The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 4

The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 4, edited by Mahvesh Murad, features award-winning science fiction and fantasy short stories from western Europe, east Asia, and the Middle East.

From Spanish steampunk and Italian horror to Nigerian science fiction and subverted Japanese folktales, from love in the time of drones to teenagers at the end of the world, the stories in this volume showcase the best of contemporary speculative fiction, wherever it’s written.

Table of Contents

Vajra Chandrasekera (Sri Lanka) — "Pockets Full of Stones"
Yukimi Ogawa (Japan) — "In Her Head, In Her Eyes"
Zen Cho (Malaysia) — "The Four Generations of Chang E"
Shimon Adaf (Israel) — "Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith" (Translated by the author)
Celeste Rita Baker (Virgin Islands) — "Single Entry"
Nene Ormes (Sweden) — "The Good Matter" (Translated by Lisa J Isaksson and Nene Ormes)
JY Yang (Singapore) — "Tiger Baby"
Isabel Yap (Philippines) — "A Cup of Salt Tears"
Usman T Malik (Pakistan) — "The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family"
Kuzhali Manickavel (India) — "Six Things We Found During the Autopsy"
Elana Gomel (Israel) — "The Farm"
Haralambi Markov (Bulgaria) — "The Language of Knives"
Sabrina Huang (Taiwan) — "Setting Up Home" (Translated by Jeremy Tiang)
Sathya Stone (Sri Lanka) — "Jinki and the Paradox"
Johann Thorsson (Iceland) — "First, Bite a Finger"
Dilman Dila (Uganda) — "How My Father Became a God"
Swabir Silayi (Kenya) — "Colour Me Grey"
Deepak Unnikrishnan (The Emirates) — "Sarama"
Chinelo Onwualu (Nigeria) — "The Gift of Touch"
Saad Z. Hossain (Bangaldesh) — "Djinns Live by the Sea"
Bernardo Fernández (Mexico) — "The Last Hours of the Final Days" (Translated by the author)
Natalia Theodoridou (Greece) — "The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul"
Samuel Marolla (Italy) — "Black Tea" (Translated by Andrew Tanzi)
Julie Novakova (Czech Republic) — "The Symphony of Ice and Dust"
Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Netherlands) — "The Boy Who Cast No Shadow" (Translated by Laura Vroomen)
Sese Yane (Kenya) — "The Corpse"
Tang Fei — "Pepe" (Translated by John Chu)
Rocío Rincón (Spain) — "The Lady of the Soler Colony" (Translated by James and Marian Womack)

About the Editors

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, the World Fantasy Award-winning Osama, and of the critically-acclaimed The Violent Century. His other works include the Bookman Histories trilogy, several novellas, two collections, and a forthcoming comics mini-series, Adler. He currently lives in London.

Mahvesh Murad is a book critic and recovering radio show host. She writes for multiple publications and hosts the Tor.com podcast Midnight in Karachi. She was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, where she still lives.

Excerpt

From: "Pockets Full of Stones" by Vajra Chandrasekera

The ghost of my grandfather Rais flickered when he talked about first contact. He was a decade younger than me now, unwrinkled and black-haired, far from grandfatherly.

Beside me, Hadil gestured for a pause. My grandfather’s ghost stopped talking, his features losing expression. The rich brown of his skin faded, became ghostlier, as the imago switched over to standby mode.

“Dike,” Hadil said, nudging me unnecessarily. “You notice the flicker?”

“Probably lost some frames in the cooker,” I said. Error-correction was tricky with neutrino-based communications over the light-years. The original Rais, very much alive, was extremely far away and travelling fast. “Did he say first contact?”

“He did,” Hadil said. He took off his augmented-reality glasses to rub his temples. Without them, his eyes looked too big, the red veins standing out. Too much time behind the glasses. “But I think that’s all the time he’s going to spend on it, no matter how important it might be. He just wants to talk to you.”

I would have argued, except it was true.

Picked up a neutrino transmission, the ghost of Rais had said tiredly. Could be pulsar activity. Some talk of first contact. See attached update for details. As if that closed the matter. Then he had changed the subject to his obsession: the petition to open up a bandwidth allocation for family members of his twenty thousand fellow colonists on the Cây Cúc. The right to talk to the Earth they’d left behind.

“Let me take a look at the attachment before Da Nang comes up,” Hadil said. On Makemake Station, we lived in epicycles. The station’s magnetic transmission horns tracked Earth in her orbit, waiting every day for the planet to spin Da Nang Mission Control into our line of sight so we could report home. There were a few hours left to go today.

“Do you mind if—” I nodded at the silent ghost. Without his glasses on Hadil couldn’t see the imago, but it hadn’t moved since he paused it.

“Go ahead,” Hadil said, getting up. “It’s your Grandpa. He probably spends the next twenty minutes crying about bandwidth and your Grandma, anyway.”

I scowled at his back as he walked to the other side of the workroom, walking through all the phantom displays he couldn’t see without his glasses on: bright screens and blinking glyphs, the scale model of Makemake Station in the corner, the wall of clocks hovering in mid-air, my silent flickering grandfather, and my favorite Gauguin, D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. Hadil had once complained it gave him nightmares, but I found it both soothing and ironically appropriate.

I had pulled rank and kept it at full size, four meters wide in our shared virtual space. Hadil always sat facing away from it.

As the relay station, the only link between Earth and her first colony ship, we could read the Updates from the Cây Cúc but they weren’t meant for us. Once we transmitted it back to Earth, it would be unpacked and pored over by analysts at Da Nang. This Update would have details about the mystery transmission, phrased carefully so that Da Nang wouldn’t think that the crew of the Cây Cúc was having a collective psychotic break. But there wouldn’t be much in the way of analysis from the Cây Cúc, just raw data. The time dilation meant they had no time to sit on information.

And neither did I. Hadil could satisfy his curiosity, but I had laws to break and no time for hypothetical aliens.

It couldn’t possibly be real aliens. They’ve probably discovered a new kind of pulsar.

“You want coffee?” Hadil said.

“No, thanks.”

The slightly acrid smell of instant coffee filled the room. You couldn’t virtualize a kettle, Hadil always said. “Do we have any fresh fruit left?” I asked, not turning around.

The fridge door opened and closed behind me. “Nope. Three days to the next supply drop.”

When he first got here, Hadil had been a little shocked to discover what I was doing. Makemake Station was a two-person miniature civilization at the outer edge of the solar system. There could be no secrets here, so I had just told him: I was dipping into that precious bandwidth to talk to my grandfather on the Cây Cúc. A strange crime, I’d admitted, but a crime nevertheless. He could have reported me, had me shipped off back home, banned from space.

But Da Nang was very political, even so many years after the troubles. He would be tainted by association, I had told him. I didn’t say that I would make sure of it. He wasn’t stupid. After a few months, he had relaxed. After his first year, we had become friends.

Given enough time, all problems are solvable.