Best of? Not off to a good start

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 compendium is in its eleventh year. This year's guest editor is Nnedi Okorafor. The series has a spotty history with me. Today I am 1/4 of the way through and it's not looking too good. Of the first five items, I have read three, skipped one almost entirely and skipped about half of another. I will comment on two of the stories, one that I found mostly good and one that is puzzling but at least not bad. The genre of each piece is included below the title.

The first story in the collection (Genre is Science Fiction) is "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" by Caroline M. Yoachim. Section after section, a short, patterned statement is repeated, with variations, on both sides of the page, in various orientations, interspersed with a short paragraph or two of entreaty. Apparently, an entity with many eyes can read many texts in parallel, and it is trying to teach us the beginnings of the same skill. We are exhorted to read the left side of the page with the left eye, and the right side with the right eye. I am one of a very few people who can go "wide-eyed" enough to attempt this, and of course the result is a muddle. The concept is interesting; the experience is one I don't plan to repeat.

The title of the fifth story (Science Fiction) is obscene, so I will mask it: "F**k Them Kids" by Tatiana Obey. The story itself is a romp, centering on a spaceship race. The race is utterly unrealistic, with small, personal spaceships (apparently capable of faster-than-light travel), decorated like NASCAR race cars, zooming through an "asteroid belt" that bears more resemblance to that video game relic Asteroids than to the actual asteroid region between Mars and Jupiter. The ships glance off asteroids and each other, so presumably the speeds involved are closer to NASCAR, 200 mph or less, than to actual inter-asteroidal velocities of 20,000 to 50,000 mph. Very fun to read; just read it like a story of back-road racing in the country.

For those who don't know, the reality of the actual asteroid belt is this: If you are near enough to a real asteroid the size of an grape or larger to actually see it visually, the next-nearest asteroid of similar size is at least a million miles away. We have sent eight spacecraft crosswise through the asteroid belt, to reach the outer planets. None has collided with even a sand grain.

Two out of five isn't a good beginning. I hope for better luck in the remaining 15 stories.

The image above was made with GPT-4o, which is getting a little obsolete, but it is more adherent to shortish prompts (~120 characters) than most. Along the way I tried a few other art engines, so I'll add a couple of the images as a bonus to this post:

Using Microsoft AI: 

Using Seedream 4.0: