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Overview
"Card's selections are excellent and include an interesting range of approaches to science fiction."--School Library Journal
A provocative collection of short science fiction from the 1980s, edited by one of science fiction's best-known names. Of particular interest in Future on Fire are several stories from the cyberpunk school, as well as Pat Murphy's Nebula Award-winning "Rachel in Love'' and Ursula K. Le Guin's wonderful "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight.''
CONTENTS
Orson Scott Card / Introduction: Science Fiction in the 1980s
Pat Murphy / Rachel in Love
Michael Swanwick and William Gibson / Dogfight
Michael Bishop / A Gift from the GrayLanders
Lucious Shephard / Fire Zone Emerald
Kim Stanley Robinson / Down and Out in the Year 2000
Rachel Pollack / Angel Baby
Susan Palwick / The Neighbor's Wife
Gregg Keizer / I Am the Burning Bush
Pat Cadigan / Pretty Boy Crossover
Ursula K. Le Guin / Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight
Connie Willis / All My Darling Daughters
Wayne Wightman / In the Realm of the Heart, In the World of the Knife
James Patrick Kelly / Rat
Felix C. Gotschalk / Vestibular Man
Bruce Sterling / Green Days in Brunei
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429965170 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/15/1991 |
| Series: | Future on Fire , #1 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 423 KB |
About the Author
Born in Richland, Washington in 1951, Orson Scott Card grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He lived in Brazil for two years as an unpaid missionary for the Mormon Church and received degrees from Brigham Young University (1975) and the University of Utah (1981). The author of numerous books, Card was the first writer to receive both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel two years in a row, first for Ender's Game and then for the sequel Speaker for the Dead. He lives with his wife and children in North Carolina.
Orson Scott Card is best known for his science fiction novel Ender's Game and its many sequels that expand the Ender Universe into the far future and the near past. Those books are organized into the Ender Saga, which chronicles the life of Ender Wiggin; the Shadow Series, which follows on the novel Ender's Shadow and is set on Earth; and the Formic Wars series, written with co-author Aaron Johnston, which tells of the terrible first contact between humans and the alien "Buggers." Card has been a working writer since the 1970s. Beginning with dozens of plays and musical comedies produced in the 1960s and 70s, Card's first published fiction appeared in 1977--the short story "Gert Fram" in the July issue of The Ensign, and the novelette version of "Ender's Game" in the August issue of Analog. The novel-length version of Ender's Game, published in 1984 and continuously in print since then, became the basis of the 2013 film, starring Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, and Abigail Breslin.
Card was born in Washington state, and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, he runs occasional writers' workshops and directs plays. He frequently teaches writing and literature courses at Southern Virginia University.
He is the author many science fiction and fantasy novels, including the American frontier fantasy series "The Tales of Alvin Maker" (beginning with Seventh Son), and stand-alone novels like Pastwatch and Hart's Hope. He has collaborated with his daughter Emily Card on a manga series, Laddertop. He has also written contemporary thrillers like Empire and historical novels like the monumental Saints and the religious novels Sarah and Rachel and Leah. Card's work also includes the Mithermages books (Lost Gate, Gate Thief), contemporary magical fantasy for readers both young and old.
Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card. He and Kristine are the parents of five children and several grandchildren.
Hometown:
Greensboro, North CarolinaDate of Birth:
August 24, 1951Place of Birth:
Richland, WashingtonEducation:
B.A. in theater, Brigham Young University, 1975; M.A. in English, University of Utah, 1981Website:
http://www.hatrack.comRead an Excerpt
Future on Fire
By Orson Scott Card
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 1991 Orson Scott CardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6517-0
CHAPTER 1
Rachel in Love
by Pat Murphy
Introduction
Most writers are pretty ordinary-looking people, not worth describing. When we look unusual it's usually on the side of gawkiness or geekishness, for ours is a profession that doesn't require us to make a strong personal impression; rather it requires us to hole up for days and weeks on end with no one but a forgiving family and a typewriter or computer for company.
But some writers do choose to present themselves with a degree of flamboyance. Some festoon themselves like cockatoos; others collect an audience by being loud, outrageous, or otherwise entertaining. Still others use their costume to declare allegiance — or at least association — with a group or movement that rejects ordinary, conventional dress.
Pat Murphy presents herself with hair cropped punkishly short, with a slender rat-tail slithering down her back. An air of cocky confidence, almost a swagger as she walks. Somehow you know at once that she'll never write a sentence like: "With heaving bosom and quavering voice she said. 'Long have I waited for you to speak of your feelings, my beloved Malcolm, so I could utter mine.'"
