Quite possibly the GREATEST science-fiction collection of ALL TIME—past, present, and FUTURE! • "Nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries, like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as lesser-known authors." —The New York Times Book Review
What if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the Pope was a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the new wave, and more. Learn the secret history of science fiction, from literary icons who wrote SF to authors from over 25 countries, some never before translated into English. In THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Read the genre that predicted electric cars, travel to the moon, and the modern smart phone. We’ve got the worlds if you’ve got the time.
Including: · Legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin! · An unearthed sci-fi story from W.E.B. DuBois! · The first publication of the work of cybernetic visionary David R. Bunch in 20 years! · A rare and brilliant novella by Chinese international sensation Liu Cixin!
Quite possibly the GREATEST science-fiction collection of ALL TIME—past, present, and FUTURE! • "Nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries, like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as lesser-known authors." —The New York Times Book Review
What if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the Pope was a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the new wave, and more. Learn the secret history of science fiction, from literary icons who wrote SF to authors from over 25 countries, some never before translated into English. In THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Read the genre that predicted electric cars, travel to the moon, and the modern smart phone. We’ve got the worlds if you’ve got the time.
Including: · Legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin! · An unearthed sci-fi story from W.E.B. DuBois! · The first publication of the work of cybernetic visionary David R. Bunch in 20 years! · A rare and brilliant novella by Chinese international sensation Liu Cixin!
Quite possibly the GREATEST science-fiction collection of ALL TIME—past, present, and FUTURE! • "Nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries, like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as lesser-known authors." —The New York Times Book Review
What if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the Pope was a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the new wave, and more. Learn the secret history of science fiction, from literary icons who wrote SF to authors from over 25 countries, some never before translated into English. In THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Read the genre that predicted electric cars, travel to the moon, and the modern smart phone. We’ve got the worlds if you’ve got the time.
Including: · Legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin! · An unearthed sci-fi story from W.E.B. DuBois! · The first publication of the work of cybernetic visionary David R. Bunch in 20 years! · A rare and brilliant novella by Chinese international sensation Liu Cixin!
ANN VANDERMEER currently serves as an acquiring fiction editor for Tor.com, Cheeky Frawg Books, and weirdfictionreview.com. She was the editor-in-chief for Weird Tales for five years, during which time she was nominated three times for the Hugo Award, winning one. Along with multiple nominations for the Shirley Jackson Award, she also has won a World Fantasy Award and a British Fantasy Award for co-editing The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Other projects have included Best American Fantasy, three Steampunk anthologies, and a humor book, The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. Her latest anthologies include The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Sisters of the Revolution, an anthology of feminist speculative fiction and The Bestiary, an anthology of original fiction and art.
JEFF VENDERMEER's most recent fiction is the New York Times-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), which Entertainment Weekly included on its list of the top ten novels of 2014 and which prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau.” The series has been acquired by publishers in 34 other countries. Paramount Pictures/Scott Rudin Productions acquired the movie rights and Annihilation won both the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, and the Los Angeles Times. A three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, he has also edited or coedited many iconic fiction anthologies, taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, lectured at MIT, Brown, and Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp located at Wofford College. His forthcoming novel is Borne.
From the Introduction Since the days of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, science fiction has not just helped define and shape the course of literature but reached well beyond fictional realms to influence our perspectives on culture, science, and technology. Ideas like electric cars, space travel, and forms of advanced communication comparable to today’s cell phone all first found their way into the public’s awareness through science fiction. In stories like Alicia Yánez Cossío’s “The IWM 100” from the 1970s you can even find a clear prediction of Information Age giants like Google—and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the event was a very real culmination of a yearning already expressed through science fiction for many decades.
Science fiction has allowed us to dream of a better world by creating visions of future societies without prejudice or war. Dystopias, too, like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, have had their place in science fiction, allowing writers to comment on injustice and dangers to democracy. Where would Eastern Bloc writers have been without the creative outlet of science fiction, which by seeming not to speak about the present day often made it past the censors? For many under Soviet domination during those decades, science fiction was a form of subversion and a symbol of freedom. Today, science fiction continues to ask “What if?” about such important topics as global warming, energy dependence, the toxic effects of capitalism, and the uses of our modern technology, while also bringing back to readers strange and wonderful visions.
No other form of literature has been so relevant to our present yet been so filled with visionary and transcendent moments. No other form has been as entertaining, either. But until now there has been no definitive and complete collection that truly captured the global influence and significance of this dynamic genre—bringing together authors from all over the world and from both the “genre” and “literary” ends of the fiction spectrum. The Big Book of Science Fiction covers the entire twentieth century, presenting, in chronological order, stories from more than thirty countries, from the pulp space opera of Edmond Hamilton to the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges, from the pre-Afrofuturism of W. E. B. Du Bois to the second-wave feminism of James Tiptree Jr.—and beyond!
