New Skies: An Anthology of Today's Science Fiction
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New Skies: An Anthology of Today's Science Fiction
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Overview
Nightmarish or whimsical, irreverent or swashbuckling, each of these short stories is an adventure in imagination. Journey from the here and now into New Skies.
A new generation of science fiction fans is at hand. A new generation that is curious, smart, audacious, and experimental. It is for them that Patrick Nielsen Hayden-winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology - has selected these stories from the thousands published by contemporary SF writers over the past two decades.
Here are writers such as Philip K. Dick, Orson Scott Card, Jane Yolen, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, Steven Gould, Connie Willis, Spider Robinson, and many more. Here is a careening adventure along the outside of a tower looming miles above the ground, and a tale of desperate survival on the deadly surface of the Moon. Here is a world in which children divorce their parents, and the story of a four-dimensional boy in a three-dimensional world. Here are future young people rebuilding after terrible disasters, and here is a story of the future development of baseball-on Mars.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429978835 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 767 KB |
| Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is Senior Editor, Manager of Science Fiction, at Tor Books. He has worked in the science fiction field as an editor, reviewer, publisher, and in other capacities, since the mid-1970s. The Washington Post has called him "one of the most literate and historically aware editors in science fiction."
His original anthology series Starlight has won the World Fantasy Award, while individual stories from it have won the Hugo, Nebula, and other awards. His other anthologies include the YA reprint collections New Skies and New Magics and Up. A frequent speaker at science fiction conventions and writing workshops, he also plays guitar with a variety of ensembles and maintains a popular weblog about politics and culture. He lives with his wife and collaborator, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, in Brooklyn, New York.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, called by the Washington Post "one of the most literate and historically aware editors in science fiction," is the winner of three Hugo Awards and the World Fantasy Award for his editorial work?. He is the editor or co-editor of several original and reprint anthologies, including the Starlight series and the young adult anthologies New Magics and New Skies.
?As an editor at Tor Books for over 25 years, he is responsible for publishing the debut novels of many of the field's best writers, including Maureen F. McHugh, Susan Palwick, Cory Doctorow, Jo Walton, and John Scalzi.
Read an Excerpt
New Skies
An Anthology of Today's Science Fiction
By Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2003 Patrick Nielsen HaydenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-7883-5
CHAPTER 1
Sometimes, it's the most routine details that seem the strangest to outsiders.
Terry Bisson is known for pungent, often very funny short stories like "Bears Discover Fire" and sharp, original novels like Talking Man and The Pickup Artist.
They're Made Out of Meat
* * *
TERRY BISSON
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."
"So ... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
"Omigod. You're serious, then. They're made out of meat."
"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat."
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen-core cluster intelligence in a class-nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."
CHAPTER 2Courage isn't being unafraid. Courage is doing what needs doing when we're scared half to death.
A working space scientist when he's not writing highly plausible "hard SF," Geoffrey A. Landis published his first novel, Mars Crossing, in 2000. "A Walk in the Sun" won science fiction's Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1992.
A Walk in the Sun
* * *
GEOFFREY A. LANDIS
The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from.
Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he'd been alive. Trish had done the best she could. All things considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect.
Titanium struts, pencil-slender, had never been designed to take the force of a landing. Paper-thin pressure walls had buckled and shattered, spreading wreckage out into the vacuum and across a square kilometer of lunar surface. An instant before impact she remembered to blow the tanks. There was no explosion, but no landing could have been gentle enough to keep Moonshadow together. In eerie silence, the fragile ship had crumpled and ripped apart like a discarded aluminum can.
The piloting module had torn open and broken loose from the main part of the ship. The fragment settled against a crater wall. When it stopped moving, Trish unbuckled the straps that held her in the pilot's seat and fell slowly to the ceiling. She oriented herself to the unaccustomed gravity, found an undamaged EVA pack and plugged it into her suit, then crawled out into the sunlight through the jagged hole where the living module had been attached.
She stood on the grey lunar surface and stared. Her shadow reached out ahead of her, a pool of inky black in the shape of a fantastically stretched man. The landscape was rugged and utterly barren, painted in stark shades of grey and black. "Magnificent desolation," she whispered. Behind her, the sun hovered just over the mountains, glinting off shards of titanium and steel scattered across the cratered plain.
Patricia Jay Mulligan looked out across the desolate moonscape and tried not to weep.
First things first. She took the radio out from the shattered crew compartment and tried it. Nothing. That was no surprise; Earth was over the horizon, and there were no other ships in cislunar space.
