Summary:
A highly recommended Best of the Year anthology, which contains one standout story, Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (long-time readers will find echoes of Sandkings and Microcosmic God), and two that I would classify as very good, Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (a different type of Deathworld) and Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (ethical AIs in China rescue Down’s Syndrome children and slowly nudge us towards utopia).
These three are supported by good to very good work by Rich Larson, Nancy Kress, and Andy Dudak, and good work from Alexander Glass, Daryl Gregory, Greg Egan, and Denise Moore. That’s two-thirds of the stories (and more than three-quarters of the anthology’s wordage) that are either worth, or are more than worth, your time—a very good hit rate for a ‘Best of the Year’ collection.
[ISFDB page] [Amazon UK, £4.23; USA, $5.99]

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Fiction:
How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar? • novelette by Rich Larson ∗∗∗+
Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars • novelette by Mercurio D. Rivera ∗∗∗∗+
50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know • short story by Ken Liu ∗∗
Time’s Own Gravity • short story by Alexander Glass ∗∗∗
Test 4 Echo • short story by Peter Watts ∗∗
Mediation • short story by Cadwell Turnbull ∗∗+
Brother Rifle • novelette by Daryl Gregory ∗∗∗
You and Whose Army? • novelette by Greg Egan ∗∗∗
A Mastery of German • short story by Marian Denise Moore ∗∗∗
When God Sits in Your Lap • novelette by Ian Tregillis ∗∗
Invisible People • novelette by Nancy Kress ∗∗∗+
Eyes of the Forest • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗∗
Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World • short story by Benjamin Rosenbaum ∗
Salvage • novelette by Andy Dudak ∗∗∗+
Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County • novella by Derek Künsken? ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Maurizio Manzieri
Index

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(All the stories have been reviewed previously, in more manageable sections, at sfshortstories.com—skip down to the three dots to find the new material.)

This Best of the Year anthology leads off with How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 15^th January 2020), which opens with the narrator asking a woman called Nat for her help in stealing a Klobučar, a piece of art, from a gangster called Quini the Squid. In the ensuing conversation we learn a number of things: (a) this is set in a cyberpunky/implants future; (b) Nat is Quini’s ex; and (c) the narrator, a former employee of Quini’s, is doing this for revenge.
We also learn about the Klobučar:

I’m not much for gene art, not much for sophisticated shit in general, but even I know Klobučar, the Croatian genius who struck the scene like a meteor and produced a brief torrent of masterpieces before carving out her brain with a mining laser on a live feed.
Anything with a verified Klobučar gene signature is worth a fortune, especially since she entwined all her works with a killswitch parasite to prevent them being sequenced and copied. But Quini is the furthest thing from an art fence, which makes the acquisition a bit of a mystery and explains him seeming slightly panicked about the whole thing.

Once the narrator convinces Nat to help, they realise that they’ll need to provide a sample of Quini’s DNA to fool the scanners which protect the safe room where the artwork is stored. We learn that they’ll also require something else for the job:

Having Quini’s helix is only half the battle: We also need a body, and neither mine nor Nat’s fits the bill, in large part because we’ve got implants that are definitely not Quini’s. Masking or turning off tech built right into the nervous system is actually a lot harder than simply hiring what our German friends call a Fleischgeist.
It’s not as snappy in English: meat ghost. But it gives you the idea—someone with no implants. None. No hand chip, no cranial, no optics or aurals. Nothing with an electronic signature. In our day and age, they might as well be invisible.
Ergo, the ghost part.

The narrator then goes to meet a Nigerian called Yinka—the prospective Fleishgeist—on Shiptown, a floating migrant settlement off the Barcelona coast, and, after hiring him, all three meet up at a sex house to practise various robbery scenarios in virtual reality. After eighteen hours of run-throughs, the narrator suggests one more to finish, only to be told by the others that they are not in VR anymore, but in the real world. The narrator realises that they have pod-sickness from the VR sessions, and concludes that it must be a side-effect of the sex-change hormones they are taking (and which were mentioned previously).
This isn’t the only problem the three encounter and (spoiler), when they start the job, they only just manage to hack the robotic guard dog before the narrator and Yinka are sawn into bloody pieces. Then Yinka learns he will need to have his arm amputated to match Quini’s body shape. Finally, after Yinka gets into the safe room, the narrator discovers that the time stamps of video footage showing the guards playing cards is faked, and that they are burnt. At that point Anton, the new chief of security at Quini’s house, points a scattergun at the narrator’s head and takes them prisoner.
The final section has Quini return from a nightclub with Nat (who has been relaying his personal signal to help the other two fool the security scanners), and start an interrogation. During this we learn how he got his “Squid” nickname, a violent anecdote that involves the amputation of this brother’s limbs for telling made-up stories. When Quini is finished questioning the three of them, he tells the narrator he is going to do the same to them, but, before he does this, he opens the pod (recovered from Yinka) to show off the artwork—and finds it empty.
This is just the first of two final plot twists that complete the tale (although there is also a short postscript to the action where the narrator tells Nat about their pending transition from male to female, and why they wanted revenge—a sexual slur from Quini).
This is a continually inventive, tightly plotted, and well done caper story that feels, in parts, like a Mission Impossible movie on steroids. The only weakness is that, despite all the hardware and gimmickry and feel of a hard SF story, there isn’t any central SF theme or concept here, and the human tale that is here instead is the weakest part (I wasn’t particularly convinced of the narrator’s motivation, and I’m getting bored of stories where trans characters struggle with their transition—it’s becoming a cliché).
Still, not bad.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,450 words. Story link.

