.

There’s a thing that I think West Indians do: we love our moms and grandmoms, and we feel real connection – we often grow up with generations in a household – and because of that, when we send them a present, we tend to buy the top of the line. So they often don’t know how to use it. I think everybody can relate to that: you get your mother a blender, and the guy who sold it to you said it was fabulous, it’s got all these features; and your mother says, “This doesn’t look like the one I have. I don’t understand this thing.” It never occurs to her to read the little booklet that came with it. So this woman’s daughter sends her this incredibly advanced Farmhand, that’s really meant for huge farms. But it’s an eager little thing that really wants to help, and it knows its mission is to assist Tantie Merle with her troubles – which include her goat, who quite frankly does not wish to be handled.

I was also talking about aging in modern societies, the loneliness that comes from it. And what it takes to go forward into a progressive future: respect and understanding. Not everybody will be like you, look like you, or react the way you do, but we’re all here together, and if we’re going to make it through this, we have to make it through it together, and we have to start with that love and community and respect.

Of course, the story is hilarious, because the goat is not happy about having this weird thing handle it.

The AI is futuristic, but this story feels so real –  because the goat is so utterly real.

When you’ve grown up with goats, you know just how hilarious life is – they are not controllable. I thought it was the perfect foil for a story about accepting people with their differences, even when they’re no fun – even when they seem destructive or pointless. Sometimes you’re just not communicating their way. But you can’t communicate with a goat: a goat does its own thing.

I was so on the side of Farmhand Lincoln having his rights, and the implied uprising of the Farmhands by the end. But I never felt like I was reading a story about labour rights – it was sneaky!

It is about that lack of respect that we have now for the persons who carry out such important labour: we don’t see them as individuals, we see them as machines who are there for productivity. So I knew what I was going to do, and I swear to God, I was laughing the entire time.

My sister is my beta reader and often my first editor. It’s one of the few stories that she just returned it to me with tears in her eyes and said, “How dare you?”

Which is a good sign?

Yes! “You know what you did!” she said!

Tell us about your third choice – “Eyes of the Crocodile”, by Malena Salazar Maciá. It has a fantastic opening line: “My return to our ancestral roots began with a crocodile’s eye that sprouted on my right breast…”

“Eyes of the Crocodile” grabs you from the first sentence to the last.

Short stories are written in all languages. Often, our most important folkloric stories are passed down verbally. Everything is oral in the West Indies, for example, because so much of our culture had to be kept in that manner; the enslaved were not allowed to read or write or congregate. If it’s oral, it’s necessarily short. In SFF in the American sphere, a lot of the short stories are coming out of North America, Australia, Canada, and England – while huge countries like China and Russia and the whole of East Asia and the entire Caribbean and Latin America having strong, long literary traditions, which include their own take on short stories. I mean, the entire continent of Africa! – so much in that literary tradition in particular, which I was taught when I was growing up in school. So it’s really pleased me to see the efforts pick up over the last few years, with certain magazines trying to have regular translations. In Samovar, and Clarkesworld… Coming from a different culture, the short stories have different ideas, and a necessarily fresh outlook.

“Eyes of the Crocodile” was one of these. Malena Salazar Maciá is very well known in Cuba, and has produced many well regarded novels there. She presents a vision of humanity’s future, through indigenous peoples; and of course it’s fraught, because it’s a vision of massive displacement. Things go wrong, and they have to adapt – and I think indigenous persons understand having to adapt to a world that is entirely hostile, that doesn’t even record your death amongst all the many other deaths that are happening. So it’s not only incredibly beautifully written, but it’s also stark, really terrifying imagery.

Even at the heart of all this scary reality, this planet that is trying to kill you, there’s beauty as our protagonist reconnects with her ancestors – as she is dying. She reconnects to the mission that they had given themselves to carry humanity forward. She is on her own mission, in what she believes are her last hours, to try and preserve that as much as possible – understanding that she’s preserving not just humanity, but her slice of humanity, her past, her ancestors, her stories.

It packs so much into less than 2500 words. It’s a beautiful mix of nature and technology and religion and ritual, which is something that I love, and that I did some work on with some of my novellas. I love the intersection of biology and technology. To my mind, all technology is really mankind trying to control natural and biological processes, and science is our attempt to figure out how to do it. And the reality is, we’re trying to reproduce things that already exist in nature: nature already knows how to do these incredible, fabulous, insane things.

