The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by In War Times, by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

  The 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by “Finisterra,” by David Moles, and “Tideline,” by Elizabeth Bear (tie).

  The 2007 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison.

  The 2008 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Black Man, by Richard Morgan.

  The 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall.

  The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award went to Stanley G. Weinbaum.

  Death hit the SF and fantasy felds hard again this year. Dead in 2008 and early 2009 were:

  Sir ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 91, one of the founding giants of modern science fiction, the last surviving member of the genre’s Big Three, which consisted of Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein, multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master Award, as famous for predicting the development of telecommunications satellites as for being involved in the production of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, author of such classics as Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise, The Sands of Mars, A Fall of Moondust, and The City and the Stars; ALGIS BUDRYS, 77, author, critic, and editor, author of the classic novel Rogue Moon, which many thought should have won the Hugo in its year, plus Who?, Michaelmas, Hard Landing, and distinguished short stories such as “A Scraping at the Bones”, “Be Merry”, “Nobody Bothers Gus”, “The Master of the Hounds”, and “The Silent Eyes of Time”; THOMAS M. DISCH, 68, writer and poet, one of the most acclaimed and respected of the New Wave authors who shook up SF in the mid-60s, also considered to be a major American poet, author of the brilliant 334, Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song, a large body of biting and sardonic short fiction, and the acerbic critical study of SF The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, which, ironically, finally won him a Hugo; JANET KAGAN, 63, author of the wildly popular “Mama Jason” stories, which were collected in Mirabile, as well as the novel Hellspark, and one of the most popular Star Trek novels ever, Uhura’s Song, winner of the Hugo Award for “The Nutcracker Coup”; a close personal friend; BARRINGTON J. BAYLEY, 71, British SF author whose highly inventive novels such as The Fall of Chronopolis, The Pillars of Eternity, and The Zap Gun were a strong infuence on the British New Space Opera of the 1980s and 90s; MICHAEL CRICHTON, 66, bestselling author of such technothrillers as The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline, Rising Sun, Eaters of the Dead, and others, most of which were made into successful movies (Eaters of the Dead was filmed, pretty faithfully, as The Thirteenth Warrior); JOHN UPDIKE, 76, major American novelist, poet, and critic, author of literary novels such as Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, perhaps best known to genre audiences as the author of fantasy novels The Witches of Eastwick (which was filmed under the same name) and The Widows of Eastwick; ROBERT ASPRIN, 62, creator and editor of the popular Thieves’ World series of braided anthologies and novels by many hands, as well as an author of comic novels such as Another Fine Myth, Phule’s Company, and their sequels; DONALD WESTLAKE, 75, who wrote some SF, including the novel Anarchaos under the name “Curt Clark,” but who was much better known as a multiple Edgar Award-winning mystery writer, author of two of the most important mystery series of our day, the Parker novels, under the name “Richard Stark,” and the John Dortmunder novels under his own name, plus many stand-alone novels; GEORGE W. PROCTOR, 61, author of sixteen SF and fantasy novels and two co-edited anthologies; JAMES KILLUS, 58, SF writer, atmospheric scientist, and technical writer, author of SF novels Book of Shadows and SunSmoke; RICHARD K. LYON, 75, SF novelist and research chemist; HUGH COOK, 52, SF/fantasy writer, author of the ten-volume Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series; LEO FRANKOWSKI, 65, SF writer, author of The Cross Time Engineer and its many sequels; STEPHEN MARLOWE, 79, prominent mystery novelist who also occasionally wrote SF as Milton Lesser; JODY SCOTT, 85, author of Passing for Human and I, Vampire; MICHAEL de LARRABEITI, 73, author of the surprisingly dark and violent YA Borribles trilogy; BRIAN THOMSEN, 49, SF editor, writer, and anthologist; EDWARD D. HOCK, 77, well-known mystery writer who also dabbled in fantasy and SF; GARY GYGAX, 69, sometimes called the father of fantasy gaming, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, author also of fantasy novels The Annubis Murders and The Samarkand Solution; DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, 46, novelist and essayist, author of Infinite Jest; JOHNNY BYRNE, 73, veteran British SF/ writer; LINO ALDANI, 83, Italian SF writer; WERNER KURT GIESA, 53, German SF, fantasy, and horror writer; JOSE B. ADOLPH, 74, Peruvian author, playwright, and scholar; LYUBEN