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Overview
This collection launched the popular and long-running "The Year's Best Science Fiction" series:
Fantastic Science Fiction!
The Year's Best -- And Biggest Collection
Here's the cream of the crop: short stories, novelettes, novellas by science fiction writers already famous and awarded for their high-quality work in science fiction. Writers like:
Poul Anderson
Joe Haldeman
Tanith Lee
George R.R. Martin
Robert Silverberg
James Tiptree, Jr.
Vernor Vinge
Gene Wolfe
Plus writers who are newer to the field, but just as excellent! These are the stories that will vie for the Hugo and Nebula Awards this year. And we've got them all! Not ten. Not twenty. 25 GREAT SF TALES.
Each one is chosen by renowned SF writer and editor Gardner R. Dozois. Among them are "Black Air" by Kim Stanley Robinson, "Blood Music" and "Hardfought" by Greg Bear, "Blind Shemmy" by Jack Dann, "Cicada Queen" by Bruce Sterling and "Slow Birds" by Ian Watson.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466807303 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/15/1984 |
| Series: | Year's Best Science Fiction Series , #1 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 570 |
| File size: | 713 KB |
About the Author
Gardner Dozois (1947-2018), one of the most acclaimed editors in science-fiction, won the Hugo Award for Best Editor 15 times. He was the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine for 20 years. He also served as the editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies and co-editor of the Warrior anthologies, Songs of the Dying Earth, and many others. As a writer, Dozois twice won the Nebula Award for best short story. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011 and received the Skylark Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Read an Excerpt
The Year's Best Science Fiction First Annual Collection
By Gardner Dozois
Bluejay Books
Copyright © 1984 Gardner R. DozoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0730-3
CHAPTER 1
Cicada Queen
Significant new talent seems to enter the SF world in waves, discrete generational groupings, usually at five-to-ten year intervals. One such influx of new talent came along in the early middle '60s, when new writers like Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Thomas M. Disch, Norman Spinrad, R.A. Lafferty, and others ushered in SF's "New Wave" years. A few years later in the early seventies, another wave of talent arrived — made up of writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, and James Tiptree, Jr. — and a few years after that, in the middle seventies, everyone was suddenly talking about writers such as Joe Haldeman, John Varley, Gregory Benford, Jack Dann, George R.R. Martin, Michael Bishop, Phyllis Eisenstein, and Edward Bryant.
Now, at the beginning of the '80s, we are clearly in the process of assimilating yet another generational wave of hot new writers, and in the years to come you will be hearing a whole lot more about writers like Michael Swanwick, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Kim Stanley Robinson, Leigh Kennedy, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Pat Murphy, Lewis Shiner ... and Bruce Sterling, who even in this august company must be considered one of the really major talents to enter SF in recent years. As is more than amply demonstrated by the powerful story of intrigue and confrontation that follows, set in a bizarre far-future world where Shapers and Mechanists struggle to control the shape of human destiny ...
Born in Brownsville, Texas, Bruce Sterling sold his first SF story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and The Last Dangerous Visions. His acclaimed story "Swarm" was both a Hugo and a Nebula Award finalist last year. His short story, "Spider Rose," was also a Hugo finalist. His novels include Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid. Upcoming is a new novel, set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, from Arbor House. Sterling lives in Austin, Texas. It began the night the Queen called off her dogs. I'd been under the dogs for two years, ever since my defection.
My initiation, and my freedom from the dogs, were celebrated at the home of Arvin Kulagin. Kulagin, a wealthy Mechanist, had a large domestic-industrial complex on the outer perimeter of a midsized cylindrical suburb.
Kulagin met me at his door and handed me a gold inhaler spiked with beta-phenethylamine. The party was already roaring. The Polycarbon Clique always turned out in force for an initiation.
As usual, my entrance was marked by a subtle freezing up. It was the dogs' fault. Voices were raised to a certain histrionic pitch, people handled their inhalers and drinks with a slightly more studied elegance, and every smile turned my way was bright enough for a team of security experts.
Kulagin smiled glassily. "Landau, it's a pleasure. Welcome. I see you've brought the Queen's Percentage." He looked pointedly at the box on my hip.
"Yes," I said. A man under the dogs had no secrets. I had been working off and on for two years on the Queen's gift and the dogs had taped everything. They were still taping everything. Czarina-Kluster Security had designed them for that. For two years they'd taped every moment of my life and everything and everyone around me.
