East Dragon has acted to maximize virtue and to serve the emperor. Two deaths or two dozen, the machine intelligence did what it concluded was in the best interests of the crew. Can I do any less?
My course is clear.
I nod.
“Yes, Captain. That is the only possible explanation.”
Somewhere, far behind us, the dream of romance and adventure finally breathes its last, mowed under by unpleasant reality. Ahead of us, though, out past the interstellar gulfs, the frontier still beckons. Perhaps there we can find another world, a newer world, one beyond the grim reach of history.
I cling to that hope and remain silent. What else can I do?
About the Authors
“The seed bombers mentioned in this story really exist . . . or at least they existed,” Tony Ballantyne tells us. “Traveling on trains to work each morning, they helped make the churned up railway embankments bloom again after the utility of the Second World War.” This story takes place in the universe of The Watcher, of which you can read more in the novels Recursion, Capacity, and Divergence. Tony is currently working on his fourth novel.
The first AI Stephen Baxter ever saw was Robert the Robot in Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5, so reliable he only hijacked the spaceship once. They were innocent times. Baxter’s latest books is the disaster novel Flood.
Former Olympic swimming champion, breeder of rare varieties of alpaca, and long-standing student of Finnish yoga . . . Keith Brooke is none of these, but he does write occasional short stories and novels, the most recent of which, Genetopia, went down well with the reviewers. He also runs the sprawling SF website infinity plus and sometimes pretends to be someone else in order to scare children.
Eric Brown is fascinated by people’s desire to believe: What is faith? What is the religious impulse? Something deep within us or something external? Still suffering grief after losing his sister in an accident fifty years ago, salvage tug captain Ed is driven by the need to know if a divine being really exists and if there is an afterlife. His love for the robot Ella only complicates matters when they find the St. Benedictus, the starship monastery returning from its encounter with God. Eric Brown’s first short story was published in Interzone in 1987, and he sold his first novel, Meridian Days, in 1992. He writes a monthly SF and Fantasy review column in The Guardian, and his latest novel is Necropath . He lives near Cambridge with the writer and mediaevalist Finn Sinclair and their daughter Freya.
Paul Di Filippo’s new novel, Cosmocopia, was inspired by the work of artist Jim Woodring, but he manages to mix in a fair amount of the artwork of Richard Powers and Frank Frazetta as well. He’s embarking on a sequel to his novella “A Year In The Linear City,” to be titled “A Princess of the Linear Jungle.”
Globe trotter Garry Kilworth was just driving down through Tasmania—“a place I’d always wanted to visit,” he says—when he started thinking ‘Why do the aliens always land in some big city in the USA or Europe? Why not here, at the ends of the Earth?’ “Then I passed a farm that looked fairly neat and wondered if they were Dutch immigrants. The rest, as it usually does, followed . . .” Jigsaw, a young adult fantasy set on a previously uninhabited island situated just off Borneo, appeared in 2007. When we bought this story, Garry was writing a young adult SF novel, a time travel story set in Prague. The title of which will be either kafka’s motorbike or The Hundred-Towered City. Or maybe even something else.
When sitting down to write “The Kamikaze Code,” James Lovegrove gave himself the brief that the tale not only had to fit the theme of this anthology but it had to be a story that seemed somehow to be aware of itself as a story. A story, in other words, about artificial sentience that was in its own way artificially sentient. This is the second tale James has produced about a fictional MoD lab, Chilton Mead, where experiments in weapons research are matched with experiments in literary form, textual games or wordplay (in the manner of his recent novel Provender Gleed). He never planned on writing a series of stories with the same setting, but now that he’s begun, he intends to do at least four or five more. For the noble reason that it seems like a good idea.
Paul McAuley has worked as a research biologist and lecturer in plant sciences at various universities including Oxford, UCLA, and St. Andrews before becoming a full-time author, publishing a dozen novels and more than fifty short stories. His first novel won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and his fifth the Arthur C. Clarke Award and John W. Campbell Award. He lives in London.
