Short Cli-Fi Fiction in Print, 2019
reviewed by Rich Horton for LOCUS Magazine
I’ll begin with two collections that got a great deal of notice outside the SF field. One is Orange World, by Karen Russell... As for Orange World, I’ll mention that I liked the title story enough to enquire about using it in my Best of the Year anthology (Karen declined, in deference to the collection.) There’s one new story in this book, “The Gondoliers”, a very fine near-future SF (or “cli-fi”) story, about a young woman who steers a gondola through the waters that have taken over southern Florida. We learn a little about the catastrophe, from a passenger who remembers the old times, and hints of the new world, particularly the ways this woman and her sisters have adapted.
“The Gondoliers” was also published in the final issue of Tin House, which was a literary magazine noticeably sympathetic to the fantastic.
Three original anthologies that stuck out for me were Jonathan Strahan’s Mission Critical, Nisi Shawl’s New Suns, and Cat Rambo’s If This Goes On.
Mission Critical features stories about characters in desperate situations, incdung “Cyclopterus” by Peter Watts. Watts’s story is more cli-fi, and terribly dark, as we might expect from him – with two people trapped in a deepwater submarine after some sort of underwater wave destroys their refuge: this is a future Earth already destroyed, and even hoped for safety under the ocean is illusory.
Every year many of the best novellas come from for Tor.com. Greg Egan’s Perihelion Summer, another example of cli-fi (unavoidable these days, and it should be unavoidable, as we learn with each new crisis, most obviously, as I write, the wildfires in Egan’s own country, Australia). In this long novella a black hole intensifies the crisis, and the story follows attempts to ride out the disaster on a self-sufficient “floating island.” Plenty of sharp speculation, resembling Kim Stanley Robinson but less optimistic.
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Rich Horton works for a major aerospace company in St. Louis. He has published over a dozen anthologies, including the yearly series The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy from Prime Books, and he is the Reprint Editor for Lightspeed Magazine. He contributes articles and reviews on SF and SF history to numerous publications.
This review and more like it in the February 2020 issue of Locus.
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