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Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) begins with an introduction (supposedly Chapter 63 of a book) which shows a group of lizard-like creatures called “The People” taking part in a purification rite at Verdant Cove. They are praying for clean air (and we learn that they have a climate warming problem similar to Earth’s).
The next section opens with a journalist called Cory arriving at the laboratory of Milagros Maldonado, an old flame, to interview her about her research. Milagros says she has a big story for him and, as she used to work for a multinational R&D company called EncelaCorp until leaving on bad terms, Cory is hoping for something juicy that will help save his precarious blogging job. However, before Milagros agrees to talk she insists on locking his “retinal readers” (which means he can’t publish the interview without her permission). Then she talks instead about the Simulation Hypothesis (which posits that humanity is living in a simulated or virtual universe), before going on to say that she has created a simulated reality where life on Earth took a different evolutionary path:

“Every change to prehistory resulted in the rise of a different apex form of intelligent life. In this version, no asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. No extinction of the dinosaurs took place at that time. Instead, a disease I introduced a million years later wiped out most of the large dinosaurs along with small mammals, allowing an amphibious salamander-like creature to survive and multiply. And—voila!—one hundred million years later we have the Sallies.”
The magnified image displayed three reptilian creatures at the base of a palm tree. One stood on its hind legs, four feet tall with slick, lime-green skin and a prehensile tail. The second had yellow skin and bore translucent wings, allowing it to hover a few feet off the ground. These were the ones flying over the city. The third, a grey-scaled creature, skittered on all fours and had larger, saucer-shaped eyes and a thicker tail. Patches of fungus spread thickly across their torsos.  p. 71

Then she tells him that the salamanders—the same creatures we read about in the introduction—are the ultimate problem solvers, and that their “thinknests” have created an carbon dioxide extraction device that will solve not only their climate problem but Earth’s as well. Then Milagros asks Cory what problem he thinks the salamanders should be made to solve next, and he replies “cancer” (as he has just completed a course of radiotherapy for the disease).
So far, so Microcosmic God (a Theodore Sturgeon story where evolutionary stresses are applied to fast-living and breeding creatures to provide a series of miracle inventions). The next part of the story continues along similar lines with an account of the cancer-like “Black Scythe” plague that Milagros introduces into the Salamander population. However, unlike the Sturgeon story, we get an intimate account of the dreadful pain and suffering the Salamanders experience:

The great plague descended upon the People of La Mangri first, killing innocent larvae in their developmental stages, rendering entire populations childless. Then the cell mutations spread to adults, bringing a slow and agonizing death to millions.
As the decaying corpses gave rise to more disease, my great-grandmother Und-ora devised stadium-sized pyres to mass-incinerate thousands of the dead at once.
She also led local thinknests in their frenzied attempts to determine the origin of the disease and stop its spread. When the cell mutations proved to be non-contagious, they studied possible environmental causes of the illness. But hundreds of Houses of different regions with radically different diets, customs, and lifestyles were all similarly stricken. With no natural explanation at hand, thinknests around the globe independently arrived at the same inescapable conclusion: the plague was another Divine test. The People assumed they had proven themselves worthy when they implemented the Extractors, purifying the atmosphere of the gods’ deadly gases.
But the gods were capricious.  p. 72

Then, after the Salamanders develop a cancer-curing Revivifier, Milagros causes an asteroid strike, which forces the thinknests to create an Asteroid Defence program. These events cause the Salamanders to turn away from their devotional religion and to an examination of the nature of their (unknown to them, virtual) reality.
Matters develop when Cory (under pressure from his boss to publish) interviews Milagros in bed (they have become lovers again), during which they discuss whether the Salamander’s suffering is “real”. Then, after Milagros falls asleep, Cory goes into the lab to record an “alien attack” on the creatures so he has some material to fall back on in case she doesn’t allow him to publish. When the Salamanders subsequently defeat the aliens that Cory has introduced into their world, he then programs “cosmic hands” to give their planet a shake. During this second event the salamanders see “God’s fingers” and realise that it is another divine attack.
It’s at this point that the story takes an ontological swerve away from the Microcosmic God template and becomes something else entirely (spoiler): Milagros arrives in the lab (presumably the next morning) to see Cory lying on the floor. She asks him what he has done—and then the Salamanders appear:

[Cory] blinked and the Sally leader disappeared. Blinked again and she stood nearer, locking eyes with him. A forked tongue with mods flicked out of the Sally’s mouth, pressing against his eyelids.
My God, what was happening?
The cold, wet tongue retracted and time stood still. Then the Sally leader sighed deeply. “This explains so much.” She turned to face Milagros. “Finally we meet face to face, Cruel God. I am Car-ling of House Jarella.”
“How—This isn’t possible!” Milagros said, tapping the mods on her face.
“You,” the Sally said to him. “When you clutched our world in your hands every thinknest across the globe isolated the frequency of the projection and used the planetary shieldtech to trace the signal back to its point of origin. Here.” The Sally waved her thin arms in the air, turning back to Milagros. “You turned us into the ultimate problem-solvers. And at last we’ve identified our ultimate problem: You.”  p. 80

After some more j’accuse, the Salamanders spirit Milagros away to their world, and Cory sees an image of her being abused by an angry mob as she is marched towards a huge crucifix. Then the salamander who is still in the lab with Cory says that they have much in common—because they have both suffered at the hands of a cruel creator. When Cory tells the salamander that Milagros didn’t hurt him, the creature replies he wasn’t talking about Milagros, but the true Creator, “millions of simulations up the chain,” before adding, “I aim to find her and make her pay.”
This sensational revelation flips the story into another paradigm completely (one where mankind isn’t God but subject to the capricious whims of one) as well as providing a pronounced sense of wonder.
The story ends with Cory’s cancer returning, and the salamanders living in an age of peace.
Although Rivera recently stated he hasn’t read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God¹ (although he has read George R. R. Martin’s Sandkings), it’s interesting to compare the differences in the two works. Rivera’s story:
(a) is more contemporary—it has better prose and a modern setting, and Milagros’s aims are probably more in tune with a modern readership, i.e. altruistic rather than the monetary/political aims of the two main characters in the Sturgeon;
(b) is more empathetic—we see the struggles of the Salamanders and the cruelties visited upon them from a first person point of view, whereas the Neoterics in the Sturgeon are offstage or more generally described (and that story never addresses the moral or ethical problems of their appalling treatment);
(c) shows more agency—the Salamanders are players who transcend their reality, whereas the Neoterics are largely pawns;
(d) is more complex—the simulation chain idea makes it a Microcosmic God-plus story;
(e) is more reflective—the occasional meditations on suffering and supreme dieties, and the fact that the story moves away from the idea of “man as God” in the Sturgeon tale to one of “man as cog” (in a larger machine or sequence of realities).
Rivera’s story is an impressive piece, both in its own right, and as a riff on a well-known genre story. It really should have been a Hugo finalist.
∗∗∗∗+ (Very Good to Excellent). 8,350 words.