But her writing is passionate, and not with the angry posing we have learned to associate with the punk look. Her work is touched with neither nihilism nor rejection of society; far from being universally angry, she writes with a tough kind of compassion. The star of her stories is never herself, never the strutting writer demanding that we notice how clever and socially aware she is. Her focus is absolutely on a character in pain — in pain, but not ready to surrender.
Indeed, in one sense her fiction often follows in one of the strongest traditions in science fiction — the hero who relies on his own brains and guts to get out of his predicament. But many of these traditional "competent man" heroes are so smug you want to grab them and strangle them while shouting, "Look, Bozo, I could look just as smart as you if I had a writer making the rest of the world fit in with my plans!" Murphy's heroes arouse, not my resentment, but my sympathy, my admiration.
"Rachel in Love," though, is something extraordinary, even for a writer of such obvious talent. It won the Nebula for best novelette of 1987, but that doesn't begin to suggest what this story achieves. What "Nightfall" has been to Isaac Asimov, what "The Star" has been to Arthur C. Clark — that is what "Rachel in Love" will surely be to Pat Murphy. I suspect she'll come to curse this story in the future, as readers say to her over and over again, "Why don't you ever write anything like 'Rachel' anymore?" But she will never really regret having written it, just as you will never regret reading it. Once you have lived through this experience of losing everything and everyone you love, losing even your own body, becoming an alien creature in your own land, and yet finding new love and new hope, it will remain part of you forever.
It is a Sunday morning in summer and a small brown chimpanzee named Rachel sits on the living room floor of a remote ranch house on the edge of the Painted Desert. She is watching a Tarzan movie on television. Her hairy arms are wrapped around her knees and she rocks back and forth with suppressed excitement. She knows that her father would say that she's too old for such childish amusements — but since Aaron is still sleeping, he can't chastise her.
On the television, Tarzan has been trapped in a bamboo cage by a band of wicked Pygmies. Rachel is afraid that he won't escape in time to save Jane from the ivory smugglers who hold her captive. The movie cuts to Jane, who is tied up in the back of a jeep, and Rachel whimpers softly to herself. She knows better than to howl: she peeked into her father's bedroom earlier, and he was still in bed. Aaron doesn't like her to howl when he is sleeping.
When the movie breaks for a commercial, Rachel goes to her father's room. She is ready for breakfast and she wants him to get up. She tiptoes to the bed to see if he is awake.
His eyes are open and he is staring at nothing. His face is pale and his lips are a purplish color. Dr. Aaron Jacobs, the man Rachel calls father, is not asleep. He is dead, having died in the night of a heart attack.
When Rachel shakes him, his head rocks back and forth in time with her shaking, but his eyes do not blink and he does not breathe. She places his hand on her head, nudging him so that he will waken and stroke her. He does not move. When she leans toward him, his hand falls limply to dangle over the edge of the bed.
In the breeze from the open bedroom window, the fine wisps of gray hair that he had carefully combed over his bald spot each morning shift and flutter, exposing the naked scalp. In the other room, elephants trumpet as they stampede across the jungle to rescue Tarzan. Rachel whimpers softly, but her father does not move.
Rachel backs away from her father's body. In the living room, Tarzan is swinging across the jungle on vines, going to save Jane. Rachel ignores the television. She prowls through the house as if searching for comfort — stepping into her own small bedroom, wandering through her father's laboratory. From the cages that line the walls, white rats stare at her with hot red eyes. A rabbit hops across its cage, making a series of slow dull thumps, like a feather pillow tumbling down a flight of stairs.
She thinks that perhaps she made a mistake. Perhaps her father is just sleeping. She returns to the bedroom, but nothing has changed. Her father lies open-eyed on the bed. For a long time, she huddles beside his body, clinging to his hand.
He is the only person she has ever known. He is her father, her teacher, her friend. She cannot leave him alone.
The afternoon sun blazes through the window, and still Aaron does not move. The room grows dark, but Rachel does not turn on the lights. She is waiting for Aaron to wake up. When the moon rises, its silver light shines through the window to cast a bright rectangle on the far wall.
Outside, somewhere in the barren rocky land surrounding the ranch house, a coyote lifts its head to the rising moon and wails, a thin sound that is as lonely as a train whistling through an abandoned station. Rachel joins in with a desolate howl of loneliness and grief. Aaron lies still and Rachel knows that he is dead.
When Rachel was younger, she had a favorite bedtime story. — Where did I come from? she would ask Aaron, using the abbreviated gestures of ASL, American Sign Language. — Tell me again.
"You're too old for bedtime stories," Aaron would say.
— Please, she'd sign. — Tell me the story.