DILOV, 80, Bulgarian SF writer; HUGO CORREA, 81, Chilean SF author; GEORGE C. CHESBRO, 68, SF writer; SYDNEY C. LONG, 63, SF writer and Clarion Workshop graduate; EDD CARTIER, 94, veteran pulp illustrator, especially known for his many black-and-white illustrations for the pioneering fantasy magazine Unknown Worlds; JOHN BERKEY, 76, prominent SF cover artist; DAVE STEVENS, 52, cartoonist and comics writer, creator of the character The Rocketeer; ROBERT LEGAULT, 58, SF reader, professional copy editor, and former managing editor of Tor Books; a friend; FORREST J. ACKERMAN, 92, longtime fan and enthusiastic booster of horror films, also an agent and occasional writer/anthologist, founder of the long-running Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, coiner of the term “sci-fi,” which is loathed in some genre circles, although mostly ubiquitous these days outside them; famed fantasy artist and illustrator JAMES CAWTHORN, 79; MURIEL R. BECKER, 83, SF scholar; JOSEPH PEVNEY, 97, film and TV director who directed many of the episodes of the original Star Trek series; BEBE BARRON, 82, who, with husband Lewis Barron, created the striking electronic score for Forbidden Planet; ALEXANDER COURAGE, 85, composer of the theme music for the original Star Trek series; ROBERT H. JUSTMAN, 82, supervising producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation; CHARLTON HESTON, 84, film actor best known to genre audiences for his roles in Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green; PAUL NEWMAN, 83, one of the most famous film actors of the twentieth century, whose genre connections were actually somewhat weak, limited to voiceover work in the animated film Cars, the unsuccessful SF movie Quintet, and The Hudsucker Proxy, which had some fantastic elements; ROY SCHEIDER, 76, film actor best known to genre audiences for his roles in 2010 and Jaws; JAMES WHITMORE, 87, probably best known to genre audiences for his roles in Them! and Planet of the Apes; JOHN PHILLIP LAW, 71, film actor best known to genre audiences for his role as the blind “angel” in Barbarella; HEATH LEDGER, 28, film actor no doubt to be recalled for a long time by genre audiences for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight; film actor VAN JOHNSON, 92, best known to genre audiences for roles in Brigadoon and The Purple Rose of Cairo; comic film actor HARVEY KORMAN, 81, who had some minor genre connections for voiceover work on TV’s The Flintstones, but who is known by practically everybody for his role as Hedly Lamarr in Blazing Saddles; MAJEL BARRETT RODDENBERRY, 76, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and also an actress in her own right, appearing in several Star Trek episodes and providing the voice of the Enterprise’s computer; PATRICK McGOOHAN, 80, acclaimed stage, television, and film actor, best known to genre audiences for his role as Number Six in TV’s The Prisoner; RICARDO MONTALBAN, 88, film and television actor, best known to genre audiences for his roles in TV’s Fantasy Island and as the villainous Khan in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; BOB MAY, 69, who played the Robot on TV’s Lost in Space; JACK SPEER, 88, long-time SF fan who wrote the first history of fandom, Up to Now, plus the Fancyclopedia; HARRY TURNER, 88, acclaimed British fan artist; KEN SLATER, 90, long-time SF fan who operated the UK mail-order list Operation Fantast; NORMA VANCE, 81, wife of SF writer Jack Vance; RAYMOND J. SMITH, 77, husband of writer Joyce Carol Oates; Dr CHRISTINE HAYCOCK, 84, widow of SF critic Sam Moskowitz; ANGELINA CANALE KONINGISOR, 84, mother of SF writer Nancy Kress; EVA S. WILLIAMS, 92, mother of SF writer Walter Jon Williams; BARNET EDELMAN, 77, father of SF editor and writer Scott Edelman; HAZEL PEARSON, 77, mother of SF writer William Barton; CLAUDI
A LIGHTFOOT, 58, mother of SF writer China Miéville; MARION HOLMAN, 88, mother of SF editor and publisher Rachel Holman; and DANTON BURROUGHS, 64, grandson of SF writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I can think of no genre justification for mentioning them, but I can’t let the obituary section close without mentioning the deaths of TONY HILLERMAN, 83, one of the great mystery writers of the last half of the twentieth century, author of the adventures of Navaho policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, such as Dance Hall of the Dead, Thief of Time, and Skinwalkers; JAMES CRUMLEY, 68, mystery writer who in some ways was the natural heir to Raymond Chandler, author of one of the ten best mystery novels of all time, The Last Good Kiss, as well as other hard-edged detective novels such as Dancing Bear and The Mexican Tree Duck; STUDS TERKEL, 96, compiler of books of interviews on topics of historic significance, such as The Good War and Working; and Nobel Prize-winner ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, 89, probably the most famous of modern Russian writers, author of The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, among others, and who I suspect was an infuence on SF writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin (there, a genre connection at last!).

