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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Preface

  The Country of the Kind Damon Knight

  Aristotle and the Gun L. Sprague de Camp

  The Other Celia Theodore Sturgeon

  Casey Agonistes Richard McKenna

  Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons Cordwainer Smith

  The Moon Moth Jack Vance

  The Golden Horn Edgar Pangborn

  The Lady Margaret Keith Roberts

  This Moment of the Storm Roger Zelazny

  Narrow Valley R. A. Lafferty

  Driftglass Samuel R. Delany

  The Worm That Flies Brian W. Aldiss

  The Fifth Head of Cerberus Gene Wolfe

  Nobody’s Home Joanna Russ

  Her Smoke Rose Up Forever James Tiptree, Jr

  The Barrow Ursula K. Le Guin

  Particle Theory Edward Bryant

  The Ugly Chickens Howard Waldrop

  Going Under Jack Dann

  Salvador Lucius Shepard

  Pretty Boy Crossover Pat Cadigan

  The Pure Product John Kessel

  The Winter Market William Gibson

  Chance Connie Willis

  The Edge of the World Michael Swanwick

  Dori Bangs Bruce Sterling

  Afterword

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgement is made for permission to print the following material:

  “The Country of the Kind,” by Damon Knight. Copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1955. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Aristotle and the Gun,” by L. Sprague de Camp. Copyright © 1956 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. First published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1956. Copyright renewed 1986 by L. Sprague de Camp. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Other Celia,” by Theodore Sturgeon. Copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. First published in Galaxy, 1957. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley.

  “Casey Agonistes,” by Richard McKenna. Copyright © 1958 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1958. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

  “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons,” by Cordwainer Smith. Copyright © 1961 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. First published in Galaxy, June 1961. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the agents for the estate, Scott Meredith Literary Associates, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.

  “The Moon Moth,” by Jack Vance. Copyright © 1961 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. First published in Galaxy, August 1961. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Golden Horn,” by Edgar Pangborn. Copyright © 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1961. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent.

  “The Lady Margaret,” by Keith Roberts. Copyright © 1966 by Keith Roberts. First published in Impulse 2, 1966 (as “The Lady Ann”); revised version copyright © 1968 from the book Pavane. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.

  “This Moment of the Storm,” by Roger Zelazny. Copyright © 1966 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1966. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Narrow Valley,” by R. A. Lafferty. Copyright © 1966 by R. A. Lafferty. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1966. Reprinted by permission of the author, and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “Driftglass,” by Samuel R. Delany. Copyright © 1971 by Samuel R. Delany. First published in Worlds of If, June 1967. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents. Henry Morrison, Inc.

  “The Worm That Flies,” by Brian W. Aldiss. Copyright © 1968 by Brian W. Aldiss. First published in The Farthest Reaches (Packet Books). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1972 by Gene Wolfe. First published in Orbit 10 (Berkley). Reprinted by permission of the author, and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “Nobody’s Home,” by Joanna Russ. Copyright © 1972 by Robert Silverberg. First published in New Dimensions II (Doubleday). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever,” by James Tiptree, Jr. Copyright © 1974 by James Tiptree, Jr. First published in Final Stage (Penguin). Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the estate’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “The Barrow,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1976 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author, and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “Particle Theory,” by Edward Bryant. Copyright © 1977 by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc. First published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1977. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Ugly Chickens,” by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 1980 by Terry Carr. First published in Universe 10 (Doubleday). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Going Under,” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1981 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, September 1981. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Salvador,” by Lucius Shepard. Copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Pretty Boy Crossover,” by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Pure Product,” by John Kessel. Copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Winter Market,” William Gibson. Copyright © 1986 by William Gibson. First published in Stardate, 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Chance,” by Connie Willis. Copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Edge of the World,” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1989 by Michael Swanwick. First published in Full Spectrum II (Bantam). Reprinted by permission of the author, and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “Dori Bangs,” by Bruce Sterling. Copyright © 1989 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Time that is intolerant

  Of the brave and innocent,

  And indifferent in a week

  To a beautiful physique,

  Worships language and forgives

  Everyone by whom it lives.

  W. H. Auden

  Preface

  Let me talk to you for a moment about a few things that this anthology is not.

  It is not an evolutionary overview of science fiction, for many of the stories that have had the greatest evolutionary impact on the field, and that would have to be included and analyzed in such an overview, were also stories that I personally didn’t much like, and they are not here.

