The Best of World SF: Volume 1

Description

Twenty-six new short stories representing the state of the art in international science fiction. 'Rare and wonderful' The Times 'The most important anthology of SF short fiction since Dangerous Visions' Adam Roberts 'Fizzes with great ideas and wonderful writing... Now this book exists, it feels absurd it didn't exist sooner' SFX The future is coming. It knows no bounds, and neither should science fiction. They say the more things change the more they stay the same. But over the last hundred years, science fiction has changed. Vibrant new generations of writers have sprung up across the globe, proving the old adage false. From Ghana to India, from Mexico to France, from Singapore to Cuba, they draw on their unique backgrounds and culture, changing the face of the genre one story at a time. Prepare yourself for a journey through the wildest reaches of the imagination, to visions of Earth as it might be and the far corners of the universe. Along the way, you will meet robots and monsters, adventurers and time travellers, rogues and royalty. In The Best of World SF, award-winning author Lavie Tidhar acts as guide and companion to a world of stories, from never-before-seen originals to award winners, from twenty-three countries and seven languages. Because the future is coming and it belongs to us all. Stories: 'Immersion' by Aliette de Bodard; 'Debtless' by Chen Qiufan (trans. from Chinese by Blake Stone-Banks); 'Fandom for Robots' by Vina Jie-Min Prasad; 'Virtual Snapshots' by Tlotlo Tsamaase; 'What The Dead Man Said' by Chinelo Onwualu; 'Delhi' by Vandana Singh; 'The Wheel of Samsara' by Han Song (trans. from Chinese by the author); 'Xingzhou' by Yi-Sheng Ng; 'Prayer' by Taiyo Fujii (trans. from Japanese by Kamil Spychalski); 'The Green Ship' by Francesco Verso (trans. from Italian by Michael Colbert); 'Eyes of the Crocodile' by Malena Salazar Macia (trans. from Spanish by Toshiya Kamei); 'Bootblack' by Tade Thompson; 'The Emptiness in the Heart of all Things' by Fabio Fernandes; 'The Sun From Both Sides' by R.S.A. Garcia; 'Dump' by Cristina Jurado (trans. from Spanish by Steve Redwood); 'Rue Chair' by Gerardo Horacio Porcayo (trans. from Spanish by the author); 'His Master's Voice' by Hannu Rajaniemi; 'Benjamin Schneider's Little Greys' by Nir Yaniv (trans. from Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar); 'The Cryptid' by Emil H. Petersen (trans. from Icelandic by the author); 'The Bank of Burkina Faso' by Ekaterina Sedia; 'An Incomplete Guide...' by Kuzhali Manickavel; 'The Old Man with The Third Hand' by Kofi Nyameye; 'The Green' by Lauren Beukes; 'The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir' by Karin Tidbeck; 'Prime Meridian' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; 'If At First You Don't Succeed' by Zen Cho

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut's by Locus.

Although science fiction imagines diverse, imaginative, and frightening futures, genre anthologies rarely achieve the brilliant range and diversity of voices of The Best of World SF: Volume 1... The anthology brings a fresh, revolutionary perspective in that its selections are intentionally curated to suggest that the horizon is both closer and brighter than Western readers might think. Vital and exciting, The Best of World SF blows the blast panels off the dusty, well-worn tropes of popular science fiction and lets in a dazzling burst of lunar light' * Foreword * This excellent anthology proves editor Tidhar's assertion that science fiction should no longer be thought of as 'white, male, and American' with 26 exemplary stories from 21 countries... Worthwhile both as a survey of international sci-fi and on a story-by-story level, this wonderful anthology should be a hit with any sci-fi fan' * Publishers Weekly * This is one of those books in our seasonal listing that warrants doing well. Some may say Lavie is doing foreign writers a favour. He's not. He's doing English-speaking readers one * Concatenation * Tidhar gives a cheerful, fannish introduction to the stories, drawn from 26 countries on five continents, and encompassing a dizzying range of tones and approaches * The Times * An excellent, lovingly curated collection that is also uniformly well translated * Financial Times * Stories like these are the ones you sometimes want to foist upon readers who claim not to like SF, and The Best of World SF: Volume 1 reminds us that such stories can come from anywhere these days, if only we get to see them. I look forward to future volumes * Locus Magazine * The variety and diversity of the material on offer is refreshing, the quality does not waver, and the translations are top-notch * Financial Times * Hopefully the little rocket on the cover will let readers know what they'll find inside this 26-story, 575-page cinder block of a collection. We're talking spaceships and nanobots, creeping horrors and astral wonders, cyberpunk dystopias and cold, empty places where no one can hear you scream. It's true the sci-fi world is always expanding, writes Israeli author/editor Lavie Tidhar in the forward, but this sort of international compendium - which includes the works of mostly non-white, non-famous authors from such far-flung homeworlds as Singapore, Brazil, Croatia, and the Philippines - is still something of a novelty in our timeline. Embrace the unknown * Philadelphia Inquirer * You can't read this and not be changed by it, which always seemed like the point of [science fiction] * Amazing Stories * This handsome volume from Head of Zeus is a major step on a 45-year journey to bring global speculative fiction to Anglophone attention... The print edition of The Best of World SF: Volume 1 is truly a thing of beauty, providing gravitas and a wider audience for the authors it collects... There are many striking stories in the collection... This anthology is just the start of a whole new game for speculative fiction authors around the world' * LA Review of Books * Fizzes with great ideas and wonderful writing... Now this book exists, it feels absurd it didn't exist sooner * SFX Magazine *