  TURING’S APPLES

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well, one who works on the cutting edge of science, whose fiction bristles with weird new ideas, and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche – a sequel to The Time Machine – The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, Emperor, Resplendent, Conqueror, Navagator, Firstborn, and The H-Bomb Girl, and two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days and Time’s Eye, a Time Odyssey. His short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayfower II. Coming up are several new novels, including Weaver, Flood, and Ark.

  As the disquieting story that follows suggests, perhaps it’s better if the search for extraterrestrial intelligence doesn’t succeed. . .

  NEAR THE CENTRE of the Moon’s far side there is a neat, round, well-defined crater called Daedalus. No human knew this existed before the middle of the twentieth century. It’s a bit of lunar territory as far as you can get from Earth, and about the quietest.

  That’s why the teams of astronauts from Europe, America, Russia and China went there. They smoothed over the floor of a crater ninety kilometres wide, laid sheets of metal mesh over the natural dish, and suspended feed horns and receiver systems on spidery scaffolding. And there you had it, an instant radio telescope, by far the most powerful ever built: a super-Arecibo, dwarfing its mother in Puerto Rico. Before the astronauts left they christened their telescope Clarke.

  Now the telescope is a ruin, and much of the floor of Daedalus is covered by glass, Moon dust melted by multiple nuclear strikes. But, I’m told, if you were to look down from some slow lunar orbit you would see a single point of light glowing there, a star fallen to the Moon. One day the Moon will be gone, but that point will remain, silently orbiting Earth, a lunar memory. And in the further future, when the Earth has gone too, when the stars have burned out and the galaxies fled from the sky, still that point of light will shine.

  My brother Wilson never left the Earth. In fact he rarely left England. He was buried, what was left of him, in a grave next to our father’s, just outside Milton Keynes. But he made that point of light on the Moon, which will be the last legacy of all mankind.

  Talk about sibling rivalry.

  2020

  It was at my father’s funeral, actually, before Wilson had even begun his SETI searches, that the Clarke first came between us.

  There was a good turnout at the funeral, at an old church on the outskirts of Milton Keynes proper. Wilson and I were my father’s only children, but as well as his old friends there were a couple of surviving aunts and a gaggle of cousins mostly around our age, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, so there was a good crop of children, like little flowers.

  I don’t know if I’d say Milton Keynes is a good place to live. It certainly isn’t a good place to die. The city is a monument to planning, a concrete grid of avenues with very English names like Midsummer, now overlaid by the new monorail. It’s so clean it makes death seem a social embarrassment, like a fart in a shopping mall. Maybe we need to be buried in ground dirty with bones.