What you find within these pages may surprise you. It definitely surprised us.
WHAT IS THE “GOLDEN AGE” OF SCIENCE FICTION?
Even people who do not read science fiction have likely heard the term “the Golden Age of Science Fiction.” The actual Golden Age of Science Fiction lasted from about the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and is often conflated for general readers with the preceding Age of the Pulps (1920s to mid-1930s). The Age of the Pulps had been dominated by the editor of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback. Sometimes called the Father of Science Fiction, Gernsback was most famously photographed in an all-encompassing “Isolator” author helmet, attached to an oxygen tank and breathing apparatus.
The Golden Age dispensed with the Isolator, coinciding as it did with the proliferation of American science fiction magazines, the rise of the ultimately divisive editor John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction (such strict definitions and such a dupe for Dianetics!), and a proto-market for science fiction novels (which would only reach fruition in the 1950s). This period also saw the rise to dominance of authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, C. L. Moore, Robert Heinlein, and Alfred Bester. It fixed science fiction in the public imagination as having a “sense of wonder” and a “can-do” attitude about science and the universe, sometimes based more on the earnest, naïve covers than the actual content, which could be dark and complex.
But “the Golden Age” has come to mean something else as well. In his classic, oft-quoted book on science fiction, Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (1984), the iconic anthologist and editor David Hartwell asserted that “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12.” Hartwell, an influential gatekeeper in the field, was making a point about the arguments that “rage until the small of the morning” at science fiction conventions among “grown men and women” about that time when “every story in every magazine was a master work of daring, original thought.” The reason readers argue about whether the Golden Age occurred in the 1930s, 1950s, or 1970s, according to Hartwell, is because the true age of science fiction is the age at which the reader has no ability to tell good fiction from bad fiction, the excellent from the terrible, but instead absorbs and appreciates just the wonderful visions and exciting plots of the stories.
This is a strange assertion to make, one that seems to want to make excuses. It’s often repeated without much analysis of how such a brilliant anthology editor also credited with bringing literary heavyweights like Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick to readers would want to (inadvertently?) apologize for science fiction while at the same time engaging in a sentimentality that seems at odds with the whole enterprise of truly speculative fiction. (Not to mention dissing twelve-year-olds!)
Perhaps one reason for Hartwell’s stance can be found in how science fiction in the United States, and to some extent in the United Kingdom, rose out of pulp magazine delivery systems seen as “low art.” A pronounced “cultural cringe” within science fiction often combines with the brutal truth that misfortunes of origin often plague literature, which can assign value based on how swanky a house looks from the outside rather than what’s inside. The new Kafka who next arises from cosmopolitan Prague is likely to be hailed a savior, but not so much the one who arises from, say, Crawfordville, Florida.
There is also something of a need to apologize for the ma-and-pop tradition exemplified by the pulps, with their amateurish and eccentric editors, who sometimes had little formal training and possessed as many eccentricities as freckles, and who came to dominate the American science fiction world early on. Sometimes an Isolator was the least of it.
Yet even with regard to the pulps, evidence suggests that these magazines at times entertained more sophisticated content than generally given credit for, so that in a sense an idea like “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12” undermines the truth about such publications. It also renders invisible all of the complex science fiction being written outside of the pulp tradition. Therefore, we humbly offer the assertion that contrary to popular belief and based on all of the evidence available to us . . . the actual Golden Age of Science Fiction is twenty-one, not twelve. The proof can be found in the contents of this anthology, where we have, as much as possible, looked at the totality of what we think of “science fiction,” without privileging the dominant mode, but also without discarding it. That which may seem overbearing or all of a type at first glance reveals its individuality and uniqueness when placed in a wider context. At third or fourth glance, you may even find that stories from completely different traditions have commonalities and speak to each other in interesting ways.
BUILDING A BETTER DEFINITION OF “SCIENCE FICTION”
We evoked the names of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells at the beginning of this introduction for a very specific reason. All three are useful entry points or origin points for science fiction because they do not exist so far back in time as to make direct influence seem ethereal or attenuated, they are still known in the modern era, and because the issues they dealt with permeate what we call the “genre” of science fiction even today. We hesitate to invoke the slippery and preternatural word influence, because influence appears and disappears and reappears, sidles in and has many mysterious ways. It can be as simple yet profound as reading a text as a child and forgetting it, only to have it well up from the subconscious years later, or it can be a clear and all-consuming passion. At best we can only say that someone cannot be influenced by something not yet written or, in some cases, not yet translated. Or that influence may occur not when a work is published but when the writer enters the popular imagination—for example, as Wells did through Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds (1938) or, to be silly for a second, Mary Shelley through the movie Young Frankenstein (1974).