After a little searching she found Sanjiv and Theresa. In the low gravity they were absurdly easy to carry. There was no use in burying them. She sat them in a niche between two boulders, facing the sun, facing west, toward where the Earth was hidden behind a range of black mountains. She tried to think of the right words to say, and failed. Perhaps as well; she wouldn't know the proper service for Sanjiv anyway. "Goodbye, Sanjiv. Goodbye, Theresa. I wish — I wish things would have been different. I'm sorry." Her voice was barely more than a whisper. "Go with God."
She tried not to think of how soon she was likely to be joining them.
She forced herself to think. What would her sister have done? Survive. Karen would survive. First: inventory your assets. She was alive, miraculously unhurt. Her vacuum suit was in serviceable condition. Life-support was powered by the suit's solar arrays; she had air and water for as long as the sun continued to shine. Scavenging the wreckage yielded plenty of unbroken food packs; she wasn't about to starve.
Second: call for help. In this case, the nearest help was a quarter of a million miles over the horizon. She would need a high-gain antenna and a mountain peak with a view of Earth.
In its computer, Moonshadow had carried the best maps of the moon ever made. Gone. There had been other maps on the ship; they were scattered with the wreckage. She'd managed to find a detailed map of Mare Nubium — useless — and a small global map meant to be used as an index. It would have to do. As near as she could tell, the impact site was just over the eastern edge of Mare Smythii — "Smith's Sea." The mountains in the distance should mark the edge of the sea, and, with luck, have a view of Earth.
She checked her suit. At a command, the solar arrays spread out to their full extent like oversized dragonfly wings and glinted in prismatic colors as they rotated to face the sun. She verified that the suit's systems were charging properly, and set off.
Close up, the mountain was less steep than it had looked from the crash site. In the low gravity, climbing was hardly more difficult than walking, although the two-meter dish made her balance awkward. Reaching the ridgetop, Trish was rewarded with the sight of a tiny sliver of blue on the horizon. The mountains on the far side of the valley were still in darkness. She hoisted the radio higher up on her shoulder and started across the next valley.
From the next mountain peak the Earth edged over the horizon, a blue and white marble half-hidden by black mountains. She unfolded the tripod for the antenna and carefully sighted along the feed. "Hello? This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Emergency. Repeat, this is an emergency. Does anybody hear me?"
She took her thumb off the transmit button and waited for a response, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of static from the sun.
"This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Does anybody hear me?" She paused again. "Moonshadow, calling anybody. Moonshadow, calling anybody. This is an emergency."
"— shadow, this is Geneva control. We read you faint but clear. Hang on, up there." She released her breath in a sudden gasp. She hadn't even realized she'd been holding it.
After five minutes the rotation of the Earth had taken the ground antenna out of range. In that time — after they had gotten over their surprise that there was a survivor of the Moonshadow — she learned the parameters of the problem. Her landing had been close to the sunset terminator; the very edge of the illuminated side of the moon. The moon's rotation is slow, but inexorable. Sunset would arrive in three days. There was no shelter on the moon, no place to wait out the fourteen-day long lunar night. Her solar cells needed sunlight to keep her air fresh. Her search of the wreckage had yielded no unruptured storage tanks, no batteries, no means to lay up a store of oxygen.
And there was no way they could launch a rescue mission before nightfall.
Too many "no"s.
She sat silent, gazing across the jagged plain toward the slender blue crescent, thinking.
After a few minutes the antenna at Goldstone rotated into range, and the radio crackled to life. "Moonshadow, do you read me? Hello, Moonshadow, do you read me?"
"Moonshadow here."
She released the transmit button and waited in long silence for her words to be carried to Earth.
"Roger, Moonshadow. We confirm the earliest window for a rescue mission is thirty days from now. Can you hold on that long?"
She made her decision and pressed the transmit button. "Astronaut Mulligan for Moonshadow. I'll be here waiting for you. One way or another."
She waited, but there was no answer. The receiving antenna at Goldstone couldn't have rotated out of range so quickly. She checked the radio. When she took the cover off, she could see that the printed circuit board on the power supply had been slightly cracked from the crash, but she couldn't see any broken leads or components clearly out of place. She banged on it with her fist — Karen's first rule of electronics, if it doesn't work, hit it — and reaimed the antenna, but it didn't help. Clearly something in it had broken.
What would Karen have done? Not just sit here and die, that was certain. Get a move on, kiddo. When sunset catches you, you'll die.
