ALSO EDITED BY ANN AND JEFF VANDERMEER
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases
(with Mark Roberts)
Best American Fantasy 1
(with Matthew Cheney)
Best American Fantasy 2
(with Matthew Cheney)
The New Weird
Steampunk
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
Fast Ships, Black Sails
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
Last Drink Bird Head
ODD?
The Weird
The Time Traveler’s Almanac
Sisters of the Revolution
The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals
ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER
Fiction
The Southern Reach Trilogy
Annihilation
Authority
Acceptance
Dradin in Love
The Book of Lost Places (stories)
Veniss Underground
City of Saints and Madmen
Secret Life (stories)
Shriek: An Afterword
The Situation
Finch
The Third Bear (stories)
Nonfiction
Why Should I Cut Your Throat?
Booklife
Monstrous Creatures
The Steampunk Bible
(with S. J. Chambers)
The Steampunk User’s Manual
(with Desirina Boskovich)
Wonderbook
ALSO BY ANN VANDERMEER
Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution
The Bestiary
A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, JULY 2016
Introduction and compilation copyright © 2016 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear on this page.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: VanderMeer, Ann, editor. | VanderMeer, Jeff, editor.
Title: The big book of science fiction / edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer.
Description: New York : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Vintage Books, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042397 | ISBN 9781101910092 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction—20th century. | Science fiction—21st century.
Classification: LCC PN6071.S33 B55 2016 | DDC 808.83/8762—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042397
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101910092
ebook ISBN 9781101910108
Cover design: Joe Montgomery
Cover image: The Canopy of Time © Bruce Pennington
www.weeklylizard.com
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Also Edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
The Star: H. G. Wells
Sultana’s Dream: Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain
The Triumph of Mechanics: Karl Hans Strobl
The New Overworld: Paul Scheerbart
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 Who Had 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: Mich
ael 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
About the Editors
About the Translators
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
The editors dedicate this book to Judith Merril, who helped show us the way.
INTRODUCTION
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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 1000” 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. Before now, there have been few attempts at a definitive anthology that truly captures 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 twenty-five 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 reach fruition only 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, 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 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 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 conte
xt. 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 say only 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).