  Our father had remembered, just, how the area was all villages and farmland before the Second World War. He had stayed on even after our mother died twenty years before he did, him and his memories made invalid by all the architecture. At the service I spoke of those memories – for instance how during the war a tough Home Guard had caught him sneaking into the grounds of Bletchley Park, not far away, scrumping apples while Alan Turing and the other geniuses were labouring over the Nazi codes inside the house. “Dad always said he wondered if he picked up a mathematical bug from Turing’s apples,” I concluded, “because, he would say, for sure Wilson’s brain didn’t come from him.”

  “Your brain too,” Wilson said when he collared me later outside the church. He hadn’t spoken at the service; that wasn’t his style. “You should have mentioned that. I’m not the only mathematical nerd in the family.”

  It was a difficult moment. My wife and I had just been introduced to Hannah, the two-year-old daughter of a cousin. Hannah had been born pro- foundly deaf, and we adults in our black suits and dresses were awkwardly copying her parents’ bits of sign language. Wilson just walked through this lot to get to me, barely glancing at the little girl with the wide smile who was the centre of attention. I led him away to avoid any offence.

  He was thirty then, a year older than me, taller, thinner, edgier. Others have said we were more similar than I wanted to believe. He had brought nobody with him to the funeral, and that was a relief. His partners could be male or female, his relationships usually destructive; his companions were like unexploded bombs walking into the room.

  “Sorry if I got the story wrong,” I said, a bit caustically.

  “Dad and his memories, all those stories he told over and over. Well, it’s the last time I’ll hear about Turing’s apples!”

  That thought hurt me. “We’ll remember. I suppose I’ll tell it to Eddie and Sam some day.” My own little boys.

  “They won’t listen. Why should they? Dad will fade away. Everybody fades away. The dead get deader.” He was talking about his own father, whom we had just buried. “Listen, have you heard they’re putting the Clarke through its acceptance test run? . . .” And, there in the churchyard, he actually pulled a handheld computer out of his inside jacket pocket and brought up a specification. “Of course you understand the importance of it being on Farside.” For the millionth time in my life he had set his little brother a pop quiz, and he looked at me as if I was catastrophically dumb.

  “Radio shadow,” I said. To be shielded from Earth’s noisy chatter was particularly important for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to which my brother was devoting his career. SETI searches for faint signals from remote civilizations, a task made orders of magnitude harder if you’re drowned out by very loud signals from a nearby civilization.

  He actually applauded my guess, sarcastically. He often reminded me of what had always repelled me about academia – the barely repressed bullying, the intense rivalry. A university is
a chimp pack. That was why I was never tempted to go down that route. That, and maybe the fact that Wilson had gone that way ahead of me.

  I was faintly relieved when people started to move out of the churchyard. There was going to be a reception at my father’s home, and we had to go.

  “So are you coming for the cakes and sherry?”

  He glanced at the time on his handheld. “Actually I’ve somebody to meet.”

  “He or she?”

  He didn’t reply. For one brief moment he looked at me with honesty. “You’re better at this stuff than me.”

  “What stuff? Being human?”

  “Listen, the Clarke should be open for business in a month. Come on down to London; we can watch the first results.”

  “I’d like that.”

  I was lying, and his invitation probably wasn’t sincere either. In the end it was over two years before I saw him again.

  By then he’d found the Eagle signal, and everything had changed.

  2022

  Wilson and his team quickly established that their brief signal, first detected just months after Clarke went operational, was coming from a source 6,500 light years from Earth, somewhere beyond a starbirth cloud called the Eagle Nebula. That’s a long way away, on the other side of the Galaxy’s next spiral arm in the Sagittarius.

  And to call the signal “brief” understates it. It was a second-long pulse, faint and hissy, and it repeated just once a year, roughly. It was a monument to robotic patience that the big lunar ear had picked up the damn thing at all.

  Still it was a genuine signal from ET, the scientists were jumping up and down, and for a while it was a public sensation. Within days somebody had rushed out a pop single inspired by the message: called “Eagle Song,” slow, dreamlike, littered with what sounded like sitars, and very beautiful. It was supposedly based on a Beatles master lost for five decades. It made number two.