this book (nine of the stories). Only mentioning the SF anthologies, among the best are: X6, an Australian small press collection of novellas; Other Earths, edited by Nick Gevers; We Think Therefore We Are, edited by Pete Crowther; When It Changed, edited by Geoff Ryman; and the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction #3, edited by George Mann.
Our Year’s Best SF is an anthology series about what’s going on now in SF. We try in each volume of this series to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. It is supposed to be fun to read, a special kind of fun you cannot find elsewhere. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2009.
This book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is fairly clearly that and not something else. It is our opinion that it is a good thing to have genre boundaries. If we didn’t, young writers would probably feel compelled to find something else, perhaps less interesting, to transgress or attack to draw attention to themselves. We have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and slipstream, and postmodern literature. We (Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s Best Fantasy as well, a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy fiction too. But here, we choose science fiction.
We make a lot of additional comments about the writers and the stories, and what’s happening in SF, in the individual introductions accompanying the stories in this book. Welcome to the Year’s Best SF in 2009.
David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
Pleasantville, NY
Infinities
VANDANA SINGH
Vandana Singh (users.rcn.com/singhvan/) is from India and lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, where she is an assistant professor of physics. Her stories are collected in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008). Her novella “Distances” was published in 2008 by Aqueduct Press. She has also published two YA novels, Younguncle Comes to Town and Younguncle in the Himalayas. And she is the editor of To Each Her Own: Anthology of Contemporary Hindi Stories. In an interview she says, “The city of Delhi is thousands of years old and I grew up surrounded by history, almost literally in the shadows of crumbling fort walls and nameless medieval monuments (among the modern high-rises). The very air was—and still is—thick with stories. But I had to go away, to take the view from a far shore, to see all this.”
“Infinities” was published in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, which came out at the end of 2008 in India. She says, “Physics is a way of viewing the world, and it is one of my most important lenses. One of the most exciting things about science is that it reveals the sub-text of the physical world. In other words, surface reality isn’t all there is, the world is full of hidden stories, connections, patterns, and the scientific as well as the literary and psychological aspects of this multi-textured reality are, to me, fascinating.” This is a story about a man in India who loves mathematics.
An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.
—Srinivasa Ramanujan,
Indian mathematician (1887–1920)
Abdul Karim is his name. He is a small, thin man, precise to the point of affectation in his appearance and manner. He walks very straight; there is gray in his hair and in his short, pointed beard. When he goes out of the house to buy vegetables, people on the street greet him respectfully. “Salaam, Master sahib,” they say, or “Namaste, Master Sahib,” according to the religion of the speaker. They know him as the mathematics master at the municipal school. He has been there so long that he sees the faces of his former students everywhere: the autorickshaw driver Ramdas who refuses to charge him, the man who sells paan from a shack at the street corner, with whom he has an account, who never reminds him when his payment is late—his name is Imran and he goes to the mosque far more regularly than Abdul Karim.
They all know him, the kindly mathematics master, but he has his secrets. They know he lives in the old yellow house, where the plaster is flaking off in chunks to reveal the underlying brick. The windows of the house are hung with faded curtains that