The Time Traveller's Almanac
Page 154
“But, I. Him. I’m not him, exactly.”
She let go of his elbow. “Not unless you want to be, my love.”
“Am I your love? Or is he?”
“That depends which version of you you want to be.”
“You’re telling me that essentially I can only be free of Internal Affairs if I undo what they made me do.”
“There’s a protocol,” she said, looking away. “We can reactivate your phone. You don’t have to reenlist in the Stasis if you don’t want to. There are berths waiting for all of us on the colony ships...”
“But that’s just exchanging one sort of reified destiny for another, isn’t it? Expansion in space, instead of time. Why is that any better than, say, freeing the machines, turning over all the available temporal bandwidth to timelike computing to see if the wild-eyed prophets of artificial intelligence and ghosts uploaded in the machines were onto something after all?”
She looked at him oddly. “Do you have any idea how weird you can be at times?”
He snorted. “Don’t worry, I’m not serious about that. I know my limits. If I don’t do this thing we’re discussing, him upstairs will be annoyed. Because Kafka will have all those naively loyal young potential me’s to send on spy missions, won’t he?” Pierce took a deep breath. “I don’t see that there’s any alternative, really. And that’s what rankles. I had hoped that the Opposition would be willing to give me a little more freedom of action than Kafka, that’s all.” He felt the ghostly touch of a bunch of raisin-wrinkled grape joints holding his preteen wrists, showing him how to cast a line. He owed it to Grandpa, he felt: to leave his own children a universe with elbow room unconstrained by the thumbcuffs of absolute history. “Will you still be here when I get back?”
She regarded him gravely. “Will you still want to see me afterward?”
“Of course.”
“See you later, then.” She smiled as she stood up, then departed.
He stared at the spot where she’d been sitting for what seemed like a long, long time. But when he tried to remember her face all he could see was the two of them, Xiri and Yarrow, superimposed.
Saying Good-bye to Now
Twenty years in Stasis. Numerous deaths, many of them self-inflicted, ordered with the callous detachment of self-appointed gods. They feed into the unquiet conscience of a man who knows he could have been better, can still be better – if only he can untangle the Gordian knot of his destiny after it’s been tied up and handed to him by people he’s coming to despise.
That’s you in a nutshell, Pierce.
You’re at a bleak crossroads, surrounded by lovers and allies and oh, so isolated in your moment of destiny. Who are you going to be, really? Who do you want to be?
All the myriad ways will lie before you, all the roads not taken at your back: who do you want to be?
You have met your elder self, the man-machine at the center of an intrigue that might never exist if Kafka gets his way. And you’ll have mapped out the scope of the rift with Xiri, itself rooted in her despair at Stasis. You can examine your life with merciless, refreshing clarity, and find it wanting if you wish. You can even unmake your mistakes: let Grandpa flower, prune back your frightened teenage nightmare of murder. You can step off the murderous infinite roundabout whenever you please, resign the game or rejoin and play to win – but the question you’ve only recently begun to ask is, who writes the rules?
Who do you want to be?
The snow falls silently around you as you stand in darkness, knee-deep in the frosted weeds lining the ditch by the railroad tracks. Alone in the night, a young man walks between islands of light. A headhunter stalks him unseen, another young man with a heart full of fears and ears stuffed with lies. There’s a knife in his sleeve and a pebble-sized machine in his pocket, and you know what he means to do, and what will come of it. And you know what you need to do.
And now it’s your turn to start making history...
We hope you enjoyed this book.
To find out about Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, click here.
To find out about the Non-Fiction contributors, click here.
For an invitation from the publisher, click here.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank the following people for their talent and assistance: our UK editor, Nic Cheetham, at Head of Zeus and our US editor, Liz Gorinsky, at Tor as well as our agents Sally Harding and Ron Eckel and all the good folks at the Cooke Agency for making this adventure come to pass. Thanks also to Dan Read, a good friend and bookseller extraordinaire, for finding and sharing obscure books with us and to Paula Guran, for her much appreciated friendship. Many thanks to the remarkable Michael Moorcock for his continued support and for also pointing us in more than one right direction, to the tireless Theresa Goulding who is always there to lend a hand and a smile, to Richard Scott for helping us track down a couple of stories; to Fritz Foy for help finding our way through the permissions maze; to Edward Gauvin for his expertise and translation talents; and to these editors who helped us along the way, including John Joseph Adams, Jetse de Vries, Gavin Grant, Alisa Krasnostein, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, Bill Schafer and Jonathan Strahan. We’d also like to thank Tyler Owen and the good people over at the Fermentation Lounge. Sustenance for both the brain and body! And last but not least, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our editorial assistants Dominik Parisien and Tessa Kum for embarking on this adventure with us and keeping us sane. We couldn’t have done it without you.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
YOUR OWN
TIME MACHINE:
THE ULTIMATE TREASURY OF TIME TRAVEL STORIES,
FROM THE BEGINNING OF TIME TO ITS VERY END.
