Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  The Big Rain - POUL ANDERSON

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  When the People Fell - CORDWAINER SMITH

  Before Eden - ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Hunter, Come Home - RICHARD McKENNA

  The Keys to December - ROGER ZELAZNY

  Retrograde Summer - JOHN VARLEY

  Shall We Take a Little Walk? - GREGORY BENFORD

  The Catharine Wheel - IAN MC DONALD

  Sunken Gardens - BRUCE STERLING

  Out of Copyright - CHARLES SHEFFIELD

  A Place with shade - ROBERT REED

  Dawn Venus - G. DAVID NORDLEY

  For White Hill - JOE HALDEMAN

  The Road to Reality - PHILLIP C. JENNINGS

  3111

  3115

  3121

  3174

  3175

  3175

  3405

  Ecopoesis - GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

  People Came from Earth - STEPHEN BAXTER

  Fossils - WILLIAM H. KEITH, JR.

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  A Martian Romance - KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  Dream of Venus - PAMELA SARGENT

  At Tide’s Turning - LAURA J. MIXON

  ALSO BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Even by the early middle of the twentieth century, it was becoming uneasily obvious—to those who kept up with science, anyway—that the other planets of our solar system were not likely abodes for life. Previous generations of science-fiction writers, the pulp-era “Superscience” writers of the 1930s and 1940s, had been free to use the solar system as their playground, and to populate Mars, Venus, and even Mercury or the Jovian moons, with oxygen-breathing humanoid natives (who conveniently all spoke English, or at least an understandable pidgin) that you could have swordfights with and/or fall in love with; in their hands, the solar system was as crowded and chummy as an Elks’ Club picnic, chockablock with alien races and alien civilizations—affording plenty of scope for Story.

  By the early fifties, however, influenced by the Campbellian Revolution in science fiction, circa 1939, when the new editor of Astounding magazine, John W Campbell, began downplaying the melodramatic pulp stuff in favor of more thoughtful material that actually made a stab at rigor and scientific accuracy (and perhaps influenced as well by visionaries such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Herman Oberth, Robert Goddard, Werner von Braun, Willy Ley, and the founding fathers of the British Interplanetary Society, people who actually wanted to go into space, for real, and who were carrying out the first crude experiments that might someday make that a possibility), we began to get the realistic space story, stories that took the idea of space exploration seriously, as something that might actually happen, that treated space as a real frontier that one day could be explored, rather than just as a setting, a colorful backdrop for chase-and-fight pulp fantasies.

  Ironically, the realistic space story came along at just about the same time that scientific investigation was making it clear that there was no place in the solar system where you could set a realistic space story, realistically speaking—at least not one that didn’t feature the characters lumbering around in space suits for the entire arc of the plot. As the century progressed, and space probes actually began to visit other planets to collect hard data, it became harder and harder to get away with a Mars that was crisscrossed with canals and swarming with sword-swinging, six-armed green warriors and beautiful egg-laying princesses in flowing diaphanous gowns, or a Venus that was covered deep with broad oceans in which swam giant dinosaur-like beasts. At last, it became impossible. The planets simply weren’t like that. And although the dream of life on Mars has hung on even to the present day, in an increasingly more pallid and less hopeful form (now we’d be overjoyed to find lichens … or even fossil microbe evidence that there once had been life there, millions of years ago), it was obvious by the middle of the century that Dejah Thoris wasn’t going to be there to greet the boys when they stepped off the spaceboat. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, space probes had “proved” that the solar system was nothing but an “uninteresting” collection of balls of rock and ice, or hellholes of deadly heat and pressure with atmospheres of poisionous gas. No available abodes for life. Dull as a supermarket parking lot.

  So where were the space colonists going to go? And where were the SF writers going to set their “realistic” tales of space exploration and colonization?

  Some writers immediately whisked themselves and their stories away to other solar systems or even to other Galaxies, far outside the writ of embarassing and hampering Fact, where they could set up whatever worlds they chose. To many writers, though, especially those with a “hard science” bent who were the very types to want to write a “realistic space story” in the first place, this was cheating: The now more widely understood limitations of Einsteinian relativity seemed to say that Faster Than Light travel was impossible (although even some of the hardest of the hard-science boys would be having second thoughts about this by the end of the century) and therefore that interstellar travel itself (let alone far-flung interstellar empires) would be difficult or impossible to achieve.

  Faced with unlivable, deadly, unEarthlike conditions on all the actual real estate within practical reach, it became obvious that there were only two ways to go (unless you ignored the problem altogether, which many writers blithely did and do, and create a magic Faster Than Light drive or spacewarp device with a snap of your authorial fingers), and the “realistic space story” from then on tended to follow one or the other of them.

  Science-fiction writer James Blish described those two ways rather succinctly: You can change the planet to accommodate the colonists, or the colonists to accommodate the planet.

  The first of these methods, changing the planet to provide more Earthlike conditions for the colonists, has become known in the genre as “terraforming,” and it is the territory explored in the anthology you hold in your hands, which deals with the creation of new, inhabitable worlds out of old, uninhabitable worlds by science and technology.