"Perhaps the Clique can have a look," Kulagin said. "Once we've whipped these dogs." He winked into the armored camera face of the watchdog, then looked at his timepiece. "Just an hour till you're out from under. Then we'll have some fun." He waved me on into the room. "If you need anything, use the servos."
Kulagin's place was spacious and elegant, decorated classically and scented by gigantic suspended marigolds. Kulagin's suburb was called the Froth and was the Clique's favorite neighborhood. Kulagin, living at the suburb's perimeter, profited by the Froth's lazy spin and had a simulated tenth of a gravity. His walls were striped to provide a vertical referent, and he had enough space to affect such luxuries as "floors," "tables," "chairs," and other forms of gravity-oriented furniture. The ceiling was studded with hooks, from which were suspended a dozen of his favorite marigolds, huge round explosions of reeking greenery with blossoms the size of my head.
I walked into the room and stood behind a couch, which partially hid the two offensive dogs. I signaled one of Kulagin's spidery servos and took a squeezebulb of liquor to cut the speedy intensity of the phenethylamine.
I watched the party, which had split into loose subeliques. Kulagin was near the door with his closest sympathizers, Mechanist officers from Czarina-Kluster banks and quiet Security types. Nearby, faculty from the Kosmosity-Metasystem campus talked shop with a pair of orbital engineers. On the ceiling, Shaper designers talked fashion, clinging to hooks in the feeble gravity. Below them a manic group of C-K folk, "Cicadas," spun like clockwork through gravity dance steps.
At the back of the room, Wellspring was holding forth amid a herd of spindly legged chairs. I leaped gently over the couch and glided toward him. The dogs sprang after me with a whir of propulsive fans.
Wellspring was my closest friend in C-K. He had encouraged my defection when he was in the Ring Council, buying ice for the Martian terraforming project. The dogs never bothered Wellspring. His ancient friendship with the Queen was well known. In C-K, Wellspring was a legend.
Tonight he was dressed for an audience with the Queen. A coronet of gold and platinum circled his dark, matted hair. He wore a loose blouse of metallic brocade with slashed sleeves that showed a black underblouse shot through with flickering pinpoints of light. This was complemented by an Investor-style jeweled skirt and knee-high scaled boots. The jeweled cables of the skirt showed Wellspring's massive legs, trained to the heavy gravity favored by the reptilian Queen. He was a powerful man, and his weaknesses, if he had any, were hidden within his past.
Wellspring was talking philosophy. His audience, mathematicians and biologists from the faculty of C-K K-M, made room for me with strained smiles. "You asked me to define my terms," he said urbanely. "By the term we, I don't mean merely you Cicadas. Nor do I mean the mass of so-called humanity. After all, you Shapers are constructed of genes patented by Reshaped genetics firms. You might be properly defined as industrial artifacts."
His audience groaned. Wellspring smiled. "And conversely, the Mechanists are slowly abandoning human flesh in favor of cybernetic modes of existence. So. It follows that my term, we, can be attributed to any cognitive metasystem on the Fourth Prigoginic Level of complexity."
A Shaper professor touched his inhaler to the painted line of his nostril and said, "I have to take issue with that, Wellspring. This occult nonsense about levels of complexity is ruining C-K's ability to do decent science."
"That's a linear causative statement," Wellspring riposted. "You conservatives are always looking for certainties outside the level of the cognitive metasystem. Clearly every intelligent being is separated from every lower level by a Prigoginic event horizon. It's time we learned to stop looking for solid ground to stand on. Let's place ourselves at the center of things. If we need something to stand on, we'll have it orbit us."
He was applauded. He said, "Admit it, Yevgeny. C-K is blooming in a new moral and intellectual climate. It's unquantifiable and unpredictable, and, as a scientist, that frightens you. Posthumanism offers fluidity and freedom, and a metaphysic daring enough to think a whole world into life. It enables us to take up economically absurd projects such as the terraforming of Mars, which your pseudopragmatic attitude could never dare to attempt. And yet think of the gain involved."
"Semantic tricks," sniffed the professor. I had never seen him before. I suspected that Wellspring had brought him along for the express purpose of baiting him.
I myself had once doubted some aspects of C-K's Posthumanism. But its open abandonment of the search for moral certainties had liberated us. When I looked at the eager, painted faces of Wellspring's audience, and compared them to the bleak strain and veiled craftiness that had once surrounded me, I felt as if I would burst. After twenty-four years of paranoid discipline under the Ring Council, and then two more years under the dogs, tonight I would be explosively released from pressure.