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50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know by Ken Liu (Uncanny, November-December 2020) takes the form of a futuristic article written about a Dr Jody Reynolds Tran and the neural network (essentially an AI) she creates called WHEEP-3. Tran later publishes a best-selling book about WHEEP-3, and subsequently causes a controversy when she reveals that the neural network was the author. There is more fuss later on when “seeds” of prose supposedly written by WHEEP-3 are found to be authored by Tran.
The story finishes with a reprint of one of WHEEP-3’s seeds, the “50 things” referred to in the title, a mix of statements that range from the obscure to the observational:

25. “I never expected to sell my rational numbers.”
26. Accepting that most humans will never get the joke.
27. That they cannot visualize more than three dimensions.
28. That they cannot manipulate time by slowing down or
speeding up.
29. That they are trapped, but think of themselves as trappers.
30. That they are free, but believe themselves imprisoned.

A moderately interesting look at how future AIs may behave and communicate—but ultimately a slight, fragmentary piece.
∗∗ (Average). 1,900 words. Story link.

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Time’s Own Gravity by Alexander Glass (Interzone, September-October 2020) begins with the narrator winding multiple timepieces in a house:

We kept them on the old kitchen table: two alarm clocks and an old pocket watch. We were lucky: we had enough to have a set in every room. We even had a couple spare, up in the attic. Some people have just one set for the house. Some people have just one clock, which means you can tell when it isn’t safe, but can’t work out which way to run. Two is better. Four is too many: you can’t distinguish their sounds clearly enough. Three is best. Time, and time, and time again. That’s what people say.

Later on we learn that differences in the speed of the ticking clocks are used to warn of time distortions that are life-threatening, something that subsequently happens to the narrator and his wife Ginny, who then flee their house:

The protocol was simple enough. First, we were supposed to get out of the immediate vicinity, and find a place that seemed safe. People said higher ground was better, for some reason, though that might have been a myth; and anyway, nowhere was completely free of danger. If there were injuries, we should get them treated, not that there was much the doctors could do, generally. Without meaning to, I found I had brought my good hand up to touch the scar on my face. I forced it back down.

As the couple wait by their house for the time distortion to pass, a man called Lukasz, the famous inventor of the Ragnorak Drive, turns up with his team. He ignores their warnings about the house, and tells them he is there because of the event. After he leaves them to survey the property, we learn that the narrator came by the scar on his face and his withered hand in a previous event; however, on that occasion, the couple didn’t get away in good time, and the narrator got caught in the margins of the time distortion. This caused his hand to age much more quickly than the rest of him (their dog, who didn’t escape with them, was reduced to a skeleton and fur).
The rest of the story has Lukasz describe his theories to the couple (spoiler), and he explains that the time distortions are living creatures which appear in our time to reproduce. Lukasz subsequently goes into the house to trap the creatures, but disappears. The story ends with the narrator’s wife leaving him, and an account of the narrator’s theories about Lukasz (who he thinks is a time traveller), and the event that caused the creation of the creatures.
I found the last part of this story a little confusing, alas, but for the most part this is a conceptually engaging piece, and one that reminded me of work by the likes of Barrington Bayley or David I. Masson.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,200 words.

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Test 4 Echo by Peter Watts (Made to Order, 2020) has two operators, Lange and Sansa, watching their remote robot Medusa get damaged during a quake in the depths of Enceladus’s seas (Enceladus is one of Saturn’s moons). When they regain contact they assess the damage to one of the robot’s arms, which seems to have left it mimicking the others. Then they catch a flash of something moving in the robot’s video feed (which has a ninety-eight minute lag to the base on the Moon). As they think they may have seen an alien, they send it limping back to that location.
As this piece progresses the story changes from what I expected to be an underwater hunt for the alien to (spoiler) one about the rise of an AI consciousness in the robot arm. Then the story changes again at the end when we find out that Sansa is an also an AI, spoofed the video feed to show the flash of movement, and has created an “unconstrained” AI in the robot (a capital offence that has it and her rebooted).
This didn’t entirely work for me: the start is confusing (it took me a page and a half to realise that Medusa was the robot probe, something that could have been avoided by the addition of “our robot” or “our probe” before “Medusa” in the first sentence); there is too much chatter (Lange talks endlessly to Sansa, or his partner Raimund on Earth); and the two changes of direction seem at least one too many for a six thousand word story. On the plus side, the dialogue is snappy and there are some good VR descriptions of what the robot probe sees.
∗∗ (Average). 6,150 words.

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Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) starts with a widow recounting her family’s custom of having birthday dinners (her and her son’s in June, the daughter’s in August, and her dead husband’s in October). We also learn that she has been dodging these (or merging the October one with Thanksgiving) for a couple of years now, and this year has plans to go to a conference. This latter leads to an argument with her children, who want the tradition to survive. During their disagreement, their house AI suggests they should perhaps make the October meal a memorial one. The mother tells the AI (more annoying since its mediation code was loaded) to switch off.
Most of the rest of the story deals with the mother’s attempts to avoid dealing with her grief, although there is also an account of her husband’s diagnosis, and his decision that they should go to therapy before he died. During this period, he told her that he wasn’t happy with his reclusiveness, and he didn’t think she was either.
The conflict with her kids comes to a head when she returns home to find them having the memorial dinner without her; she stomps off to her room, where she talks to an AI copy of her husband. The story ends with reconciliation and cake.
This is well enough done but it is essentially a slight mainstream story (a woman comes to terms with her grief and reconciles with her children) with some SF furniture.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 4,300 words.