For this reason even wider claims of influence on science fiction, like writer and editor Lester del Rey’s assertion that the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest written science fiction story, seem appropriative, beside the point, and an overreach for legitimacy more useful as a “tell” about the position of science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s in North America.
But we brought up our triumvirate because they represent different strands of science fiction. The earliest of these authors, Mary Shelley, and her Frankenstein (1818), ushered in a modern sensibility of ambivalence about the uses of technology and science while wedding the speculative to the horrific in a way reflected very early on in science fiction. The “mad scientist” trope runs rife through the pages of the science fiction pulps and even today in their modern equivalents. She also is an important figure for feminist SF.
Jules Verne, meanwhile, opened up lines of inquiry along more optimistic and hopeful lines. For all that Verne liked to create schematics and specific detail about his inventions—like the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)—he was a very happy puppy who used his talents in the service of scientific romanticism, not “hard science fiction.”
H. G. Wells’s fiction was also dubbed “scientific romanticism” during his lifetime, but his work existed somewhere between these two foci. His most useful trait as the godfather of modern science fiction is the granularity of his writing. Because his view of the world existed at an intersection of sociology, politics, and technology, Wells was able to create complex geopolitical and social contexts for his fiction—indeed, after he abandoned science fiction, Wells’s later novels were those of a social realist, dealing with societal injustice, among other topics. He was able to quantify and fully realize extrapolations about the future and explore the iniquities of modern industrialization in his fiction.
The impulse to directly react to how industrialization has affected our lives occurs very early on in science fiction—for example, in Karl Hans Strobl’s cautionary factory tale “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907) and even in the playful utopian visions of Paul Scheerbart, which often pushed back against bad elements of “modernization.” (For his optimism, Scheerbart perished in World War I, while Strobl’s “reward” was to fall for fascism and join the Nazi Party—in part, a kind of repudiation of the views expressed in “The Triumph . . .”)
Social and political issues also peer out from science fiction from the start, and not just in Wells’s work. Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) is a potent feminist utopian vision. W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920) isn’t just a story about an impending science-fictional catastrophe but also the start of a conversation about race relations and a proto-Afrofuturist tale. The previously untranslated Yefim Zozulya’s “The Doom of Principal City” (1918) presages the atrocities perpetrated by the communism of the Soviet Union and highlights the underlying absurdities of certain ideological positions. (It’s perhaps telling that these early examples do not come from the American pulp SF tradition.)
This kind of eclectic stance also suggests a simple yet effective definition for science fiction: it depicts the future, whether in a stylized or realistic manner. There is no other definitional barrier to identifying science fiction unless you are intent on defending some particular territory. Science fiction lives in the future, whether that future exists ten seconds from the Now or whether in a story someone builds a time machine a century from now in order to travel back into the past. It is science fiction whether the future is phantasmagorical and surreal or nailed down using the rivets and technical jargon of “hard science fiction.” A story is also science fiction whether the story in question is, in fact, extrapolation about the future or using the future to comment on the past or present.
Thinking about science fiction in this way delinks the actual content or “experience” delivered by science fiction from the commodification of that genre by the marketplace. It does not privilege the dominant mode that originated with the pulps over other forms. But neither does it privilege those other manifestations over the dominant mode. Further, this definition eliminates or bypasses the idea of a “turf war” between genre and the mainstream, between commercial and literary, and invalidates the (weird ignorant snobbery of) tribalism that occurs on one side of the divide and the faux snobbery (ironically based on ignorance) that sometimes manifests on the other.
Wrote the brilliant editor Judith Merril in the seventh annual edition of The Year’s Best S-F (1963), out of frustration:
“But that’s not science fiction . . . !” Even my best friends (to invert a paraphrase) keep telling me: That’s not science fiction! Sometimes they mean it couldn’t be s-f, because it’s good. Sometimes it couldn’t be because it’s not about spaceships or time machines. (Religion or politics or psychology isn’t science fiction—is it?) Sometimes (because some of my best friends are s-f fans) they mean it’s not really science fiction—just fantasy or satire or something like that. On the whole, I think I am very patient. I generally manage to explain again, just a little wearily, what the “S-F” in the title of this book means, and what science fiction is, and why the one contains the other, without being constrained by it. But it does strain my patience when the exclamation is compounded to mean, “Surely you don’t mean to use that? That’s not science fiction!”—about a first-rate piece of the honest thing.
Standing on either side of this debate is corrosive—detrimental to the study and celebration of science fiction; all it does is sidetrack discussion or analysis, which devolves into SF/not SF or intrinsically valuable/not valuable. And, for the general reader weary of anthologies prefaced by a series of “inside baseball” remarks, our definition hopefully lessens your future burden of reading these words.