I sniffed at the phenethylamine, the body's own "natural" amphetamine. I felt suddenly dizzy, as if the space inside my head were full of the red-hot Ur-space of the primordial deSitter cosmos, ready at any moment to make the Prigoginic leap into the "normal" space-time continuum, the Second Prigoginic Level of complexity. ... Posthumanism schooled us to think in terms of fits and starts, of structures accreting along unspoken patterns, following the lines first suggested by the ancient Terran philosopher Ilya Prigogine. I directly understood this, since my own mild attraction to the dazzling Valery Korstad had coalesced into a knotted desire that suppressants could numb but not destroy.
She was dancing across the room, the jeweled strings of her Investor skirt twisting like snakes. She had the anonymous beauty of the Reshaped, overlaid with the ingenious, enticing paint of C-K. I had never seen anything I wanted more, and from our brief and strained flirtations I knew that only the dogs stood between us.
Wellspring took me by the arm. His audience had dissolved as I stood rapt, lusting after Valery. "How much longer, son?"
Startled, I looked at the watch display on my forearm. "Only twenty minutes, Wellspring."
"That's fine, son." Wellspring was famous for his use of archaic terms like son. "Once the dogs are gone, it'll be your party, Hans. I won't stay here to eclipse you. Besides, the Queen awaits me. You have the Queen's Percentage?"
"Yes, just as you said." I unpeeled the box from the stick-tight patch on my hip and handed it over.
Wellspring lifted its lid with his powerful fingers and looked inside. Then he laughed aloud. "Jesus! It's beautiful!"
Suddenly he pulled the open box away and the Queen's gift hung in midair, glittering above our heads. It was an artificial gem the size of a child's fist, its chiseled planes glittering with the green and gold of endolithic lichen. As it spun it threw tiny glints of fractured light across our faces.
As it fell, Kulagin appeared and caught it on the points of four extended fingertips. His left eye, an artificial implant, glistened darkly as he examined it.
"Eisho Zaibatsu?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "They handled the synthesizing work; the lichen is a special variety of my own." I saw that a curious circle was gathering and said aloud, "Our host is a connoisseur."
"Only of finance," Kulagin said quietly, but with equal emphasis. "I understand now why you patented the process in your own name. It's a dazzling accomplishment. How could any Investor resist the lure of a living jewel, friends? Someday soon our initiate will be a wealthy man." I looked quickly at Wellspring, but he unobtrusively touched one finger to his lips. "And he'll need that wealth to bring Mars to fruition," Wellspring said loudly. "We can't depend forever on the Kosmosity for funding. Friends, rejoice that you too will reap the profits of Landau's ingenious genetics." He caught the jewel and boxed it."And tonight I have the honor of presenting his gift to the Queen. A double honor, since I recruited its creator myself." Suddenly he leaped toward the exit, his powerful legs carrying him quickly above our heads. As he flew he shouted, "Good-bye, son! May another dog never darken your doorstep!"
With Wellspring's exit, the non-Polycarbon guests began leaving, forming a jostling knot of hat-fetching servos and gossiping well-wishers. When the last was gone, the Clique grew suddenly quiet.
Kulagin had me stand at a far corner of his studio while the Clique formed a long gauntlet for the dogs, arming themselves with ribbons and paint. A certain dark edge of smoldering vengeance only added a tang to their enjoyment. I took a pair of paint balloons from one of Kulagin's scurrying servos.
The time was almost on me. For two long years I'd schemed to join the Polycarbon Clique. I needed them. I felt they needed me. I was tired of suspicion, of strained politeness, of the glass walls of the dogs' surveillance. The keen edges of my long discipline suddenly, painfully crumbled. I began shaking uncontrollably, unable to hold it back.
The dogs were still, taping steadily to the last appointed instant. The crowd began to count down. Exactly at the count of zero the two dogs turned to go.
They were barraged with paint and tangled streamers. A moment earlier they would have turned savagely on their tormentors, but now they had reached the limits of their programming, and at long last they were helpless. The Clique's aim was deadly, and with every splattering hit they split the air with screams of laughter. They knew no mercy, and it took a full minute before the humiliated dogs could hop and stagger, blinded, to the door.