In the end, he always relented and told her. "Once upon a time, there was a good little girl named Rachel," he said. "She was a pretty girl, with long golden hair like a princess in a fairy tale. She lived with her father and her mother and they were all very happy."
Rachel would snuggle contentedly beneath her blankets. The story, like any good fairy tale, had elements of tragedy. In the story, Rachel's father worked at a university, studying the workings of the brain and charting the electric fields that the nervous impulses of an active brain produced. But the other researchers at the university didn't understand Rachel's father; they distrusted his research and cut off his funding. (During this portion of the story, Aaron's voice took on a bitter edge.) So he left the university and took his wife and daughter to the desert, where he could work in peace.
He continued his research and determined that each individual brain produced its own unique pattern of fields, as characteristic as a fingerprint. (Rachel found this part of the story quite dull, but Aaron insisted on including it.) The shape of this "Electric Mind," as he called it, was determined by habitual patterns of thoughts and emotions. Record the Electric Mind, he postulated, and you could capture an individual's personality.
Then one sunny day, the doctor's wife and beautiful daughter went for a drive. A truck barreling down a winding cliffside road lost its brakes and met the car head-on, killing both the girl and her mother. (Rachel clung to Aaron's hand during this part of the story, frightened by the sudden evil twist of fortune.)
But though Rachel's body had died, all was not lost. In his desert lab, the doctor had recorded the electrical patterns produced by his daughter's brain. The doctor had been experimenting with the use of external magnetic fields to impose the patterns from one animal onto the brain of another. From an animal supply house, he obtained a young chimpanzee. He used a mixture of norepinephrine-based transmitter substances to boost the speed of neural processing in the chimp's brain, and then he imposed the pattern of his daughter's mind upon the brain of this young chimp, combined the two after his own fashion, saving his daughter in his own way. In the chimp's brain was all that remained of Rachel Jacobs.
The doctor named the chimp Rachel and raised her as his own daughter. Since the limitations of the chimpanzee larynx made speech very difficult, he instructed her in ASL. He taught her to read and to write. They were good friends, the best of companions.
By this point in the story, Rachel was usually asleep. But it didn't matter — she knew the ending. The doctor, whose name was Aaron Jacobs, and the chimp named Rachel lived happily ever after.
Rachel likes fairy tales and she likes happy endings. She has the mind of a teenage girl, but the innocent heart of a young chimp.
Sometimes, when Rachel looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She remembers having small, pale, delicate hands. Memories lie upon memories, layers upon layers, like the sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes.
Rachel remembers a blond-haired fair-skinned woman who smelled sweetly of perfume. On a Halloween long ago, this woman (who was, in these memories, Rachel's mother) painted Rachel's fingernails bright red because Rachel was dressed as a gypsy and gypsies like red. Rachel remembers the woman's hands: white hands with faintly blue veins hidden just beneath the skin, neatly clipped nails painted rose pink.
But Rachel also remembers another mother and another time. Her mother was dark and hairy and smelled sweetly of overripe fruit. She and Rachel lived in a wire cage in a room filled with chimps and she hugged Rachel to her hairy breast whenever any people came into the room. Rachel's mother groomed Rachel constantly, picking delicately through her fur in search of lice that she never found.
Memories upon memories: jumbled and confused, like random pictures clipped from magazines, a bright collage that makes no sense. Rachel remembers cages: cold wire mesh beneath her feet, the smell of fear around her. A man in a white lab coat took her from the arms of her hairy mother and pricked her with needles. She could hear her mother howling, but she could not escape from the man.
Rachel remembers a junior high school dance where she wore a new dress: she stood in a dark corner of the gym for hours, pretending to admire the crepe paper decorations because she felt too shy to search among the crowd for her friends.
She remembers when she was a young chimp: she huddled with five other adolescent chimps in the stuffy freight compartment of a train, frightened by the alien smells and sounds.
She remembers gym class: gray lockers and ugly gym suits that revealed her skinny legs. The teacher made everyone play softball, even Rachel who was unathletic and painfully shy. Rachel at bat, standing at the plate, was terrified to be the center of attention. "Easy out," said the catcher, a hard-edged girl who ran with the wrong crowd and always smelled of cigarette smoke. When Rachel swung at the ball and missed, the outfielders filled the air with malicious laughter.
Rachel's memories are as delicate and elusive as the dusty moths and butterflies that dance among the rabbit brush and sage. Memories of her girlhood never linger; they land for an instant, then take flight, leaving Rachel feeling abandoned and alone.
