The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF Read online

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the USA by St Martin’s Press, 2005

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2008

  Copyright © Gardner Dozois, 2005, 2008

  The right of Gardner Dozois to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-84529-424-3

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword Robert Silverberg

  Preface Gardner Dozois

  BLOOD MUSIC Greg Bear

  A CABIN ON THE COAST Gene Wolfe

  SALVADOR Lucius Shepard

  TRINITY Nancy Kress

  FLYING SAUCER ROCK AND ROLL Howard Waldrop

  DINNER IN AUDOGHAST Bruce Sterling

  ROADSIDE RESCUE Pat Cadigan

  SNOW John Crowley

  THE WINTER MARKET William Gibson

  THE PURE PRODUCT John Kessel

  STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT Eileen Gunn

  KIRINYAGA Mike Resnick

  TALES FROM THE VENIA WOODS Robert Silverberg

  BEARS DISCOVER FIRE Terry Bisson

  EVEN THE QUEEN Connie Willis

  GUEST OF HONOR Robert Reed

  NONE SO BLIND Joe Haldeman

  MORTIMER GRAY’S HISTORY OF DEATH Brian Stableford

  THE LINCOLN TRAIN Maureen F. McHugh

  WANG’S CARPETS Greg Egan

  COMING OF AGE IN KARHIDE Ursula K. Le Guin

  THE DEAD Michael Swanwick

  RECORDING ANGEL Ian McDonald

  A DRY, QUIET WAR Tony Daniel

  THE UNDISCOVERED William Sanders

  SECOND SKIN Paul J. McAuley

  STORY OF YOUR LIFE Ted Chiang

  PEOPLE CAME FROM EARTH Stephen Baxter

  THE WEDDING ALBUM David Marusek

  1016 TO 1 James Patrick Kelly

  DADDY’S WORLD Walter Jon Williams

  THE REAL WORLD Steven Utley

  HAVE NOT HAVE Geoff Ryman

  LOBSTERS Charles Stross

  BREATHMOSS Ian R. MacLeod

  LAMBING SEASON Molly Gloss

  THE FLUTED GIRL Paolo Bacigalupi

  FOOTVOTE Peter F. Hamilton

  ZIMA BLUE Alastair Reynolds

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Blood Music,” by Greg Bear. Copyright © 1983 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction, June 1983. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Cabin on the Coast,” by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1981 by Gene Wolfe. First Published in Zu den Stemen (Goldmann, Verlag, Munich), edited by Peter Wilfert. First published in English in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

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

  “Trinity,” by Nancy Kress. Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,” by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 1984 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, January 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Dinner in Audoghast,” by Bruce Sterling. Copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Roadside Rescue,” by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 1985 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, July 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Snow,” by John Crowley. Copyright © 1985 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, November 1985. Published by permission of the author and his agent.

  “The Winter Market,” by William Gibson. Copyright © 1986 by William Gibson. First published in Stardate, February 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Martha Millard.

  “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.

  “Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” by Elleen Gunn. Copyright © 1988 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Kirinyaga,” by Mike Resnick. Copyright © 1988 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Tales from the Venia Woods,” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1989 by Agberg Ltd. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Bears Discover Fire,” by Terry Bisson. Copyright © 1990 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Even the Queen,” by Connie Willis. Copyright © 1992 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Fiction Magazine, April 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Guest of Honor,” by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1993 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1993. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “None So Blind,” by Joe Haldeman. Copyright © 1994 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death,” by Brian Stableford. Copyright © 1995 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Lincoln Train,” by Maureen F. McHugh. Copyright © 1995 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Wang’s Carpets,” by Greg Egan. Copyright © 1995 by Greg Egan. First appeared in New Legends (Tor). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Coming of Age in Karhide,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1995 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First published in New Legends (Tor). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  “The Dead,” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1996 by Michael Swanwick. First published in Starlight 1 (Tor). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Recording Angel,” by Ian McDonald. Copyright © 1996 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, February 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Dry, Quiet War,” by Tony Daniel. Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Undiscovered,” b
y William Sanders. Copyright © 1997 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 1997. Published by permission of the author.

  “Second Skin,” by Paul J. McAuley. Copyright © 1997 by Paul J. McAuley. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang. Copyright © 1998 by Ted Chiang. First published in Starlight 2 (Tor). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  “People Came from Earth,” by Stephen Baxter. Copyright © 1999 by Stephen Baxter. First published in Moon Shots (DAW). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Wedding Album,” by David Marusek. Copyright © 1999 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “1016 to 1,” by James Patrick Kelly. Copyright © 1999 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Daddy’s World,” by Walter Jon Williams. Copyright © 1999 by Walter Jon Williams. First published in Not of Woman Born (Roc Books). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Real World,” by Steven Utley. Copyright © 2000 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, September 6. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Have Not Have,” by Geoff Ryman. Copyright © 2001 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Lobsters,” by Charles Stross. Copyright © 2001 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Breathmoss,” by Ian R. MacLeod. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Susan Ann Protter.

  “Lambing Season,” by Molly Gloss. Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Footvote,” by Peter F. Hamilton. Copyright © 2004 by Peter F. Hamilton. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Fluted Girl,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Copyright © 2003 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Ficion, June 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Zima Blue,” by Alastair Reynolds. Copyright © 2005 by Alastair Reynolds. First published in Postscripts 4. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  FOREWORD

  Robert Silverberg

  Gardner Dozois’s annual anthology, The Mammoth Book of Best New SF, is now a series that comprises twenty hefty volumes,1 which require close to three and a half feet of shelf space. You will find that three-and-a-half-foot expanse of Dozois anthologies in any science-fiction library worthy of the name. Their presence is essential, for the Dozois book is the definitive historical record of the most fertile twenty years in the history of the science-fiction short story. Volume by volume, each anthology is an exciting and memorable collection. Taken all in all, though, they form a whole rather greater than the sum of their parts: an extraordinary editorial achievement, a unique encyclopedic text. And now we are given a book that offers us The Best of the Best – editor Dozois’s selection of the finest of the hundreds of stories that make up those twenty anthologies.

  In no way does this book, good as it is, replace those twenty anthologies. No one volume possibly could. It serves, rather, as a marker, a signifier, which by the luminous excellence of its material reminds us of the magnitude of Gardner Dozois’s total accomplishment in assembling this wondrous series.

  The science-fiction short story’s illustrious history goes back a long way. Beyond doubt the Greeks and the Romans wrote them – tales of robot warriors and imaginary voyages, some of them voyages to the moon. Closer to our own day, Hawthorne, Poe, and Verne produced what was unquestionably science fiction. More than a century ago H. G. Wells, the first great modern master of the form, filled the popular magazines of his day with dozens of s-f stories – “The Country of the Blind,” “The Crystal Egg,” “The Star,” and many more – of such surpassing inventiveness that they have held their own in print ever since. From 1911 on, the Luxembourg-born gadgeteer Hugo Gernsback began publishing science fiction as a regular feature of his magazines Modern Electrics and Science and Invention, and it proved so popular that in 1926 Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted entirely to it. (Because new stories were so hard to find at first, Gernsback filled many of the early issues with the work of Poe, Verne, and Wells.) Amazing built an avid readership and before long had a vigorous pair of competitors: Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories. Those were followed by a host of others, gaudy pulp magazines with names like Startling Stories, Planet Stories, Cosmic Stories, and Super Science Stories, and then, after World War II, came a group of less flamboyant-looking magazines aimed at more sophisticated readers, most notably Galaxy Science Fiction and Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  Though much of the material in the science-fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s was crude and ephemeral, some was not, and, inevitably, book publishers began to collect the best of it in anthologies. The first such volume was Phil Stong’s The Other Worlds (1941), which drew on the pulps for stories by Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Murray Leinster, Harry Bates, and other well-known s-f masters of the day. Two years later, the knowledgeable Donald A. Wollheim edited The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, with stories by Sturgeon, Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, and more. Then, just after the war, came two major collections, both of them still of major significance: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, and The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin. The Healy-McComas book, studded with classics like Asimov’s “Nightfall” and Don A. Stuart’s “Who Goes There?”, was drawn largely from the pages of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, the dominant magazine in the field during the 1940s. The Conklin anthology also leaned heavily on Campbell’s magazine, but cast a wider net, with extensive representation of stories from the previous decade, including many from the Gernsback magazines, as well as work by Poe, Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