In the summer of 2002, Patrick O’Leary visited La Brea Tar Pits in California with some colleagues. “When we returned to my rental car, we discovered it had been broken into. We lost briefcases, passports, laptops, etc. I lost some fifty handwritten pages of a novel. Which sucked. But at least, now, I can say I have managed to retrieve something useful from the experience. You should go there sometime. It’s a great place. Lock your doors though. You never know what you’re going to lose.” O’Leary’s newest collection of stories, The Black Heart, is forthcoming. He lives with his new wife Sandy Rice in Troy, Michigan.
Old comedians are prone to say, “You end up using everything in your life just to get a laugh.” It’s much the same for aging authors. Robert Reed took his daughter to a certain amusement park in California, and he stood in a very long line so that a beautiful princess could autograph a very special book. Directly behind him stood a middle-aged and decidedly childless couple. What was their story? Why were they here? Reed’s most recent book is The Flavors Of My Genius. He lives with his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Chris Roberson avoided titling his story of artificial intelligence in a Chinese-dominated alternate history “O Robot,” but just barely. Also considered and rejected were “Wood Sheep Year: A Space Odyssey,” “Eastworld,” and “M.I. Machine Intelligence.” The other stories and novels in the sequence, collective known as the Celestial Empire, include The Voyage of Night Shining White, The Dragon’s Nine Sons, and Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, each of which has, likewise, only narrowly escaped equally unfortunate titling disasters.
During his schooldays Adam Roberts was, on account of his surname, sometimes called Adam Robots. Presumably because of this the idea got lodged in his wide-browed, sandy-haired, wide-apart-eyed, pale-skinned English head that he ought, one day, to write a story called “Adam Robots.” And now, thanks to the editor’s badgering he has at last been able to realize this dream. “I love it,” he is reported as saying from his home, just west of London, “when a plan comes together.” By comparison, the titles of his three most recent novels, Gradisil, Land of the Headless, and Splinter, seem very tame indeed.
Brian Stableford’s recent novels include Streaking and The New Faust at the Tragicomique. His recent nonfiction includes a mammoth reference book, Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia and a collection of critical essays, Heterocosms. His recent translations from the French include the second volume of the classic series of Paul Féval novels after which his favorite publisher is named, The Invisible Weapon, and the anthology News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances.
Roy Chapman Andrews, two-fisted paleontologist and author of Steven Utley’s favorite childhood book, All About Dinosaurs, may have been the author’s first real-life hero and undoubtedly inculcated in him a lifelong admiration for scientists—even as his account of the nineteenth-century Cope-Marsh feud informed him that scientists can behave as foolishly as anybody else. Steven reckons his ideas about artificial intelligence were probably shaped by Tobor the Robot, who menaced Captain Video on a TV show in the 1950s.
Ian Watson wrote the screen story for Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence after a year spent eyeball to eyeball with Stanley Kubrick. His most recent story collection is The Butterflies of Memory, which has nothing to do with his earlier novel, The Flies of Memory. His website with fun photos, including winning the chocolate Rabbit of Death for best costume as a Spanish swordsman, is at www.ianwatson.info
Rumor claims
that “The Chinese Room” was actually written by one “M,” who works in a chamber on the opposite side of the world from Marly Youmans, the woman who is credited as author. This “Marly Youmans” appears to be the author of numerous books, including her most recent novel, The Wolf Pit, her most recent fantasy, Ingledove, and a collection of poems, Claire. Her seventh book, the novella Val/ Orson, is forthcoming in 2008. Nothing further is known about M.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Tempest 43
The Highway Code
Salvage Rites
The Kamikaze Code
Adam Robots
Seeds
Lost Places of the Earth
The Chinese Room
Three Princesses
The New Cyberiad
That Laugh
Alles in Ordnung
Sweats
Some Fast Thinking Needed
Dragon King of the Eastern Sea
About the Authors
We Think, Therefore We Are Page 28
