THE BEST OF WORLD SF VOLUME 1 THE BEST OF WORLD SF EDITED BY LAVIE TIDHAR AN AD ASTRA BOOK www.headofzeus.com First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd An Ad Astra book In the compilation and introductory material © Lavie Tidhar The moral right of Lavie Tidhar to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. The moral right of the contributing authors of this anthology to be identified as such is asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. The list of individual titles and respective copyrights to be found on page 597 constitutes an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This is an anthology of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in each story are either products of each author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All excerpts have been reproduced according to the styles found in the original works. As a result, some spellings and accents used can vary throughout this anthology. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN (HB) 9781838937645 ISBN (TPB) 9781800240407 ISBN (E) 9781838937669 Head of Zeus Ltd First Floor East 5–8 Hardwick Street London EC1R 4RG WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM Contents Title Page Copyright Introduction Aliette de Bodard Immersion Chen Qiufan Debtless translated by Blake Stone-Banks Vina Jie-Min Prasad Fandom For Robots Tlotlo Tsamaase Virtual Snapshots Chinelo Onwualu What the Dead Man Said Vandana Singh Delhi Han Song The Wheel of Samsara Ng Yi-Sheng Xingzhou Taiyo Fujii Prayer translated by Kamil Spychalski Francesco Verso The Green Ship translated by Michael Colbert Malena Salazar Maciá Eyes of the Crocodile translated by Toshiya Kamei Tade Thompson Bootblack Fabio Fernandes The Emptiness in the Heart of All Things R. S. A. Garcia The Sun From Both Sides Cristina Jurado DUMP translated by Steve Redwood Gerardo Horacio Porcayo Rue Chair Hannu Rajaniemi His Master’s Voice Nir Yaniv Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys translated by Lavie Tidhar Emil Hjörvar Petersen The Cryptid Ekaterina Sedia The Bank of Burkina Faso Kuzhali Manickavel An Incomplete Guide to Understanding the Rose Petal Infestation Associated With EverTyphoid Patients in the Tropicool IcyLand Urban Indian Slum Kofi Nyameye The Old Man with the Third Hand Lauren Beukes The Green Karin Tidbeck The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir Silvia Moreno-Garcia Prime Meridian Zen Cho If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again Extended Copyright About the author An Invitation from the Publisher Introduction 1. They say the more things change the more they stay the same, but things do change, and science fiction has to change in order to survive. For too long, the future was dominated by one country and one viewpoint: the future was white, male and American, and it was going to stay that way – until it didn’t. I look at The Best of World SF with something like awe, because it doesn’t feel real. As I write this, it isn’t yet real. I look to the future and imagine holding the book, reading the introduction. I have read anthologies and I’ve been published in anthologies but I never thought I would see one like this. The sheer breadth of talent from across the planet gathered here is something no one could imagine twenty years ago. Publishing certainly wasn’t interested. And it wasn’t just then. I spent ten years trying to get someone, anyone, to publish this book, or one like it. The last time I tried it took the publisher an hour to turn it down. Less than an hour, if I’m being honest. If you make yourself enough of a pain, eventually people notice. Or so I tried to tell myself. In 2008, I convinced my friend Jason Sizemore to publish an anthology of international speculative fiction. Jason runs a small press out of Kentucky, of all places, and is a stubborn man, and I told him he will make no money doing this but that it will be good. We put together The Apex Book of World SF out of string and sticks and polish and buttons and it came out in 2009. No one had done a book like that before, not in this way, not with an editor who himself didn’t belong to the Anglo world. And I was right: we didn’t make any money, but the book was good. It was a ridiculous thing to do. And no one was interested. Reviewers didn’t even know how to talk about the book. It wasn’t exotic, it wasn’t strange: it was just a collection of stories written by people from places like Malaysia and China, Croatia and the Philippines, and the only thing they did share was that they weren’t a part of Anglo-American science fiction. And they were good. So we did it again. I edited The Apex Book of World SF 2 in 2012. And then we did it again with The Apex Book of World SF 3 in 2014. We published writers no one had heard of – then. Aliette de Bodard and Tade Thompson and Lauren Beukes and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Nnedi Okorafor’s in there. So are Hannu Rajaniemi and Amal El-Mohtar. Between them, now, these writers are science fiction. They have the awards and the hardcovers in the bookstores and the film and TV deals. It was easy to see this is how it should be, back then, because they were good. But then you’d talk to publishers and they’d say things like, ‘Oh, we don’t publish books set in Nigeria.’ And that would be the end of the discussion. I had never heard a more ridiculous thing. I went and wrote a science fiction novel set in Israel in the sure and liberating knowledge no one would publish it, and it came out from an independent press and won a couple of awards and