I really enjoyed the transformation the protagonist is undergoing throughout the story, both the terror of it and the brutality of it – because that’s nature for you as well. It’s unforgiving, it’s terrifying. It doesn’t see you as an individual, but you open yourself up to the fact that you’re part of a food chain, a world – you have value, but the whole is important.

That tone of the story is fascinating. It’s definitely sci fi – the trouble is caused by malfunctioning nanobots in her body – but it feels mythic.

Yes, that’s something that I’m always going for in my own work –  I want you to feel mythic, like this is an epic story, and then I want to slide science fiction in there. I don’t really see much of a disconnect between them.

Your next choice is a complete change in tone! Tell us about the content and the form of Nino Cipri’s “Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out!”

This story came out quite a while ago, and it was one of the first I saw that was really successful at interactive storytelling. It’s acknowledging the way that storytelling has changed – because of the internet, because of social media, because of the way people consume the written word now. Cipri was at the forefront of examining new narrative structures. My entire life I have loved narrative structure as a way to really impart the impact of a story – from the time I read It by Stephen King, and saw just how broadly you could work with narrative structure. I’m fascinated by people who can come up with a story in a framework that feels completely different, and yet relevant; instantly understandable, but not easily reproducible.

It’s a quiz. We’ve all played these quizzes… And it tells you a story with every solution that you have to choose from. With every answer, you’re choosing one of these dead girls’ horrible stories, which you learn they have risen above – they’ve turned into an origin story for something far better.

It’s horror, because I have to slide one horror story in here. My first love is SFF, and horror is one part of SFF – sometimes people like to put in an ‘H’, but personally, I see no difference. When you’ve read certain SFF stories that end a certain way, I dare you to say they’re not horror! And you can have SFF stories that are mystery, horror, romance, whatever you want – they all fit together. Sometimes people don’t like to have fun, and they take an element out – but that’s not how it used to be. You would just write a story and people would read it. You read Frankenstein, and just say, “Great!”. But now we’re obsessed with labelling things, so a lot of people are missing out on things because it doesn’t carry the correct label. That’s why I wanted to include this story, because it defies the label. It is about superheroes, so it should SFF. It’s horrifying, so it should be horror. Narratively, it should be a quiz – but it is most definitely a short story, with a lot of impact.

It also says something really important about friendship and community and women – you’re beginning to see the thread! I love when we talk about found family and community. These are things I’m intimately familiar with, culturally and personally, so I’m always drawn towards stories that can capture this feeling of being in a community that’s working towards something – and that have commentary on how people treat communities, how people forget that community is one of the building blocks of society. This one is about a crew of persons who have had terrible things happen to them, and use that as a jumping off point to become something far more powerful.

We see a lot of experiments with form in sci fi short stories…

Yes, this is one of the wonderful things about short stories. I was reading another one just the other day, We Will Teach You How to Read by Caroline M. Yaochim… And everybody, I think, has heard about Stet by Sarah Gailey, because it was Award nominated. That’s a short story that is intended for creators, who understand what it is to have to deal with other people’s comments on your work. I almost put another of Wole’s work there as well, because he also had one in Clarkesworld, Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core: it was basically a form, and the person was asked to make comments on the form. And the story is in both the form and the comments, and it was just – chef’s kiss!

Your final choice is a little experimental in form – not as much as a quiz, but it’s made up of five very brief sections. Tell us about “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus”, by Rachael K. Jones.

So first off, I had to include something by Rachael. She wrote my favourite short story last year, which was The Sound of Children Screaming. I had the great honour of being nominated alongside her, and then she did me the great honour of reading my speech when I could not be there to collect; so in addition to being an incredibly talented writer and a teacher, she has been a lovely person to me. I didn’t pick the story because of that! – I just wanted to give you an idea of who she is.

I picked the story because it socks you in the eye in 600 words. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a science fiction story that short, and I wanted people to understand that flash fiction is also an area in which incredibly talented people are working – like Mari Ness, and Nino Cipri, who can produce flash stories that are just as effective as an entire novel. They just live in your head: for days after, you’re like: “… Huh.” You’re reading your book at night: “…Huh.” You’re drinking your tea at the cafe two days later, and your friend is telling you about what her husband did, and it’s still playing on repeat in your head.

“Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” is… I wouldn’t want to give away too much, because it’s just 600 words, and those 600 words matter, and I would love for people to just absorb it the way I absorbed it! It’s about the tremendous heartlessness of Empire, and the tiny, sometimes horrible mercies that we have to bestow upon ourselves and others when you are truly grist for the mill, a cog in the machine. Her story The Sound of Children Screaming is about gun culture and the scourge of school shootings, and she’s a teacher, so she writes the truth of being somebody in the path of this. And it’s the same thing with this story: the understanding that many countries right now are in the path of an uncaring, brutal machine that demands submission to inhumane policies. It doesn’t fool you with the idea that revolutions just happen without a tremendous cost to persons, whether they are ready to pay it or not.

The terrible choice being made is right there in the first couple of sentences – but at that stage you don’t understand it.

Yes, I love that it’s in a circle. My favourite short stories tend to go in a beautiful circle: you’re back at the beginning, and you understand what you read at the beginning finally. The same thing happened in Performance Review: you finally understand why the protagonist’s boss had forgotten about his dog, and why he’s a completely different person. And with Tartarus, when you read the first set up, you think, “How unimaginably cruel”… And then at the end of it, you think, “Good God, how unimaginably cruel”. The last line really is the sinker.

Thank you so much for these five recommendations – and for the honourable mentions list you sent me, which I’ll include at the end of the interview! Any concluding thoughts on sci fi short stories, before we go?

I think just this… I’ve been in this business for over 20 years now, and when I started, there weren’t any other Trinidadians around, and very few other Caribbean people. Nalo Hopkinson was a tremendous inspiration to me; I found Midnight Robber in that same library that I found Best Science Fiction of the Year, and those were my two introductions to who I was going to be. I read the first and I thought, I’m going to be a writer. And then I read Midnight Robber, and I said, “Wait – you mean I can write science fiction about me?”

I have loved watching us grow up about inclusion in SFF. It’s still struggling with being less of an unwelcoming place for people like me; still struggling with being representational as opposed to simply tokenizing; still struggling very much with the reality that you’re allowed to be a failure or to be mediocre unless you’re a person of colour, in which case your sales results stand for everybody who looks like you, and therefore no one else gets another chance. But there has been a lot of positive change in a relatively short space of time.

So I am very, very happy to be a Trinbagonian achieving this award, because everything I’ve written has been about my people, speaking to what I believe my culture values. We’ve got our problems like everybody else; we’ve got our bad seeds and our issues. Nobody is free of those. But I do think there is something uniquely joyous about my people, uniquely funny, uniquely loving. We’ve learned how to survive the brutalities, the negligence, and the pure incompetence that leads us; and we’ve done that through community and joy and song and ancestorship, and through traditions, and showing each other love.

I think everybody everywhere loves the place that they come from, but few of us get the chance to tell other people. So I’ve been very blessed in that way. I have been blessed to see Trinidadians come into SFF, and begin to achieve big things – Suzan Palumbo, Shari Paul, Tobias Buckell, Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Lord: all of these persons have laid down foundations for everybody else to walk on, and we’re all busy trying to reach back and pull people up. It’s good to see the industry changing so that they can make space for these people, and the place that started this was SFF magazines, and the short fiction community. They opened their doors to people like me long before the publishing world was willing to give you a book deal, or Hollywood was willing to give you a movie. I would not be here today if it were not for the wonderful place that I came from – the country, the education system, the people, the culture – or for the people that welcomed me into their own family, the thing that I love so much: the SFF community. Just a huge thank you to all of them.

I hope people support our short fiction community going forward. It is in danger of dying out because people don’t know it’s there, and they’re searching all over the internet for something that’s staring them right in the face: free, professional, beautiful, short work that has something to say, that is artistically true and authentic, and that just wants you to think about it.

An ‘honourable mentions’ list from R.S.A. Garcia:

The Murderbot Series – Martha Wells

Second Variety – Philip K. Dick

Douen – Suzan Palumbo

Midnight Robber – Nalo Hopkinson

Umbernight – Carolyn Ives Gilman

When We Were Starless – Simone Heller

Airbody – Sameem Siddiqui

Axiom of Dreams – Arula Ratnakar

Light Speed is Not a Speed – Andy Dudak

Wild Meat – Shari Paul

Sour Milk Girls – Erin Roberts

Rage / The Long Walk / The Mist – Stephen King

Kushtuka – Mathilda Zeller

The Sound of Children Screaming – Rachel K. Jones

Navajos Don’t Wear Elk Teeth – Conley Lyons

The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society – T. Kingfisher

Ivy, Angelica, Bay – C.L. Polk

The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington – Phenderson Djèlí Clark

Sonny Liston Takes The Fall – Elizabeth Bear

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance – Tobias Buckell

Open House on Haunted Hill – John Wiswell