Rachel leaves Aaron's body where it is, but closes his eyes and pulls the sheet up over his head. She does not know what else to do. Each day she waters the garden and picks some greens for the rabbits. Each day, she cares for the animals in the lab, bringing them food and refilling their water bottles. The weather is cool, and Aaron's body does not smell too bad, though by the end of the week, a wide line of ants runs from the bed to the open window.
At the end of the first week, on a moonlit evening, Rachel decides to let the animals go free. She releases the rabbits one by one, climbing on a stepladder to reach down into the cage and lift each placid bunny out. She carries each one to the back door, holding it for a moment and stroking the soft warm fur. Then she sets the animal down and nudges it in the direction of the green grass that grows around the perimeter of the fenced garden.
The rats are more difficult to deal with. She manages to wrestle the large rat cage off the shelf, but it is heavier than she thought it would be. Though she slows its fall, it lands on the floor with a crash and the rats scurry to and fro within. She shoves the cage across the linoleum floor, sliding it down the hall, over the doorsill and onto the back patio. When she opens the cage door, rats burst out like popcorn from a popper, white in the moonlight and dashing in all directions.
Once, while Aaron was taking a nap, Rachel walked along the dirt track that led to the main highway. She hadn't planned on going far. She just wanted to see what the highway looked like, maybe hide near the mailbox and watch a car drive past. She was curious about the outside world and her fleeting fragmentary memories did not satisfy that curiosity.
She was halfway to the mailbox when Aaron came roaring up in his old jeep. "Get in the car," he shouted at her. "Right now!" Rachel had never seen him so angry. She cowered in the jeep's passenger seat, covered with dust from the road, unhappy that Aaron was so upset. He didn't speak until they got back to the ranch house, and then he spoke in a low voice, filled with bitterness and suppressed rage.
"You don't want to go out there," he said. "You wouldn't like it out there. The world is filled with petty, narrow-minded, stupid people. They wouldn't understand you. And anyone they don't understand, they want to hurt. They hurt anyone who's different. If they know that you're different, they punish you, hurt you. They'd lock you up and never let you go."
He looked straight ahead, staring through the dirty windshield. "It's not like the shows on TV, Rachel," he said in a softer tone. "It's not like the stories in books."
He looked at her then and she gestured frantically. — I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
"I can't protect you out there," he said. "I can't keep you safe."
Rachel took his hand in both of hers. He relented then, stroking her head. "Never do that again," he said. "Never."
Aaron's fear was contagious. Rachel never again walked alone the dirt track and sometimes she had dreams about bad people who wanted to lock her in a cage.
Two weeks after Aaron's death, a black-and-white police car drives slowly up to the house. When the policemen knock on the door, Rachel hides behind the couch in the living room. They knock again, try the knob, then open the door, which she had left unlocked.
Suddenly frightened, Rachel bolts from behind the couch, bounding toward the back door. Behind her, she hears one man yell, "My God! It's a gorilla!"
By the time he pulls his gun, Rachel has run out the back door and away into the hills. From the hills she watches as an ambulance drives up and two men in white take Aaron's body away. Even after the ambulance and the police car drive away, Rachel is afraid to go back to the house. Only after sunset does she return.
Just before dawn the next morning, she wakens to the sound of a truck jouncing down the dirt road. She peers out the window to see a pale green pickup. Sloppily stenciled in white on the door are the words: PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER. Rachel hesitates as the truck pulls up in front of the house. By the time she has decided to flee, two men are getting out of the truck. One of them carries a rifle.
She runs out the back door and heads for the hills, but she is only halfway to hiding when she heard a sound like a sharp intake of breath and feels a painful jolt in her shoulder. Suddenly, her legs give way and she is tumbling backward down the sandy slope, dust coating her red-brown fur, her howl becoming a whimper, then fading to nothing at all. She falls into the blackness of sleep.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Future on Fire by Orson Scott Card. Copyright © 1991 Orson Scott Card. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Science Fiction in the 1980s Orson Scott Card,Rachel in Love Pat Murphy,
Dogfight Michael Swanwick and William Gibson,
A Gift from the GrayLanders Michael Bishop,
Fire Zone Emerald Lucius Shepard,
Down and Out in the Year 2000 Kim Stanley Robinson,
Angel Baby Rachel Pollack,
The Neighbor's Wife Susan Palwick,
I Am the Burning Bush Gregg Keizer,
Pretty Boy Crossover Pat Cadigan,
Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight Ursula K. Le Guin,
All My Darling Daughters Connie Willis,
In the Realm of the Heart, In the World of the Knife Wayne Wightman,
Rat James Patrick Kelly,
Vestibular Man Felix C. Gotschalk,
Green Days in Brunei Bruce Sterling,
Copyright,
Tor Books by Orson Scott Card,