STORIES FROM:
* Douglas Adams * Dean Francis Alfar * Isaac Asimov * Kage Baker
* Barrington J. Bayley * Elizabeth Bear * Max Beerbohm * Steve Bein
* E.F. Benson * Rick Bowes * Ray Bradbury * Molly Brown
* Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud * C.J. Cherryh * John Chu
* Peter Crowther * Rjurik Davidson * Greg Egan * William Gibson
* Karen Haber * Nalo Hopkinson * Langdon Jones * Garry Kilworth
* Alice Sola Kim * Ellen Klages * Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore
* Geoffrey A. Landis * David Langford * Joe Lansdale * Tanith Lee
* Ursula K. Le Guin * Bob Leman * Rosaleen Love * George R.R. Martin
* David I. Masson * Richard Matheson * Edward Page Mitchell
* Michael Moorcock * Tamsyn Muir * Kim Newman * Tony Pi
* Adam Roberts * Kristine Kathryn Rusch * Eric Frank Russell
* Pamela Sargent * Eric Schaller * Robert Silverberg * Vandana Singh
* Cordwainer Smith * Norman Spinrad * Charles Stross * Theodore
Sturgeon * Michael Swanwick * Adrian Tchaikovsky * Karin Tidbeck
* Harry Turtledove * Steven Utley * Carrie Vaughn * H.G. Wells
* Connie Willis * Gene Wolfe *
FEATURING:
* Top Ten Tips for Time Travellers
* Time Travel in Theory & Practice
* Fashion for Time Travellers
* Music to Time Travel to
ABOUT THE EDITORS
For 25 years, Hugo Award winner Ann VanderMeer and World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer have been traveling into the past to bring back incredible stories for generations of readers. Their recent The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories (Atlantic Books, UK) covered 100 years of weird fiction in a single massive 750,000-word, 1,200-page volume. The VanderMeers have also edited such iconic compilations as Steampunk and The New Weird, both considered definitive for those subgenres. Other recent books include The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals.
This “literary power couple” (Boing Boing) has been profiled on national NPR, the Weather Channel, Wired.com, and the New York Times’ book blog. Together or separately, they have been keynote speakers around the world, including at MIT, the Library of Congress,
and Utopiales. They also have been brought in to conduct creativity workshops for the likes of Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft) and help run Wofford College’s Shared Worlds, a unique SF/Fantasy teen writing camp.
Ann served as editor-in-chief of Weird Tales for five years and currently serves as a consulting editor for Tor.com. She also recently edited Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution. Jeff’s recent Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction is the world’s first image-driven writing book. His forthcoming Southern Reach trilogy was optioned by Paramount Pictures through Scott Rudin Productions and will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (U.S.), HarperCollins Canada, and Fourth Estate (UK). The VanderMeers live in Tallahassee, Florida, with four cats and twenty thousand books.
ABOUT THE NON-FICTION CONTRIBUTORS
Jason Heller is the author of the alternate history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Hugo-nominated editor for his work at Clarkesworld Magazine. He’s also a contributing writer and former editor for The Onion’s A.V. Club. In addition, his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Weird Tales, Alternative Press, Tor.com, and others. He lives in Denver, where he plays in punk bands and subjects his writing students to merciless doses of Bob Dylan.
Rian Johnson is an award-winning writer and director whose films include Brick, The Brothers Bloom and the time travel movie Looper. He lives in Los Angeles.
Tessa Kum’s work has appeared in Halo: Evolutions, Baggage, Daikaiju, ASIM, and other places. A Clarion South 2005 graduate, she was an editorial assistant at Weird Tales while under the command of Ann Vandermeer and is now a freelance editor. She lives in Melbourne.
Stan Love is a planetary scientist, NASA astronaut, and lifelong science fiction fan. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Harvey Mudd College, where they use rhinoceroses to teach relativity, and a master’s and doctorate in Astronomy from the University of Washington. He gives frequent public presentations on space science and exploration based on his professional background and his experience as a Space Shuttle crewmember. Dr. Love admires the interplay between speculative fiction, which can imagine better futures, and science and technology, which can make them real.
Dominik Parisien is a Franco-Ontarian living in Montreal, Quebec. He holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Ottawa. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Goblin Fruit, Stone Telling, Mythic Delirium, Ideomancer, Shock Totem, Strange Horizons, and Tesseracts 17, amongst others. Dominik provides editorial support to Cheeky Frawg Books and is a former editorial assistant for Weird Tales.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, is forthcoming from Atria in 2014. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award; her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, and others, and anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, After, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, io9.com, Weird Tales, and Tor.com, and she’s a co-author of pop-culture book Geek Wisdom (Quirk).