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Brother Rifle by Daryl Gregory (Made to Order, 2020) is, for the most part, a pretty good story about Rashad, a soldier who has a combat brain injury that means he can’t make decisions or feel emotions. After the opening scene, where he enrols in an experimental program run by a Dr Subramaniam, “Dr S.”, and his assistant Alejandra, the story flashes back to his time in combat:

Once, Rashad had been very good at making decisions. Even that first month in Jammu and Kashmir, with insurgents firing at them from every rooftop and IEDs hiding under the road, he’d rarely hesitated and was usually right.
The man he’d been before the wound—a person he thought of as RBB, Rashad Before Bullet—was a systems operator in a 15-Marine squad, responsible for the squad’s pocket-sized black hornet drones and his beloved SHEP unit. Good name. It was like a hunting dog on wheels, able to follow him or forge ahead, motoring through the terraced mountain villages, swiveling that .50 caliber M2 as if it were sniffing out prey. The sensors arrayed across its body fed data to an ATLAS-enabled AI, which in turn beamed information to the wrap screen on Rashad’s arm. Possible targets were outlined like bad guys in a video game: a silhouette in a window, on a roof, behind a corner.
But the SHEP wasn’t allowed to take the shot—that was Rashad’s decision. He was the man in the loop. Every death was his choice.
When a target popped up on his screen, all he had to do was press the palm switch in his glove and the silhouette would vanish in an exclamation of dust and noise, eight rounds per second. The AI popped up the next target and if he closed his fist just so, another roar ripped the body to shreds.
Hold. Bang. Hold. No and Yes and No.

After some more scene setting, which limns his domestic arrangements among other things, we cut to the crux of the story—which involves an incident where two of his team are shot by a sniper. The aftermath of this, when Rashid engages the sniper but also kills a civilian family, is interwoven with the remaining treatment sessions, and his growing infatuation with Alejandra.
The ending (spoiler) involves Dr S. and Alejandra moving back east, Rashid’s attempted suicide, and his discovery of an aversion that Alejandra has programmed into him. All this is not particularly clear, and I wasn’t entirely sure about what happens or what the point of the story might be. Pity.
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,700 words.

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You and Whose Army? by Greg Egan (Clarkesworld, October 2020) gets off to a fairly leisurely start with Rufus meeting a woman who knows Linus, his brother: it materialises that Rufus and Linus share memories, and that he has disappeared. We also learn, later on in the story, that there are four brothers (the others are Caius and Silus), and that they were originally part of a cult that biologically modified them as a part of an attempted hive-mind project that was later shut down by the authorities (we find most of this out when Rufus consults a PI called Leong about his brother’s disappearance):

Leong paused expectantly, giving him a chance to explain what he meant, but when he remained silent she tried prompting him. “You live in Adelaide, right? So do you meet up in person regularly?”
“Not in person.” Rufus clenched his fists and inhaled slowly. “We have neural links. All four of us. We share each other’s memories. They took us off the boat when we were eight.”
Leong was clearly thrown for a moment, but she retained a professional demeanor. Rufus guessed she was in her early forties, so mid-twenties when the story broke. Unless she’d been living in a cult of her own, she’d know exactly what he was talking about.
“You were born on the Physalia?”
“That’s right.” Rufus had to give her full marks for not only recalling the name, but pronouncing it correctly.
“And you and Linus are quadruplets?”
“Yes. The others are overseas, studying.” No idiotic blather confusing them with “clones.” Rufus’s experience had set the bar low, but he felt entitled to a small celebration at every sensible word that came out of her mouth.
“Forgive me if I’m not clear on exactly how this works,” Leong said. “When you say you share each other’s memories . . . ?”
“We wake up recalling what the other three did,” Rufus replied. “When we sleep, as well as consolidating our own experience into long-term memory, we receive enough data to do the same with the others’. We remember being them, as well as ourselves.

The rest of this piece is, essentially, a missing person story. When Leong produces a picture of Linus leaving Sydney airport the brothers don’t have the money to fund a worldwide search, so they create a social media app that scans submitted photographs for evidence of their brother in the background. Eventually (spoiler), they track him down to a college in France where he has won a scholarship. Further investigation reveals that Linus is being sponsored by an aging billionaire called Guinard (who may have part-funded the Physalia project).
Caius flies to France to question Linus (the point of view moves through all the four brothers during the story), and discovers that Guinard is sharing his memories with Linus and grooming him to become his successor (this is portrayed as a form of immortality for Guinard).
Events then see the three brothers attempting to kidnap Linus when they can’t convince him to spend some time on his own, unconnected to either them or Guinard—so Linus can learn to be himself, neither in their shadow, as he complains, nor as a receptacle for Guinard.
The kidnapping attempt fails when it is stopped by Guinard’s security, and the story ends with Linus thinking to himself that he doesn’t intend to be a receptacle for Guinard, only his protégé, and that he cannot reveal this deception to his brothers until the billionaire dies.
This is pretty good in parts—there is commentary about personhood, and some dry humour—and it is generally interesting, but the ending doesn’t really convince, and a lot of the story is taken up with inter-brother relationship tensions. Although this is a solid story, it struck me as Egan on cruise-control.
∗∗∗ (Good). 13,050 words. Story link.

