“Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling”

2018 [Dellamonica, Alexandra Margaret] (b. 1968). “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling.” By L. X. Beckett [pseud.]. The Magazine and Fantasy and Science Fiction 135.1/2 (July-August 2018): 75-149. Rpt. in The Best Science Fiction of the Year. Volume 4. Ed. Neil Clarke (New York: Night Shade, 2019), 364-428, with an editor’s note on 364. PSt 

A complex high-tech dystopia in which individuals gain and lose social capital, which is necessary for almost everything one does, through the responses of people to their actions. The focus is on a man struggling to regain the capital he has lost. Other aspects of the society are referred to in passing, like printed food, the effects of climate change, such as the use of backyards as carbon offsets, which is likely to required in the near future, and that childless young people have left western countries, and their parents and grandparents, for jobs in Asia. The author’s novel Gamechanger. New York: Tor, 2019 is set in the same future. The Canadian author self-identifies as feminist, lesbian, genderqueer, married, and Slytherian.