The Star - H. G. Wells Sultana’s Dream - Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein The New Overworld - Paul Scheerbart The Triumph of Mechanics - Karl Hans Strobl Elements of Pataphysics - Alfred Jarry Mechanopolis - Miguel de Unamuno The Doom of Principal City - Yefim Zozulya The Comet - W. E. B. Du Bois The Fate of the Poseidonia - Clare Winger Harris The Star Stealers - Edmond Hamilton The Conquest of Gola - Leslie F. Stone A Martian Odyssey - Stanley G. Weinbaum The Last Poet and the Robots - A. Merritt The Microscopic Giants - Paul Ernst Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - Jorge Luis Borges Desertion - Clifford D. Simak September 2005: The Martian - Ray Bradbury Baby HP - Juan José Arreola Surface Tension - James Blish Beyond Lies the Wub - Philip K. Dick The Snowball Effect - Katherine MacLean Prott - Margaret St. Clair The Liberation of Earth - William Tenn Let Me Live in a House - Chad Oliver The Star - Arthur C. Clarke Grandpa - James H. Schmitz The Game of Rat and Dragon - Cordwainer Smith The Last Question - Isaac Asimov Stranger Station - Damon Knight Sector General - James White The Visitors - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Pelt - Carol Emshwiller The Monster - Gérard Klein The Man Who Lost the Sea - Theodore Sturgeon The Waves - Silvina Ocampo Plenitude - Will Worthington The Voices of Time - J. G. Ballard The Astronaut - Valentina Zhuravlyova The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink - Adolfo Bioy Casares 2 B R 0 2 B - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. A Modest Genius - Vadim Shefner Day of Wrath - Sever Gansovsky The Hands - John Baxter Darkness - André Carneiro "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman - Harlan Ellison Nine Hundred Grandmothers - R. A. Lafferty Day Million - Frederik Pohl Student Body - F. L. Wallace Aye, and Gomorrah - Samuel R. Delany The Hall of Machines - Langdon Jones Soft Clocks - Yoshio Aramaki Three from Moderan - David R. Bunch Let Us Save the Universe - Stanisław Lem Vaster Than Empires and More Slow - Ursula K. Le Guin Good News from the Vatican - Robert Silverberg When It Changed - Joanna Russ And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side - James Tiptree Jr. Where Two Paths Cross - Dmitri Bilenkin Standing Woman - Yasutaka Tsutsui The IWM 1000 - Alicia Yánez Cossío The House of Compassionate Sharers - Michael Bishop Sporting with the Chid - Barrington J. Bayley Sandkings - George R. R. Martin Wives - Lisa Tuttle The Snake That Read Chomsky - Josephine Saxton Reiko’s Universe Box - Kajio Shinji Swarm - Bruce Sterling Mondocane - Jacques Barbéri Blood Music - Greg Bear Bloodchild - Octavia E. Butler Variation on a Man - Pat Cadigan Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead - S. N. Dyer New Rose Hotel - William Gibson Pots - C. J. Cherryh Snow - John Crowley The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things - Karen Joy Fowler The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets - Angélica Gorodischer The Owl of Bear Island - Jon Bing Readers of the Lost Art - Élisabeth Vonarburg A Gift from the Culture - Iain M. Banks Paranamanco - Jean-Claude Dunyach Crying in the Rain - Tanith Lee The Frozen Cardinal - Michael Moorcock Rachel in Love - Pat Murphy Sharing Air - Manjula Padmanabhan Schwarzschild Radius - Connie Willis All the Hues of Hell - Gene Wolfe Vacuum States - Geoffrey A. Landis Two Small Birds - Han Song Burning Sky - Rachel Pollack Before I Wake - Kim Stanley Robinson Death Is Static Death Is Movement - Misha Nogha The Brains of Rats - Michael Blumlein Gorgonoids - Leena Krohn Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ - Kojo Laing The Universe of Things - Gwyneth Jones The Remoras - Robert Reed The Ghost Standard - William Tenn Remnants of the Virago Crypto-System - Geoffrey Maloney How Alex Became a Machine - Stepan Chapman The Poetry Cloud - Cixin Liu Story of Your Life - Ted Chiang Craphound - Cory Doctorow The Slynx - Tatyana Tolstaya Baby Doll - Johanna Sinisalo
For nearly two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog and Tor.com, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s can’t-miss new SFF releases.
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Short stories hold a special place in the modern history of science fiction and fantasy—from the Golden Age, when sci-fi and fantasy magazines gave birth to legendary careers, to today, when they’ve proliferated across digital media, introducing us to up-and-coming talent and revealing new facets of established writers we love. Here are our favorite science […]
There are a ton of noteworthy SFF books hitting shelves this week, but none are likely to make more of an impact than The Big Book of Science Fiction, a carefully curated anthology of more than a century of SF short fiction, showing the weird ways the genre has grown and changed over the years. […]