  The second method, redesigning humans so that they are able to survive on alien planets under alien conditions, has become known as “pantropy” (a word coined by Blish himself), and is the territory explored (along with other deliberate, engineered changes to the human form and nature) in the upcoming companion anthology to this one, Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future, also from St. Martin’s Griffin.

  Although a (rather thin) argument could be made for the “atmosphere plants” that kept Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars from dying, it’s more likely that the notion of terraforming an alien world was first introduced into the genre, as fiction, at least, by Olaf Stapledon’s monumental work of imagination, Last and First Men, in 1930 … although the term “terraforming” itself was coined by Jack Williamson, in a series of stories (in which terraforming would actually play a rather minor role) published in 1942 and 1943, later melded into the novel Seetee Ship. The early 1950s saw the first detailed “modern” terraforming stories, including stories such as Walter M. Miller’s “Crucifixus Etiam” and Poul Anderson’s “The Big Rain” and Isaac Asimov’s “The Martian Way.” (Asimov’s novella is mostly concerned with the politics involved in liberating a Martian colony from the political domination of mother Earth, although it does feature the first suggestion in SF—as far as I can tell, anyway—that Mars could be supplied with water by bringing ice asteroids to it … although Asimov has them landing gently rather than smashing ca
tastrophically into it, as later terraformers would have it.) Some of the best novels to deal with the theme, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars and Robert A. Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, also appeared in the early 1950s, followed, a few years later, by novels such as Poul Anderson’s The Snows of Ganymede.

  As the sixties progressed and eventually turned into the seventies, terraforming stories would tend to retreat from the foreground of the field and instead become part of the genre’s background furniture—so that while many stories and novels would casually mention that they were taking place on a world that had been terraformed, few would deal centrally with the problems and consequences of the terraforming process itself. There were exceptions, of course, including Roger Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead, Gregory Benford’s Jupiter Project, David Gerrold’s Moonstar Odyssey, George R. R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging , and Andrew Weiner’s Station Gehenna—but, by and large, that was the way to bet it.

  Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s—perhaps because of new data from new generations of space probes that made it clear just how bizarre, complex, surprising, and mysterious a place our solar system really is—science-fiction writers (following the lead of somewhat earlier pioneers such as John Varley, Gregory Benford, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, and others) began to become interested in the solar system again, finding it lushly romantic just as it was, lifeless balls of rock and all. Suddenly, we were seeing stories and novels again that dealt centrally with terraforming, instead of reducing it to a background enabling-device, including the launch of two major series of terraforming novels that treated both the scientific and the social problems involved in creating a new world in considerable detail and with great gravitas, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), and Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy (Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadow, and Child of Venus), as well as singleton novels such as Greg Bear’s Moving Mars, Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road, and Jack Williamson’s Beachhead (part of an explosion in the nineties of novels about a colonized Mars, many of which, such as Paul J. McAuley’s Red Dust and Alexander Jabiokov’s River of Dust, mention terraforming schemes at least in passing). There was a rush of terraforming short stories as well in the last years of the nineties, one that has as yet showed no sign of slowing down here at the beginning of a new century.

  That’s quite a bit of literary ground to cover, more than fifty years’ worth, and, as usual with these retrospective anthologies, there were many more stories that I would have liked to use than I had room to use. Winnowing-screens were clearly called for.

  In many current stories, terraforming is accomplished at the wave of a hand by posthumans who have been given the powers of gods by incomprehensibly advanced science and technology, but that’s the territory which will be covered in the follow-up volume to this one, Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future, and not the sort of thing I wanted for this anthology, which I intuitively felt should deal centrally with the problems that ordinary humans, people not unlike you and me, would have to face in terraforming a world, and with the social and political and personal consequences of the success of such a project—or of its failure. So that was one winnowing- screen.

  With an anthology entitled Worldmakers, I could almost certainly have gotten away with including some stories set in Virtual Reality surrounds, or in artificial simulation—worlds inside computer systems, but that seemed wrong to me for this particular book too (and besides, I’ve already edited three anthologies which cover those sorts of stories, Isaac Asimov’s Cyberdreams and Isaac Asimov’s Skin Deep, with Sheila Williams, and Hackers, with Jack Dann). So that was another screen.

  The last winnowing-screen will probably be the most controversial: I decided not to include any stories about space stations or “O’Neill”-style orbital L5 colonies. For one thing, because there’s been a recent rush of anthologies full of such stories—including Skylife, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, and Star Colonies and Far Frontiers, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers—but also because “L5 colony” stories have a dated smell to them now, to me, anyway. There was a glut of such stories in the late seventies that persisted throughout much of the eighties, a fad that dominated the field for several years, but now, more than fifteen years later, that particular concept seems faded to me, dusty, an SF dream of the future that’s never going to come true, receding into distance, much like domed cities and continent-girdling slidewalks and automated highways. (My own opinion, for whatever it’s worth, is that deliberately planned and created all-in-one-shot space cities of the “L5 colony” type are unlikely, anytime in the reasonably foreseeable future—enormously too expensive, for one thing, and, as many stories, such as Paul J. McAuley’s recent “Quiet War” stories, have shown, too vulnerable to a million forms of sabotage and terrorism to be really practical; easier by far to create bases dug into the sheltering rock of the Moon, or Mars, or even to hollow out an asteroid. We probably will get space cities eventually, but they won’t be planned, as such; instead, my guess is that they’ll accrete slowly and gradually, haphazardly, bit by bit, around space factories and other installations that have a practical reason for being there, like company towns springing up around a mine or a military base, and although the inhabitants may be de facto colonists, in the long run, they won’t think of themselves as such until several generations have gone by—they’ll just be people who work in space, until their children or grandchildren decide not to go home.) And that was the final screen.

