The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  We also have wanted to represent as many different types of science fiction as possible, including hard science fiction, soft (social) science fiction, space opera, alternative history, apocalyptic stories, tales of alien encounters, near-future dystopia, satirical stories, and a host of other modes.

  Within this general context, we have been less concerned about making sure to include certain authors than we have about trying to give accurate overviews of certain eras, impulses, and movements. For this reason, most readers will no doubt discover a favorite story or author has been omitted…but also come across new discoveries and new favorites previously unknown to them.

  We have also weighed historical significance against readability in the modern era, with the guiding principle that most people picking up this anthology will be general readers, not academics. For this reason, too, we have endeavored to include humorous stories, which are a rich and deep part of the science fiction tradition and help to balance out the preponderance of dystopias depicted in many of the serious stories. Joke stories, on the other hand, and most twist stories have been omitted as too self-referential, especially stories that rely too heavily on referring to science fiction fandom or core genre.

  Because ecological and environmental issues have become increasingly urgent, if given the choice of two equally good stories by the same author, we have also chosen to favor stories featuring those themes. (For example, our selection from Ursula K. Le Guin.) One regret is not being able to include fiction by John Brunner, Frank Herbert, and other giants in the field whose novels are arguably much more robust and vital on this topic than their short fiction.

  In considering the broadness of our definition of science fiction, we have had to set limits. Most steampunk seems to us to have more in common with fantasy than science fiction, and stories of the very far future in which science is indistinguishable from magic also seem to us to belong to the fantastical. For this latter reason, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories, and their ilk, will fall within the remit of a future anthology.

  In considering international fiction we have chosen (after hard-won prior experience) to take the path of least resistance. For example, we had more access to and better intel about Soviet-era and certain strands of Latin American science fiction than some other traditions. It therefore seemed more valuable to present relatively complete “through-lines” of those traditions than to try to provide one representative story for as many countries as possible. In addition, given our access to international fiction and a choice between equally good stories (often with similar themes) set in a particular country, one by an author from that country and one by an author from the US or UK, we have chosen to use the story by the author from the country in question.

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  With regard to translations, we followed two rules: to be fearless about including stories not previously published in English (if deemed of high quality) and to retranslate stories already translated into English if the existing translation was more than twenty-five years old or if we believed the existing translation contained errors.

  The new translations (works never before published in English) included in this anthology are Karl Hans Strobel’s “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907), Paul Scheerbart’s “The New Overworld” (1911), Yefim Zozulya’s “The Doom of Principal City” (1918), Silvina Ocampo’s “The Waves” (1959), Angélica Gorodischer’s “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” (1985), Jacques Barbéri’s “Mondocane” (1983), and Han Song’s “Two Small Birds” (1988).

  The retranslated stories are Miguel de Unamuno’s “Mechanopolis” (1913), Juan José Arreola’s “Baby HP” (1952), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “The Visitors” (1958), Valentina Zhuravlyova’s “The Astronaut” (1960), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s “The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink” (1962), Sever Gansovsky’s “Day of Wrath” (1965), and Dmitri Bilenkin’s “Where Two Paths Cross” (1973).

  In contextualizing all of this material we realized that no introduction could truly convey the depth and breadth of a century of science fiction. For this reason, we made the strategic decision to include expanded author notes, which also include information on each story. These notes sometimes convey biographical data and in other cases form miniature essays to provide general context. Sometimes these notes quote other writers or critics to provide firsthand recollections. In researching these author notes, we are very fortunate to have had access, in a synergistic way, to the best existing source about certain writers, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, with the blessing of its founders, John Clute, Peter Nicholls, and David Langford. Entries containing information from the encyclopedia as their nucleus are noted in the permissions acknowledgments (pages 1169–1178).

  Finally, as ever, certain stories could not be acquired for this anthology—or for anyone’s anthology—due to the stance of the estates in question. The following stories should be considered an extension of this anthology: A. E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shop” (1942), Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—” (1959), and Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days” (1966). In addition, for reasons of space we have been unable to include E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909), an excerpt from Gustave Le Rouge’s strange novel about a mission to a Mars inhabited by vampires (1909), and an excerpt from Doris Lessing’s 1970s science fiction novels.

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  If we have brought any particular value to the task of editing this anthology—and we will let others debate that question—it lies in three areas: 1) we love all kinds of fiction, in all its many forms, and all kinds of science fiction; 2) we have built up an extensive (and still-growing) network of international literary contacts that allowed us to acquire unique content; and 3) we did not approach the task from the center of genre, which is where most editors of these kinds of anthologies have come from. We belong to no clique or group within the science fiction community and have no particular affiliation with nor disinclination to consider any writer in the field, living or dead.