  It is not really a
historical survey of the various periods of science fiction history, either, since such a survey, to function well, would have to include a balanced selection of representative stories from the various aesthetic factions that are always in contention in any period of genre history, and would have to look beyond first-rate authors to the second-rank authors, from whose work you can often get a more accurate idea of the essential nature of the different kinds of work that are being done … but those stories are not here, either. (No story here was selected because it is a good example of this trend or that, or of one type of writing or another, although a few of them, by happenstance, may actually turn out to be good examples of whatever it is – that is not why they are here, though.)

  It isn’t a Politically Correct book, either, since to be Politically Correct, more care would have had to be taken in selecting the proportionately proper number of writers from each of SF’s political cliques and pressure groups – are there enough hard-science writers? enough leftists? enough British writers? enough women? – and no such demographic care was exercised. Nor is it made up of comfortably expedient choices that could be expected to score me a lot of personal brownie points – several of my best friends and closest colleagues have no work here, for instance, which will no doubt hurt their feelings, and there are a number of important and influential genre figures I could usefully have flattered by putting them in these pages and who will probably not be flattered by finding that they have been omitted. Nor was the book designed with an eye to insuring me a margin of safety with reviewers, since there are a number of icons, from Heinlein to Dick to Ballard, that I will no doubt be pilloried for leaving out. (Indeed, even as I write this, the critics are gleefully rubbing their hands together in anticipation, getting ready to come forward and tell me what I should have used instead, or why I shouldn’t have used the stories I did use.)

  No, from the moment Deborah Beale put forth the suggestion that I should edit a retrospective anthology of the best stories of the last thirty years or so, it was clear to me that there was only one criterion that I could use, if the book was to have any sort of validity at all – the stories would have to be the ones that had had the most impact on me as a reader.

  Not always the ones they’re supposed to be, often not the famous ones, or the respectable ones, sometimes not even the ones I’d have liked them to be … but, rather, the ones that had moved me and shaken me, the ones that got under my skin, the ones that seized me and forced me to be impressed with them, often against my better judgment, the ones that I could not forget, even when sometimes they were stories that I would rather not have ever read at all. The stories that got to me, that changed the way I thought, or what I believed, or how I felt, or the way that I felt it. The stories that had penetrated through all the insulating shells of abstract aesthetic appreciation and intellectual admiration, and had hit me, hit me in the center of my soul.

  Instinct – yes, we’re talking about stories selected by instinct, by one reader’s emotional reaction to them, rather than stories selected to express some critical theory, or to grind a particular political ax, or because they help buttress some polemic or aesthetic argument about the nature of the field. Already, I can see the lips curling in scorn … and yet, I do believe that, in the end, that is all we ever really have to work with.

  Even today, at a time when I read hundreds of stories a month for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and for my Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology … even today, I can be reading through the submission pile, and be thinking, yes, this is pretty good, nicely handled, and we can use a hard-science story to balance off the softer stuff in the April issue … and then I’ll pick up another manuscript and start to read, and all at once I’ll forget that I’m reading it. I’ll forget that I’m supposed to be evaluating it, I’ll forget about the April issue, or what I’m going to have for lunch, I’ll forget where I am, or that time is passing … I’ll submerge in the story and forget everything until I come out of the story with a start and a shudder a half-hour or an hour later, and sit there with the manuscript on my lap, staring off into distance and feeling gooseflesh shiver up my spine.

  And I think that if there ever comes a time when I’m too worn-out or jaded or cynical to feel that way any longer, if there comes a time when there are no stories, however rare, that can swallow me up and make me shiver with dread or awe or wonder at the end, then that will be the time for me to lay down my blue pencil, and get out of the editing business.

  So then, right from the start I resolved to only use stories in this anthology that had been important to me, however eccentric those choices might seem to other people … and not to worry about whether those stories were generally considered to have had any historical or critical importance for the field at large.

  A few weeks’ work, however, was enough to show me that, even sticking to that criterion, I was still going to end up with a book easily three times larger even than the huge volume that Deborah had envisioned. Larger than was feasible, or even possible. Clearly, other winnowing-screens were needed.