  Will we terraform other worlds? Science-fiction writers seem to vacillate between optimism and pessimism on the subject, with the last few years seeing a number of stories about failed or failing terraforming projects, perhaps as the realization of just how immense and complicated a job it would be sinks in, perhaps in part in reaction to the relative optimism (at least in terms of saying that it can be done) of books such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. (On the other hand, the two most recently published stories included here are reasonably optimistic about the chances of a terraforming project succeeding, so perhaps the pendulum is swinging again.) Perhaps, to people raised in an immediate-gratification society, the idea of starting a project that you won’t live to see completed, that won’t come to fruition until hundreds of years after your death, seems alien and unnatural, sadly pointless, something not worth doing at all. I think that many people dismiss terraforming on those grounds, as something we’ll never have the patience or continuity or dedication to actually finish. So why start at all? On the other hand, the people who started raising the great cathedrals of Europe knew they were embarking on projects that wouldn’t be completed for hundreds of years, long after their own deaths, and that didn’t stop them from starting the work necessary to raise them. So such selfless dedication and no-immediate-result long-term planning is possible, is a part of the spectrum of possible human behaviors. Once, people had a vision intense enough to help them sustain organized community effort over a span of centuries. Who can say they won’t find such a vision again? (Perhaps religious Faith helps in making a generations-long perspective of this sort possible, and Mars will end up being terraformed by Baptists or Mormons or Hindus or Buddhists, or by the sons of Islam.)

  My own guess is that, if the human race survives and our technological civilization doesn’t crash disastrously, terraforming of some sort will become a reality, sooner or later. After all, we’ve already inadvertently “terraformed” our own Earth, radically changing our climate and ecosystem, and we didn’t even mean to do it! It wasn’t even all that difficult, was it, given a few hundred years of time for many small, almost-unnoticeable-at-first effects to multiply and set up self-reinforcing, escalating feedback loops? I suspect that somebody’s bound to try it deliberately somewhere else one of these days—if anyone lives through humanity’s first, blundering, inadvertent “experiments” in terraforming in the first place, that is!

  In the meantime, while we’re waiting for the Final Results to c
ome in (perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to become one of the “Posthumans” who are the subject of this anthology’s follow-up volume, and will be able to afford to wait hundreds of years to See For Yourself!), here are some of the best guesses by some of SF’s most gifted dreamers about what it would be like to attempt to build a brave new world out of dust and poison and ice, to create a new home for yourself and your children and your children’s children where there was nothing before but desolation and ashes and death … to dream fiercely enough to make your dream a reality.

  Enjoy.

  —GARDNER DOZOIS

  The Big Rain

  POUL ANDERSON

  One of the best-known writers in science fiction, Poul Anderson made his first sale in 1947, while he was still in college, and in the course of his subsequent career has published almost a hundred books (in several different fields, as Anderson has written historical novels, fantasies, and mysteries, in addition to SF), sold hundreds of short pieces to every conceivable market, and won seven Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and the Tolkien Memorial Award for life achievement.

  Anderson had trained to be a scientist, taking a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota, but the writing life proved to be more seductive, and he never did get around to working in his original field of choice. Instead, the sales mounted steadily, until by the late fifties and early sixties he may have been one of the most prolific writers in the genre.

  In spite of his high output of fiction, he somehow managed to maintain an amazingly high standard of literary quality as well, and by the early to mid-1960s was also on his way to becoming one of the most honored and respected writers in the genre. At one point during this period (in addition to non-related work, and lesser series such as the “Hoka” stories he was writing in collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson), Anderson was running three of the most popular and prestigious series in science fiction all at the same time: the “Technic History” series detailing the exploits of the wily trader Nicholas Van Rijn (which includes novels such as The Man Who Counts, The Trouble Twisters, Satan’s World, Mirkheim, The People of the Wind, and collections such as Trader to the Stars and The Earth Book of Stormgate); the extremely popular series relating the adventures of interstellar secret agent Dominic Flandry, probably the most successful attempt to cross SF with the spy thriller, next to Jack Vance’s “Demon Princes” novels (the Flandry series includes novels such as A Circus of Hells, The Rebel Worlds, The Day of Their Return, Flandry of Terra, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, A Stone in Heaven, and The Game of Empire, and collections such as Agent of the Terran Empire); and, my own personal favorite, a series that took us along on assignment with the agents of the Time Patrol (including the collections The Guardians of Time, Time Patrolman, The Shield of Time, and The Time Patrol).