QUICK REVIEW: The Best American Series

 I've written before, also briefly, about The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, a yearly publication with a collection of short stories selected from works published in the previous year. I recently read through the 2020 edition, and just now finished reading through a book in a sibling series: the 2019 publication of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. I'm writing this post to re-affirm my earlier endorsement, and expand it to The Best American collection(s) as a whole.

The 2020 edition of Science Fiction and Fantasy stood out to me even more than previous years because of the sheer volume of queer representation it contained. Many times I had to remind myself that I was not, in fact,  reading a collection like Meanwhile, Elsewhere, which set out to be by and about queer people, but a filtered, edited, and selected collection of the best of main-stream sci-fi and fantasy. In that sense it was an absolute relief and revelation to read; it's not the most subversive or most queer content I have encountered, but the sheer prevalence and normalization of queerness with the stories felt like a real paradigm shift. It was a reminder that, despite the setbacks and the ongoing assault on queer people and minority rights, there has been a cultural shift. Progress is not made or lost all at once in every sphere, and we are still very much in the fight for our existence and acknowledgement.

When I picked up the Science and Nature Writing edition, I was not sure what to expect, but I decided on it because, quite frankly, I am at a deficit when it comes to reading non-fiction. As the forward acknowledges, the line between science and nature writing is quite thin, especially in these days of climate catastrophe and global warming. Indeed, the power in this collection is not any individual piece of writing (though they are all great), but in how they paint a collective and stark picture of the state of our world; the state of nature, and the state of our science and human impact. So many of the stories are about either extinction, the ongoing impacts of climate change, or the socioeconomic systems that helped lead to these problems and how they continue to propagate their own.

The most chilling of these essay to read, I think, was the piece "When the Next Plague Hits," by Ed Young. It was published in 2018, but reading it now is not so much an exercise of hindsight but of prophesy. In these few pages, Ed highlights the 'potential' breaking points of the U.S.'s healthcare and global monitor systems, and points to past outbreaks as a warning of how close we were to disaster. And line by line, it is a prediction, blueprint, and explanation for exactly what led to the COVID-19 pandemic, and an infuriatingly naked picture of how visible the fault lines were. Anthony Fauci is even quoted in the story, previewing the disaster he would confront in the following years.

But I don't want to oversell one piece or simply recount what I liked from each of these volumes (which was a lot; they are all very good). I'm writing this short post to recommended the collections, any of their editions, and their sibling series, as I've seen enough to be confidant in their quality.

Reading takes time, and we don't have much of it, but if you want an excellent slice of what is being written here in the United States, the Best American series is worth picking up in whatever genre you are interested in. It is available wherever books are sold.