•

A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore (Dominion, Volume One, 2020) opens with a woman called Candace being appointed as the project leader of an R&D project called Engram. Her boss tells her to either “kill it or bring it to a conclusion”.
The next part of the story sees Candace learn, from both Helene, the previous project leader, and Dr Walker, the team leader, that the project is about genetic memory:

[Dr Walker] hummed thoughtfully, leaned back in his chair and asked, “What do you want to know about Engram?”
“All I know is that it is some type of research on memory enhancement or memory retrieval. I looked online but the closest that I could find were some studies done around 2010. Some researchers taught rats how to run a maze and then found that their descendants were able to run the same maze without training.”
“Did you find anything else?”
I grimaced. “Five years later, some researchers were saying that the experience of American slavery was passed on to the descendants of the enslaved via the same process.”
“Yes,” Dr. Walker said. “That’s one of the few follow-ups to the research at Emory University.”

The rest of the story develops this idea further and (spoiler), when Walker realises that Candace is now his boss (something that she didn’t reveal in their first meeting) he gives her a much more detailed explanation about the project, starting first with parental genetics—haplogroups—and then revealing that his project has made it possible for people to share their memories with those in similar groups. So Candace would be able to share her German language ability with anyone in her (for example) L1b group. Of course, the wider reveal is that the human race is a descendant of one person, L0, so there is the possibility that, with further development, people could share their memories with everyone, and possibly access their ancestors’ memories too.
Wrapped around this plot thread is a lot of characterisation-related material that nicely balances the above (e.g. Candace talks on a couple of occasions with her widowed father, who is doing family tree research but is struggling to track down their black ancestors because of societal conditions at the time, etc.)
Unfortunately, though, all of this just peters out: at the start of the story there is brief section about one of the project’s janitors who is imprinted with Candace’s German skills but, in another short passage at the end of the story, he just wanders off. So the piece ends with the development of a major technological invention that will have profound societal implications, but there is no account of any of the subsequent changes that result. It all feels like we have been served up the opening chapters of a longer novel. Still, it’s probably a worthwhile piece for all that.
∗∗∗ (Good). 8,400 words.

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When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) starts off in what I assume is hard-boiled/noir detective style:

I was jammed to the gills in the City of Angels the night some dumb onion started a war in heaven. And I was still piffled, a few hours later, when it ended.
I’d been weighing down a stool in my favorite gin mill, chewing face with a bottle and trying not to leave a puddle. A geriatric air chiller slowly lost its fight against entropy while the happy lady fumbling with her client in the corner gave us all a case of the hot pants, so the tapster barked at them to scram. They did, but not before pausing in the open doorway to let a devil wind rifle our pockets for loose change. (It got no business from me. You’d keep your cabbage in a shoe, too, if you’d ever lost a sawbuck to a Cherub’s grift.)

It keeps this up for a handful of pages until it moderates into a more normal style (although one still peppered with the likes of the above), during which we learn (a) that the “war in heaven” is an anti-satellite shooting war and (b) see the narrator, Philo Vance, approached by a man who wants him to check on his very rich mother (who seems to have cut him off after marrying a gold-digger).
The rest of the story mostly takes place at the woman’s mansion. Philo visits, sees a crashed car, and eventually manages to talk to someone at the house who has blood on his cuffs. Simultaneous with these events, Philo sees messages in his cigarette smoke and in water vapour—someone or something is trying to contact him.
The rest of the story is quite strange and, at one point, involves Philo departing our plane of existence to talk to something called the “Power”, which is concerned about something called METATRON running amok. This latter section, and previous hints, seem to suggest that Philo is an angel, although not from the sort of Heaven that we normally think of, and that the Power and METATRON are divine forces (possibly God and the Devil?).
Eventually (spoiler), and after various adventures at the bar and the mansion, we find that the mother’s disappearance and the behaviour of METATRON are connected, and matters resolve in the mother’s underground bunker—for both Heaven and Earth.
I’m not I entirely understood what was going on here, but those readers who have read Tregillis’s novel Something More Than Night (described as “Angel Noir” in the Asimov’s introduction) may fare better. As for the rest of us, there is probably enough sense here for it to be rated as okay. It’s more style than substance though, and it becomes a bit wearying.
∗∗ (Average). 8,200 words.

•

Invisible People by Nancy Kress (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) gets off to a lively start with a couple dealing with their two young kids at breakfast time. After an amount of porridge slinging from the younger of the two, the house system tells them there are two strangers of the front porch.
These visitors turn out to be FBI agents, and they tell the parents that their adopted daughter Kenly has come to their attention as part of a RICO investigation into an adoption agency. They then tell the confused parents that her genes were tampered with before she was placed with them.
The next part of the story sees husband (and lawyer) Tom go to his office, where he has to deal with a wife who wants a punitive divorce from her cheating husband, the commander of a nuclear submarine in the Arctic. After this appointment (the wife’s hostility is obliquely relevant later on in the story), he briefs his (sexually transitioning) PI George about his problem, and orders a “no expense spared” investigation into the adoption agency.
The next major event occurs weeks later—and after a period of Kenly being kept at home because of possible risk-taking behaviour associated with the genetic changes—when the couple’s upset babysitter comes home from the park with Kenly. She gives an account of how Kenly ran to the homeless camp in the park and started giving away toys. When one of the men grabbed her and asked for money, the babysitter used a concealed weapon to fire a warning shot. The couple scold Kenly, but she insists she would do the same thing again, as the camp has “kids with no toys”.
The rest of the story sees George the PI discover that there are a group of international scientists in the Cayman Islands behind the adoption/gene-modification scheme, and that the alterations include a “gene drive”, which means that the changes will be more widely passed on to any descendants. After Tom tells his wife about this at home, the very rich Kathleen McGuire turns up and tells the couple the same thing happened to her (now dead) six-year-old boy. She suggests that the affected parents should band together to have their children’s DNA/genes scanned so they can find out what changes have been made, and why.
This all comes to a head (spoiler) when Kenly rescues a baby from a dog, and Tom realises what the modifications are, and why they have been done: he later tells McGuire that the genetic changes were to increase empathy.
Apart from the main story there are other sub-plots/elements that will allow readers to guess what the genetic changes are intended to do—such as the fragments from an essay written by Kenly about leopards which show she sympathises not only with the baboons they kill, but with the leopards too, or the nuclear submarine stand-off in the Arctic that rumbles on in the background throughout.
The final section sees the couple offered gene therapy for their daughter, a procedure that will reverse the changes the adoption centre made. They discuss the matter: do they choose the increased risk that comes with increased empathy, or not? We don’t find out what their decision is, and the story finishes (like C. M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl’s The Meeting) with Tom picking up the phone to make a call.
This is a pretty good piece overall, but the quality varies from the okay/good (e.g. the more formulaic and preachy elements) to the very good (e.g. the revelation of what the genetic modifications mean).
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 8,900 words.

•

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens on a colony planet that has a distinct Deathworld vibe¹ (i.e. it is inimical to human life), and sees Mauled by Mistake treating the wounds of her apprentice Sedef, who has just been attacked by a lashvine. However, once Mauled is finished applying the nanobot medical patches, she tells Sedef that (a) she has also been badly wounded in the attack, (b) they are out of medical supplies, and (c) Sedef will have to go back to the depot and get more.
The rest of the story sees the inexperienced Sedef make her way to the depot before returning to treat to Mauled. During this journey we see the exotic, and brightly illuminated, world they live on (anything that isn’t brightly lit is food, so humans have to wear lightsuits to protect themselves on the surface)—and we also learn something about the colony’s history (most humans retreated underground after arrival, and now only wayfinders like Mauled and Sedef go out on the surface). Light relief is provided by the pair’s mentor/student relationship:

“We need to be at the depot before dark [said Mauled]. Changeover is the most dangerous time to be out. As the forest modulates its glow for sundark, any slight suit anomaly is particularly visible.”
“We learned that. And there are animals, [our tutor] Beyazit said, that specialize in hunting during changeover. Some of which no one has ever seen. Predators we haven’t even—”
“Predators?” Mauled by Mistake gave out an incredulous bark, followed by a stream of intricate profanity. Sedef had heard that the wayfinders had a whole second language of profanity so inventive it was almost unintelligible to others. She couldn’t understand all of this expression—something about Beyazit’s father being born in a quiver of nightwing penises? Could that be right?  p. 68

The subject of predators comes up again when the pair meet another wayfinder in a shelter:

“Beyazit is telling the prospects to beware of predators,” Mauled by Mistake said in the young man’s direction.
“Beyazit should start each day by eating a bowl of his own entrails,” the young man said without looking up. “He almost got me killed once.”
“Who of us has he not almost gotten killed?”
Later, over a cold dinner of nutrient broth and noodles Sedef had made and packeted herself, Mauled by Mistake said, “The first thing to understand is that there are no predators in the forest. This old word does not fit. Only the ignorant use it.”
“But death is always waiting,” Sedef protested. “The forest is filled with teeth.”
“Yes,” Mauled by Mistake said. “You know your recitations well. The forest is filled with teeth. Death is waiting. Always. And so on. But there are no predators. There are only scavengers. When they attack you, and they will—and when they kill you someday, which they likely will—it will be by accident.”
“But the suit lights are a defense against attack. They indicate we are dangerous.”
The young man released a stream of profanity involving something about Beyazit attempting to whistle through a mouthful of various parts of his relatives’ anatomy. “The suits don’t indicate we are dangerous: They simply indicate we are alive.”  pp. 69-70

Mauled is supposed to be a woman, but it is hard to visualise this character as anything other than a grumpy 50-year-old bloke.²
The story (spoiler) comes to an exciting climax when Sedef realises that she won’t get back to where Mauled is before Changeover, when there is a chance that the arrival of sundark and its accompanying EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) may knock out her suit lights . . . . This then happens, and then a “puma” appears: Sedef’s solution to this terminal problem is ingenious, and provides the story with a neat pay-off line.
This is a hugely appealing story, and particularly so for those attracted to old-school SF.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 5,650 words.

•

Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) starts with Siob, a member of the far-future Dispersion of Humanity, remembering a faraway conflict before he arrives on a world where Thave (another member of the Dispersion) lives.
The planet is disguised to appear uninhabitable, and Thave lives through several host bodies in a futuristic underground city. Siob remonstrates with her about her choice (a dull section that seems essentially to be about cultural aesthetics).
Later, Siob asks Thave about other members of the Dispersion before he goes down to “Bedlam”—the final long stream of consciousness section of the book:

Outside the door, the city seethed, roiled, cacophonous. Brimming with people. Were they people? Brimming with dolls, brimming with shadows, brimming with monsters. I forced a smile, a monstrous gritted-teeth affair. “I can’t, Thavé. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I have to go down.”
Thavé nodded (whatever that meant).
It was time for Bedlam.
There was a claw-hand of a moon, violent violet, digging down past my eyes, beneath the portal, the partial, the penetrating perorating peach perfection, capsized
capsized
in an ocean of night.
That’s not right. Focus on the hands, on the hands—leather? of leather? Running through the heather.
(“I can see where I am, I can always see where I am. Dreaming with part of my brain. But how to interpret what I see? How to know if that—that—is a bed, a wall, a hand, a moon, a vault, a vertilex, a transix, a typhoon?”)
Cultural detox. Hallucenophenomenic aspects of.

I’m not entirely sure what goes on subsequently, but I vaguely recall a lot of memories and angst. And, of course, the two pages of blank verse, which were an especial treat.
There is a lot of surface glitter in this story but not, I think, much else.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,750 words.