I was overcome with mob hysteria. Screams escaped my clenched teeth. I had to be grappled back from pursuing the dogs down the hall. As firm hands pulled me back within the room I turned to face my friends, and I was chilled at the raw emotion on their faces. It was as if they had been stripped of skin and watched me with live eyes in slabs of meat.
I was picked up bodily and passed from hand to hand around the room. Even those that I knew well seemed alien to me now. Hands tore at my clothing until I was stripped; they even took my computer gauntlet, then stood me in the middle of the room.
As I stood shivering within the circle, Kulagin approached me, his arms rigid, his face stiff and hieratic. His hands were full of loose black cloth. He held the cloth over my head and I saw that it was a black hood. He put his lips close to my ear and said softly, "Friend, go the distance." Then he pulled the hood over my head and knotted it.
The hood had been soaked in something. I could smell that it reeked. My hands and feet began to tingle, then go numb. Slowly, warmth crept like bracelets up my arms and legs. I could hear nothing, and my feet could no longer feel the floor. I lost all sense of balance, and suddenly I fell backward, into the infinite.
My eyes opened, or my eyes closed, I couldn't tell. But at the limits of vision, from behind some unspoken fog, emerged pinpoints of cold and piercing brightness. It was the Great Galactic Night, the vast and pitiless emptiness that lurks just beyond the warm rim of every human habitat, emptier even than death.
I was naked in space and it was so bitterly cold that I could taste it like poison in every cell I had. I could feel the pale heat of my own life streaming out of me like plasma, ebbing away in aurora sheets from my fingertips. I continued to fall, and as the last rags of warmth pulsed off into the devouring chasm of space, and my body grew stiff and white and furred with frost from every pore, I faced the ultimate horror: that I would not die, that I would fall forever backward into the unknown, my mind shriveling into a single frozen spore of isolation and terror.
Time dilated. Eons of silent fear telescoped into a few heartbeats and I saw before me a single white blob of light, like a rent from this cosmos into some neighboring realm full of alien radiance. This time I faced it as I fell toward it, and through it, and then, finally, jarringly, I was back behind my own eyes, within my own head, on the soft floor of Kulagin's studio.
The hood was gone. I wore a loose black robe, closed with an embroidered belt. Kulagin and Valery Korstad helped me to my feet. I wobbled, brushing away tears, but I managed to stand, and the Clique cheered.
Kulagin's shoulder was under my arm. He embraced me and whispered, "Brother, remember the cold. When we your friends need warmth, be warm, remembering the cold. When friendship pains you, forgive us, remembering the cold. When selfishness tempts you, renounce it, remembering the cold. For you have gone the distance, and returned to us renewed. Remember, remember the cold." And then he gave me my secret name, and pressed his painted lips to mine.
I clung to him, choked with sobs. Valery embraced me and Kulagin pulled away gently, smiling.
One by one the Clique took my hands and pressed their lips quickly to my face, murmuring congratulations. Still unable to speak, I could only nod. Meanwhile Valery Korstad, clinging to my arm, whispered hotly in my ear, "Hans, Hans, Hans Landau, there still remains a certain ritual, which I have reserved to myself, Tonight the finest chamber in the Froth belongs to us, a sacred place where no glassy-eyed dog has ever trespassed. Hans Landau, tonight that place belongs to you, and so do I."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Year's Best Science Fiction First Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois. Copyright © 1984 Gardner R. Dozois. Excerpted by permission of Bluejay Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction - Summation: 1983
Cicada Queen / Bruce Sterling
Beyond the Dead Reef / James Tiptree Jr.
Slow birds / Ian Watson
Vulcan's Forge / Poul Anderson
Man-Mountain Gentian / Howard Waldrop
Hardfought / Greg Bear
Manifest Destiny / Joe Haldeman
Full Chicken Richness / Avram Davidson
Multiples / Robert Silverberg
Cryptic / Jack McDevitt
The Sidon in the Mirror / Connie Willis
Golden Gate / R. A. Lafferty
Blind Shemmy / Jack Dann
In the Islands / Pat Murphy
Nunc Dimittis by Tanith Lee
Blood Music / Greg Bear
Her Furry Face / Leigh Kennedy
Knight Of Shallows / Rand B. Lee
The Cat / Gene Wolfe
The Monkey Treatment / George R. R. Martin
Nearly Departed / Pat Cadigan
Hearts Do Not In Eyes Shine / John Kessel
Carrion Comfort / Dan Simmons
Gemstone / Vernor Vinge
Black Air / Kim Stanley Robinson
Honorable Mentions