  That said, we are also not coming to the task from the sometimes too elevated height of mainstream literary editors with no connection to their speculative subject matter. We do not care about making a case for the legitimacy of science fiction; the ignorance of those who don’t value science fiction is their own affliction and problem (as is the ignorance of those who claim science fiction is the be-all and end-all).

  Throughout our three-year journey of discovery for this project, we have also had to reconcile ourselves to what we call Regret Over Taxonomy (exclusion is inevitable but not a cause for relief or happiness) and Acknowledgment of the Inherent Imperfection of the Results. However, the corollary to this latter recognition is to never accept or resign oneself to the inherent imperfection of the results.

  Now we hope you will put aside this overlong introduction and simply immerse yourself in the science-fictional wonders here assembled. For they are many, and they are indeed wondrous and startling and, at times, darkly beautiful.

  The Star

  H. G. WELLS

  Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer who, as H. G. Wells, achieved worldwide acclaim during his lifetime for his journalism as well as for his fiction, both realistic and speculative, yet today is known solely for his science fiction. Throughout his career, Wells was driven by a need to spread the gospel of science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution. He wanted to explore social issues through Utopianism, while, ever practical, keeping a firm grasp on his Socialist Party membership card. However, he also had a knack for spinning a ripping good yarn.

  Wells’s most notable science fiction includes The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Just as Edgar Allan Poe’s stories more or less created the horror and mystery genres (and included early science fiction), Wells could be said, along with the French writer Jules Verne, to be the forefather of modern science fiction. Verne, whose best work was published bef
ore the twentieth century, held the public imagination through fanciful modern-era “megafauna” like the giant submarine the Nautilus and mechanical people-mover elephants, for which Verne even provided detailed blueprints. But Wells found such stunts from his rival annoying and was less interested in whether a mecha-elephant could actually clomp and clank across the earth than in charting the effect of mass societal changes in technology and biology. In a sense, even though their stories were both grouped under the label of “science romance,” Verne embraced a Romantic vision of science fiction and Wells was a somewhat cynical futurist.

  He often cast a jaundiced eye at modern humanity. The shadow of Poe permeates Wells’s work in that Wells heeded the horror in Poe’s fiction, especially in works like The Island of Dr. Moreau. While Wells could find his way to a happy ending or return to the status quo, the path there would always be bleaker and more influenced by an outlook on humankind that reflected the realities of history. This cold-eyed analysis lent his vision of the future its staying power, a seeming realism that had a significant influence on science fiction in the United States and the United Kingdom during the rise of pulp magazines and the community devoted to them.

  Wells became more cynical about technology after the horrors of World War I, and not only did he lose faith in humanity, he stopped writing science fiction. In doing so, he also lost from his later novels some spark or energy that would recommend them to a modern reader. The creativity required to come up with an extrapolation of the improbable had energized Wells’s imagination in a way that made his science fiction more interesting than his other fiction.

  “The Star” (1897), as with much of Wells’s science fiction, is credited with creating a subgenre—in this case, the “impact” subgenre, as of some object falling from the sky onto Earth or other planets, or heavenly bodies colliding. Such stories tend to revolve around a mystery about the object in question, or focus on the reactions of characters in the aftermath. Arthur C. Clarke mentions “The Star” in his novel Rendezvous with Rama and wrote a story with the same title (also included in this volume), although Clarke’s story has no connection to this one.

  THE STAR

  H. G. Wells

  It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind.

  Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an opera glass could attain it.

  On the third day of the New Year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. “A Planetary Collision,” one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine’s opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic; so that in most of the capitals of the world, on January third, there was an expectation, however vague, of some imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see—the old familiar stars just as they had always been.

  Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead grown pale. The winter’s dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky quickening country it could be seen—and out at sea by seamen watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky!

  Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast Negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star.

  And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed together; and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck, fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night.

  And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. “It is larger,” they cried. “It is brighter!” And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.

  “It is brighter!” cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. “It is nearer,” they said. “Nearer!”

  And voice after voice repeated, “It is nearer,” and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. “It is nearer.” Men writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possi
bility in those words, “It is nearer.” It hurried along wakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passersby. “It is nearer.” Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not feel. “Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must be to find out things like that!”

  Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to comfort themselves—looking skyward. “It has need to be nearer, for the night’s as cold as charity. Don’t seem much warmth from it if it is nearer, all the same.”

  “What is a new star to me?” cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her dead.

  The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for himself—with the great white star shining broad and bright through the frost-flowers of his window. “Centrifugal, centripetal,” he said, with his chin on his fist. “Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! And this—!

  “Do we come in the way? I wonder—”

  The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African city a great man had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his bride. “Even the skies have illuminated,” said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two Negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of one another, crouched together in a canebrake where the fireflies hovered. “That is our star,” they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.