•

Salvage by Andy Dudak (Interzone, January-February 2020) gets off to an intriguing start with a woman called Aristy examining “homifacts” on New Ce. These homifacts are petrified humans created by an alien race a thousand years previously, with the purpose of stopping human observation of the Universe (which was, apparently, causing it to fly apart). The hominids are, however, still alive as software inside their transmuted bodies—and Aristy is there and able to interface with them because her people were on near-lightspeed spaceships at the time of the alien action. As she tells one of the homifacts (a political man in the Picti dictatorship which ruled the planet):

“They asked humanity to turn its damaging gaze away from the cosmos. Turn inward, lose itself in simulated realities. And some did. Whole civilizations did. But it wasn’t enough for the aliens, the Curators as we’ve come to call them. So, they acted. They swept through the human Emanation in less than a century. No one knows how they did that.
“They turned the human species inward. Cities, worlds, systems, empires. The Curators’ Reagent froze people instantly, preserved their brains, which were gradually converted into durable networks suffusing their remnant statues. A trillion human beings Turned Inward, a trillion isolated minds in a trillion virtualities.”

Aristy now spends her time interfacing with these homifacts and asking them if they want to be downloaded onto her servers, where they can live in a world of their own creation; stay where they are, with or without improvements; or be deleted:

Of the six she hacked today, four chose transfer to her server: Acolyte, Night Soil Collector, Visiting Student, and Doctor. The small-minded Printer opted to remain in his simulated village, but with a larger, more prosperous print shop, a remodeled wife, and a medal of distinguished service from Generalissimo Picti. The brainwashed Commissar, unable to bear the historical irrelevance of Picti’s long-gone reign, chose oblivion.

Just as this story looks like it is settling down into its groove, the next part veers off in an unexpected direction: Aristy goes back to her camp and finds a lawyer and an armed guard waiting. They ask her about the homifacts she has salvaged, and then tell her that she needs to go with them to Drop City.
After her arrival, Aristy is quizzed by the Drop City Committee, and later has to listen to a number of homifacts give testimony about the crimes committed against them by Picti the dictator: they go on to demand his reclamation so he can stand trial. Then, during a recess, Aristy goes for a drink in a bar, followed by her guard; there, an old man challenges her about something she did on her starship. Finally, the committee reconvene and sentence Aristy to community service for her illegal salvaging operations, which means she has to track down Picti and bring him to trial for them.
The search for General Picti starts at a torture chamber under a building called The Tannery. Aristy finds his security boss there, and starts going through his memories to find out where Picti was when the aliens arrived: these scenes build up a picture of the planetary society of the time.
When (spoiler) Aristy finally finds Picti, she enters his simulation and goes through the timeline, watching as it veers from reality into fantasy (during this sequence Picti turns himself into a god). Then she appears to tell him that he is to stand trial for his crimes, and Picti learns what has happened over the last 1000 years. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Aristy was one of the waking crew of the starship, and deliberately killed its sleepers. We aren’t really told why Aristy did this, but the ending has such an intense, almost hallucinatory, quality that I wasn’t as bothered about this as I might have been.
This is an original piece, it has a complex development and, all in all, is pretty good.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 10,600 words.

•

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens in China in 2010 with a young woman called Pha Xov telling an ambitious young man called Qiao Fue that she is pregnant. Qiao chooses to pursue wealth and power over marrying her and providing for the child.
The story then skips forward ten years (over its length the tale telescopes forward to 2095) and we see the daughter born of that relationship with her grandmother. The child is called Lian Mee (the mother marries someone else but the husband doesn’t want the child around), and we watch as she grows up and goes to college. There she has a life changing experience when a professor sexually harasses her, telling Lian that, if she wants to pass her course, she must come to his apartment. After much agonising she goes—but he isn’t there, and she graduates anyway.
The experience has a profound effect on her, and accelerates her work on moral AIs. Soon she starts her own company (so she can have a decent employer), Miao Punk Princess Inc., and hires a programmer called Vue Yeng to help her start up a cheap cache internet company that will help fund her AI work.
An early example of Lian’s work are the training AIs she develops, which learn from sensors attached to skilled builders and craftsmen, and are destined to train compete novices in the future. These AIs are more than just training programs however, as one man on a building site finds out when he gropes one of Lian’s female employees. Lian removes his AI training sensors and says he won’t be paid for a week.
After developing Human Resources AIs (which in one episode stop an employer sweeping yet another sexual harassment case under the carpet), Lian eventually manages to convince the local bureaucrats to roll out her anti-poverty AIs. These help the poor but also start acting on their own initiative, which we see when a man called Kong Xang abandons his newly born Down’s syndrome baby on a factory doorstep. After Qiao Fue (Lian Mee’s father, whose life story also occasionally features) declines to pick up the child after being diverted there by the software in his car, the AIs intervene:

Mino Jai Lia cried out at the knock at her door. She lived alone. The knock happened again. Her children and grandchildren didn’t live in the village anymore. She barely received visitors during the day and never during the night.
“Who is it?” she yelled. “Get out of here before I call the police!”
The threat was no good. She didn’t have a phone, and the next neighbor was four li away.
“Who is it?” she said, turning on the single bulb and putting her feet into plastic shoes.
“Anti-poverty AI,” a voice said. A light shone under the door.
The anti-poverty AI delivered her groceries every second day and took away her trash.
“Anti-poverty AI,” came the stupid answer, but she recognized the voice.
She unlatched the door and opened it. A spidery robot stood there with a bag in its arms. And another stood behind it with more groceries than she ever got. The little running lights showed two other robots in the dark beyond.
“Hello Mrs. Mino,” the AI said. “Sorry for disturbing you.” It started advancing, then stopped when she didn’t move. She backed up and two robots walked in like big spiders, cameras whirring. Their feet were muddy.
“Off the mats!” she said.
The robots stepped around the fiber mats keeping the mud from her feet. The first AI held a bundle.
“A baby,” she said wonderingly. Robots shouldn’t be taking children out at night. She was about to berate them when she saw the baby’s face under the light. “Oh, baby . . .” she said sadly.
When she was just a girl, her aunt had a baby like this. No one ever saw the baby after it was born. These robots hadn’t stolen someone’s baby.
“I am the Anti-Poverty AI supervisor, Mrs. Mino,” the robot said.
She’d never heard of AI supervisors. Only regular robots came with her groceries, and they didn’t talk much.
“We are seeking your assistance in caring for this baby. If you raise this child, I will authorize your placement on a special poverty vulnerability list. Your deliveries of groceries, firewood, and clothing will be increased and diversified. A medical AI will visit once per month.”
The robot behind the supervisor set the bags down and began revealing blankets, baby clothes, a baby hammock, wipes, formula, disposable diapers, as well as bags of cooked pork and chicken, foods that for years she’d only seen on holidays. She neared. A flat little face surrounded fat lips puckered in hunger.
“What’s the baby’s name?” she said.
“Kong,” the supervisor said, pausing. “Kong Toua.”
A good name, a good Miao name for a boy. Toua meant first.
“This place will need to be fixed up,” she warned. “This is no place for a baby.”
“I will authorize a construction AI to visit and assess your needs,” the supervisor said.
Mino Jai Lia took the warm baby gently from the netting.  p. 174