Charles Yu received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his short story collection, Third Class Superhero. His first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, was a New York Times Notable Book and named by Time magazine as one of the Best Books of 2010. His latest book is Sorry Please Thank You, which was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in Santa Monica.
A Letter from the Publisher
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First published in the UK in 2013 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, 2013
Copyright © All non-fiction to the respective writers:
Rian Johnson, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Charles Yu, Stan Love, Genevieve Valentine and Jason Heller, 2013
The moral right of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN (eBook) 9781781853894
ISBN (HB) 9781781853900
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EXTENDED COPYRIGHT
Unless otherwise stated the following were reprinted by permission of the authors.
Douglas Adams: ‘Young Zaphod Plays It Safe,’ copyright © 2003 by Douglas Adams. Originally published in The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book (1986), The Salmon of Doubt (2002). Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and Macmillan Publishers.
Dean Francis Alfar: ‘Terminós’, copyright © 2005 by Dean Francis Alfar. Originally published in Rabid Transit: Menagerie, eds Christopher Barzak, Alan DeNiro and Kristin Livdahl, Velocity Press, 2005.
Isaac Asimov: ‘What If’, copyright © 1952 by the estate of Isaac Asimov. Originally published in Fantastic Story Magazine (Summer 1952). Reprinted by permission of author’s estate and Trident Media Group.
Kage Baker: ‘Noble Mold’, copyright © 1997 by estate of Kage Baker. Originally published in Asimov’s (March 1997). Reprinted by permission of author’s estate and the Linn Prentis Literary Agency.
Kage Baker: ‘A Night on the Barbary Coast’, copyright © 2003 by estate of Kage Baker. Originally published in The Silver Gryphon (June 2003). Reprinted by permission of author’s estate and the Linn Prentis Literary Agency.
Barrington J. Bayley: ‘Life Trap’, copyright © 1979 by Barrington J. Bayley. Originally published in The Seed of Evil. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
Elizabeth Bear: ‘This Tragic Glass’, copyright © 2004 by Sarah Wishnevsky. Originally published in SciFiction (April 7, 2004).
Max Beerbohm: ‘Enoch Soames’. Originally published in The Century Magazine, May 1916.
Steve Bein: ‘The Most Important Thing in the World’, copyright © 2011 by Steve Bein. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (March 2011).
E.F. Benson; ‘In the Tube’. Originally published in Hutchinson’s Magazine, 1923.
Richard Bowes: ‘The Mask of the Rex’, copyright © 2002 by Richard Bowes. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 2002).
Ray Bradbury: ‘A Sound of Thunder’, copyright © 1952 by the estate of Ray Bradbury. Originally published in Collier’s. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and Don Congdon Associates.
Molly Brown: ‘Bad Timing’, copyright © 1991 by Molly Brown. Originally published in Interzone 54 (Dec 1991).
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud: ‘The Gulf of the Years’, copyright © 2011 by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin. Originally published in A Life on Paper (Small Beer Pre
ss).
C.J. Cherryh: ‘The Threads of Time’ by C.J. Cherryh, copyright © 1978 by C.J. Cherryh. Originally published in Darkover Grand Council Program Book IV (1978), Visible Light (1986).
John Chu: ‘Thirty Seconds From Now’ by John Chu, copyright © 2011 by John Chu. Originally published in Boston Review (2011).
Peter Crowther: ‘Palindromic’, copyright © 1997 by Peter Crowther. Originally published in First Contact (eds Martin Greenberg, Larry Segriff).
Rjurik Davidson: ‘Domine’, copyright © 2007 by Rjurik Davidson. Originally published in Aurealis #37 (March 2007).
Greg Egan: ‘The Lost Continent’, copyright © 2008 by Greg Egan. Originally published in The Starry Rift (ed. Jonathan Strahan/Viking Penguin 2008) Oceanic (UK) & Crystal Nights and Other Stories (Subterranean, 2009).
William Gibson: ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, copyright © 1981 by William Gibson. Originally published in OMNI Magazine.
Karen Haber: ‘3 RMS, Good View’, copyright © 1990 by Karen Haber. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Dec1990).
Nalo Hopkinson: ‘Message in a Bottle’, copyright © 2004 by Nalo Hopkinson. Originally published in Futureways (New York’s Whitney Museum and Arsenal Pulp Press).
Langdon Jones: ‘The Great Clock’, copyright © 1966 by Langdon Jones. Originally published in New Worlds Quarterly (March 1966).
Garry Kilworth: ‘On the Watchtower at Plataea’, copyright © 1988 by Garry Kilworth. Originally published in Other Edens II (1988).
Alice Sola Kim: ‘Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters’, copyright © 2010 by Alice Sola Kim. Originally published in Lightspeed (Nov 2010).
Ellen Klages: ‘Time Gypsy’, copyright © 1998 by Ellen Klages. Originally published in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel; Overlook Press, 1998.