Year's Best SF 17

Paul Park lives with his wife, Deborah Brothers, and their children in North Adams, Massachusetts. He teaches at Williams College, where his mother and father also taught. He became prominent in SF in the late 1980s with the publication of his first three novels, The Starbridge Chronicles: Soldiers of Paradise (1987), Sugar Rain (1989), and The Cult of Loving Kindness (1991). He went on to write a variety of challenging novels in and out of genre, and short stories collected in If Lions Could Speak (2002). His major project in the last decade has been the four-volume fantasy of an alternate world where magic works— A Princess of Roumania (2005) and its sequels, The Tourmaline (2006), The White Tyger (2007), and The Hidden World (2008). There was once in the 1980s a fine SF novel, Winter’s Daughter, by Charles Whitmore, a post-catastrophe story told in the form of the Icelandic sagas. Perhaps this is the tradition into which the present story fits.

“Ragnarok” was published at Tor.com, and this is perhaps its first appearance in print. It is a stanzaic narrative written in the style of the Icelandic saga, set in a post-apocalyptic future. We think it’s a knockout.