This abandonment episode spawns another two threads in the story. The first of these is Mino’s care of Toua and a number of other Down’s children, and we see Toua eventually grow up and develop to the point where, with an embedded AI assistant, he is able to care for other children and also go on errands, e.g. to hospitals to pick up other abandoned Down’s children. The other thread sees Toua’s father, Kong Xang, become estranged from his wife Chang Bo (who, co-incidentally, is later hired by Lian Mee and set to work on a building site where she is taught to lay bricks by a training AI) and begin his descent into alcoholism and homelessness.
While all this is going on Qaio Fue acquires power and wealth, partly through his development of life extension technology. This culminates with Qaio raising a clone as a successor (he never meets his daughter Lian Mee, although he is aware of her)—but even though the clone has the same genetics Qaio can’t provide the same upbringing, and his “son” is too laid back to be interested in corporate politics and wealth when there is UBI that covers his needs.
Eventually (spoiler) Lian Mee, now widely known as “Miao Punk Princess” (which would have been a better title for the story) dies. But her work survives her—as we see when Kong Xang is found by an anti-poverty AI on the streets of Guiyang, and offered the chance to go back to Danzhai. When he eventually arrives at the care home he finds it is operated by Down’s syndrome staff and their AIs. One of them is his son, Toua, who confronts Kong Xang and tells him that he is a bad person before saying he will look after him. Kong Xang breaks down, and gives his son the bracelet he removed before abandoning him.
This is a compelling (and occasionally emotional) read, and an intriguing look at how AI could eventually provide a pragmatic and compassionate utopia on Earth (or at least move us substantially in that direction): the story could perhaps be seen as the other side of the coin to Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands. That said, this impressive, multi-threaded piece isn’t perfect—the issue of how China’s current totalitarian leadership would react to autonomous moral AIs is almost completely ignored (although there is a brief episode where Lian concedes that Legal AIs have to be under state control), and I’m not sure that the Qaio Fue thread fits into the story particularly well (I suspect the arc of Lian’s father’s life is meant to be a foil for the rest of the story, but it seems instead to be about a powerful man who is thwarted by his lack of self-knowledge).
Overall, a novel’s worth of ideation squeezed into a very good novella.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 23,350 words.

•••

There is no non-fiction to speak of, but there is an Index of all of Allan Kaster’s anthologies at the back of the book. The Cover is a reprint of Maurizio Manzieri’s cover for Asimov’s Science Fiction, July-August 2019.

•••

In conclusion, there is one standout story in this volume, Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera, and two that I would classify as very good, Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler and Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (some, or all, of these should have been on the recent Hugo ballot).
These three are supported by good to very good work by Rich Larson, Nancy Kress, and Andy Dudak, and good work from Alexander Glass, Daryl Gregory, Greg Egan, and Denise Moore. That’s two-thirds of the stories (and more than three-quarters of the anthology’s wordage) that are either worth, or are more than worth, your time—a very good hit rate for a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology.
Out of the also rans, the only ones I felt that shouldn’t be here were the Tregillis (I’m not sure this is science fiction, never mind “hard science fiction”), and the Rosenbaum (an over-written non-story)—but at least they didn’t irritate me (something that can’t be said about the also-rans in some anthologies).
This selection is also largely free of some of the current curses of the SF short fiction field (litfic stories or misery memoirs masquerading as SF, pieces that are little more than pious political or cultural propaganda, work that has no obvious structure, arc, or point, etc., etc.—I could go on).
Four stories from Asimov’s SF, two each from Interzone and the anthologies Entanglements and Made to Order, and one each from Tor.com, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Dominion, and F&SF.
Highly recommended.  ●

____________________

1. Ray Nayler (another Asimov’s SF regular) interviewed Rivera about Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars here. I think Nayler lets his preoccupation about the shortcomings of capitalism somewhat blindside him to the more obvious themes of the story, i.e. man as God, and humanity’s appalling treatment of other species. These two issues appear, to a greater or lesser extent, in the two stories already mentioned as well as another two related pieces, Crystal Nights by Greg Egan (Interzone #215, April 2008), and Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979). The theme of man as God is particularly prominent in the Egan (and it is the only one of the four pieces where the protagonist alters his behaviour towards the subject species when he realises they are suffering) whereas the Martin is almost entirely about the main character’s sadistic treatment of his alien “pets” (the piece is essentially a “let’s set an anthill on fire for fun” story but, notwithstanding this, a gripping piece and a worthy multiple award winner).

2. Deathworld by Harry Harrison (Astounding Science Fiction, January-March 1960).

3. Mauled by Mistake (from Nayler’s Eyes of the Forest) can’t be portrayed as a man because, of course, that would turn Mauled and Sedef’s relationship into a dreadfully patriarchal one. And if you have both Mauled and Sedef as men there will be no women left in the story. The horror!  ●