They had heard her reply. She had to believe they heard her reply and would be coming for her. All she had to do was survive.
The dish antenna would be too awkward to carry with her. She could afford nothing but the bare necessities. At sunset her air would be gone. She put down the radio and began to walk.
Mission Commander Stanley stared at the x-rays of his engine. It was four in the morning. There would be no more sleep for him that night; he was scheduled to fly to Washington at six to testify to Congress.
"Your decision, Commander," the engine technician said. "We can't find any flaws in the x-rays we took of the flight engines, but it could be hidden. The nominal flight profile doesn't take the engines to a hundred twenty, so the blades should hold even if there is a flaw."
"How long a delay if we yank the engines for inspection?"
"Assuming they're okay, we lose a day. If not, two, maybe three."
Commander Stanley drummed his fingers in irritation. He hated to be forced into hasty decisions. "Normal procedure would be?"
"Normally we'd want to reinspect."
"Do it."
He sighed. Another delay. Somewhere up there, somebody was counting on him to get there on time. If she was still alive. If the cut-off radio signal didn't signify catastrophic failure of other systems.
If she could find a way to survive without air.
On Earth it would have been a marathon pace. On the moon it was an easy lope. After ten miles the trek fell into an easy rhythm: half a walk, half like jogging, and half bounding like a slow-motion kangaroo. Her worst enemy was boredom.
Her comrades at the academy — in part envious of the top scores that had made her the first of their class picked for a mission — had ribbed her mercilessly about flying a mission that would come within a few kilometers of the moon without landing. Now she had a chance to see more of the moon up close than anybody in history. She wondered what her classmates were thinking now. She would have a tale to tell — if only she could survive to tell it.
The warble of the low voltage warning broke her out of her reverie. She checked her running display as she started down the maintenance checklist. Elapsed EVA time, eight point three hours. System functions, nominal, except that the solar array current was way below norm. In a few moments she found the trouble: a thin layer of dust on her solar array. Not a serious problem; it could be brushed off. If she couldn't find a pace that would avoid kicking dust on the arrays, then she would have to break every few hours to housekeep. She rechecked the array and continued on.
With the sun unmoving ahead of her and nothing but the hypnotically blue crescent of the slowly rotating Earth creeping imperceptibly off the horizon, her attention wandered. Moonshadow had been tagged as an easy mission, a low-orbit mapping flight to scout sites for the future moonbase. Moonshadow had never been intended to land, not on the moon, not anywhere.
She'd landed it anyway; she had to.
Walking west across the barren plain, Trish had nightmares of blood and falling, Sanjiv dying beside her; Theresa already dead in the lab module; the moon looming huge, spinning at a crazy angle in the viewports. Stop the spin, aim for the terminator — at low sun angles, the illumination makes it easier to see the roughness of the surface. Conserve fuel, but remember to blow the tanks an instant before you hit to avoid explosion.
That was over. Concentrate on the present. One foot in front of the other. Again. Again.
The undervoltage alarm chimed again. Dust, already?
She looked down at her navigation aid and realized with a shock that she had walked a hundred and fifty kilometers.
Time for a break anyway. She sat down on a boulder, fetched a snackpack out of her carryall, and set a timer for fifteen minutes. The airtight quick-seal on the food pack was designed to mate to the matching port in the lower part of her faceplate. It would be important to keep the seal free of grit. She verified the vacuum seal twice before opening the pack into the suit, then pushed the food bar in so she could turn her head and gnaw off pieces. The bar was hard and slightly sweet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Skies by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Copyright © 2003 Patrick Nielsen Hayden. 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,Terry Bisson, "They're Made Out of Meat",
Geoffrey A. Landis, "A Walk in the Sun",
Steven Gould, "Peaches for Mad Molly",
Spider Robinson, "Serpents' Teeth",
Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, "Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen",
Connie Willis, "A Letter from the Clearys",
Will Shetterly, "Brian and the Aliens",
David Langford, "Different Kinds of Darkness",
Greg van Eekhout, "Will You Be an Astronaut?",
Jane Yolen, "Cards of Grief",
Greg Bear, "Tangents",
Philip K. Dick, "The Alien Mind",
Nancy Kress, "Out of All Them Bright Stars",
Maureen F. McHugh, "The Lincoln Train",
Kim Stanley Robinson, "Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars",
Orson Scott Card, "Salvage",
Robert Charles Wilson, "The Great Goodbye",