  First, figuring that the “Golden Age” of the 1940s and the Galaxy era of the early 1950s had already been extensively covered by other anthologies, I arbitrarily decided to reach no further back in time than the late 1950s, about the same period when I myself had started reading science fiction in a systematic and regular way (I cheated a bit – arbitrarily – to get one of my favorites, Damon Knight’s “The Country of the Kind,” in on the front end of the book). Also, the 1970s and the 1980s are the periods that have been the least extensively mined for anthologies to date, and so I decided to lean slightly in their direction to compensate.

  Next, although it was a hard choice, I decided that there were some stories that, although they probably deserved to be in the book, were just too heavily anthologized already. Was there really any point in reprinting Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon” or Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” or “The Nine Billion Names of God” or Isaac Asimov’s “The Ugly Little Boy” or Harlan Ellison’s “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” or “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” or Robert A. Heinlein’s “‘All You Zombies –’” or Alfred Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit” once again, when they were already among the most frequently reprinted stories in the genre? Reluctantly, I decided that there was not – especially as they would be taking slots that could go instead to lesser-known work.

  Next, there were many stories that deserved to be used here that were just too long to be included, even in a book of this size, especially as every novella that I used would of necessity force the elimination of several good shorter stories that also deserved to be here. I settled in the end for using the one novella I felt that I could not omit, and all the rest that I would have liked to use as well – Jack Vance’s “The Dragon Masters,” Lucius Shepard’s “R & R,” Nancy Kress’s “Trinity,” Poul Anderson’s “The Sky People” and “The Night Face,” Brian W. Aldiss’s “Total Environment,” Michael Bishop’s “The Samurai and the Willows” and “Death and Designation Among the Asadi,” Judith Moffett’s “Tiny Tango,” John Varley’s “In the Hall of the Martian Kings” and “The Persistence of Vision,” Joe Haldeman’s “Hero,” Geoff Ryman’s “The Unconquered Country,” Samuel R. Delany’s “The Star Pit,” Connie Willis’s “Blued Moon” and “The Last of the Winnebagoes,” Theodore Sturgeon’s “Baby Is Three,” Michael Moorcock’s “Pale Roses,” Avram Davidson’s “Sleep Well of Nights,” Algis Budrys’s “Rogue Moon,” Richard McKenna’s “Fiddler’s Green,” Robert Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead” and “Sailing to Byzantium,” James Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” Damon Knight’s “The Earth Quarter” and “Dio,” J. G. Ballard’s “The Voices of Time,” Kate Wilhelm’s “The Infinity Box,” Cordwainer Smith’s “On the Storm Planet,” Michael Swanwick’s “Trojan Horse,” George R. R. Martin’s “A Song for Lya,” Walter Jon Williams’s “No Spot of Ground,” Bruce Sterling’s “Green Days in Brun
ei,” Pat Cadigan’s “My Brother’s Keeper,” John Crowley’s “Great Work of Time,” Thomas M. Disch’s “The Asian Shore,” and a dozen others – must wait for the multi-dimensional, infinitely extensible version of this anthology.

  There is a finite amount of space even for the shorter stories, alas – and if I’d had even 40,000 words worth of extra room to use, you’d find stories here by Fritz Leiber, Kate Wilhelm, Norman Spinrad, Thomas M. Disch, Ian Watson, Avram Davidson, Robert Silverberg, Greg Bear, Brian Stableford, Pat Murphy, Frederik Pohl, M. John Harrison, Mike Resnick, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others, which we were ultimately unable to squeeze into the book, no matter how hard we tried.

  Last of all, having assembled the stories that burned the brightest in my memory, I went back and reread them all again – thumping them, as it were, to see if any of them rang hollow. A few of them did, not holding up to a fresh reading, and I excised them. The majority did not.

  Tastes being as subjective as they are, I can’t claim that these are the best science fiction stories of the last four decades – but certainly it is safe to say that they are among the best, at the very least. There is not a story in this book that I wouldn’t buy today, if it were somehow crossing my desk for the first time, not even the oldest story here, which will be thirty-eight years old by the time you read these words.

  The best stories, in fact, seem esentially to be timeless. (We’re still reading the Odyssey, aren’t we?) A good story is like a benign virus – even when it originates in the minds of men and women long years dead, it can reach across the abyss of the grave, across thousands of miles of distance and hundreds of years of time, across every barrier of custom or prejudice or age, and, touching a living mind, infect that mind with the dream at its heart … can leave the one that it infects with dreaming shaken and changed forever, forever dizzy and raddled with a vision that came to them from outside the fortress self, burning up with the fever of dreams. And then they may touch someone else …