  As the science-fiction magazines grew in number and quality in the post-war years, an inevitable next development was the coming of anthologies devoted to the best stories of a single year. The first of these was edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, a pair of scholarly science-fiction readers with long experience in the field, and it was called, not entirely appropriately (since it drew entirely on material published in 1948), The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949.

  Science fiction then was a very small entity indeed – eight or nine magazines, a dozen or so books a year produced by semi-professional publishing houses run by old-time s-f fans, and the very occasional short story by the likes of Robert A. Heinlein in the Saturday Evening Post or some other well-known slick magazine. So esoteric a species of reading-matter was it that Bleiler and Dikty found it necessary to provide their book, which was issued by the relatively minor mainstream publishing house of Frederick Fell, Inc., with two separate introductory essays explaining the nature and history of science fiction to uninitiated readers.

  In those days science fiction was at its best in the short lengths, and the editors of The Best Science Fiction: 1949 had plenty of splendid material to offer. There were two stories by Ray Bradbury, both later incorporated in The Martian Chronicles; Wilmar Shiras’s fine superchild story “In Hiding;” an excellent early Poul Anderson story, one by Isaac Asimov, and hal4f a dozen others, all of which would be received enthusiastically by modern readers. The book did fairly well, by the modest sales standards of its era, and the Bleiler-Dikty series of annual anthologies continued for another decade or so.

  Towards the end of its era the Bleiler-Dikty collection was joined by a very different sort of Best of the Year anthology edited by Ju
dith Merril, whose sophisticated literary tastes led her to go far beyond the s-f magazines, offering stories by such outsiders to the field as Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Finney, Donald Barthelme, and John Steinbeck cheek-by-jowl with the more familiar offerings of Asimov, Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and Clifford D. Simak. The Merril anthology, inaugurated in 1956, also lasted about a decade; and by then science fiction had become big business, with new magazines founded, shows like Star Trek appearing on network television, dozens and then hundreds of novels published every year. Since the 1960s no year has gone by without its Best of the Year collection, and sometimes two or three simultaneously. Such distinguished science-fiction writers as Frederik Pohl, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, and Lester del Rey took their turns at compiling annual anthologies, along with veteran book editors like Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.

  When word went forth in 1983 that one more Year’s Best anthology was being assembled, this one under the editorship of Gardner Dozois, it was reasonable to expect a creditable job. Dozois was, after all, a capable and well-known writer himself, who had begun his career precociously with a short story in 1966 and from 1971 on had brought forth a great deal of impressively powerful work; he had edited a string of theme anthologies (A Day in the Life, 1972, Future Power, 1976, Another World, 1977, and many others); and for five years beginning in 1977 had taken over the editorship of Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year anthology. But no one, I think, was quite prepared for the magnitude and comprehensiveness of the inaugural volume of the new Dozois anthology, nor could anyone have anticipated that the series would, in time, come to be the defining summation of a glorious era in science fiction.

  I have the first volume of the Dozois series before me now. It looks surprisingly like the most recent one: a thick book that announces its name in bold letters emphasizing the words SCIENCE FICTION, and lists on its cover the names of thirteen of its contributors. Those contributors were a stellar group, of course. Taken all together, the stories represent a shrewd cross-section of what was already a potent period in the history of the s-f short story.