Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  ANTHOLOGY OF SPECULATIVE FICTION, VOLUME TWO

  Incorporating The Golden Age of Science Fiction anthologies and “Free Speculative Fiction Online” (featuring Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Interzone, Clarkesworld Magazine and winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards).

  What is Speculative Fiction?

  The term "speculative fiction", like most genre names, does not have a clear-cut or universally agreed-upon definition. The term appears to have been coined by Robert A. Heinlein, a popular and respected writer of "hard-core" science fiction (i.e. science fiction that relies on the scientific accuracy of the problems and solutions included in the work). In an essay written in 1948, "On Writing of Speculative Fiction", he explicitly used the term as a substitute for "science fiction." Once the term went into popular use, editors, readers, academics and some writers developed a tendency to think of speculative fiction as an umbrella term covering everything from science fiction and fantasy to magical realism. Under this definition, every novel that is not highly invested in "realism" could be called "speculative fiction." People who embrace this term, e.g. the prolific on-line reviewer of speculative fiction, D.D. Shade, argue that the excessive sub-genres within genres like science fiction and the growing tendency of writers to draw from several sub-genres and genres within their work makes a more general term useful.

  At the same time, writers have also used the term to distinguish their work from the very genres the term is supposed to cover. In other words, writers who feel that the literary world looks down upon science fiction and fantasy want to distinguish their work as different from those styles of novels, and consequently prefer the term "speculative fiction." The use of "speculative fiction" to express dissatisfaction with the genre of science fiction was popularized in the 1960s and early 1970s by Judith Merril and other writers and editors in connection with the New Wave movement. It fell into disuse around the mid 1970s, but just as New Wave arts have enjoyed a slight return to popularity in the 2000s, the idea of speculative fiction as distinct from other genres has once again entered the general parlance.

  The use of the term "speculative fiction" has been intertwined in a complicated way with issues of women writers of genre fiction. In 1996, the journal Femspec was founded to combat the "collectively perceived lack of attention to science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and supernatural works in feminist journals and audiences; the lack of consistently developed levels of feminism in science fiction criticism; and the inadequacy of magical realist publishing outlets and forums in the United States." In the 1960s and 1970s, women both became much more prolific as writers of science fiction and fantasy, and achieved much higher levels of acceptance amongst their peers, readers, and reviewers. Women began winning the top science fiction writing awards (The Nebula and The Hugo) and much more frequently published under their own names (previously almost all women writing science fiction and fantasy published under pseudonyms or used only the initial of their first name). As these women pushed for more acceptance in the world of science fiction, many also wanted to raise the level of importance of the genre itself. Those who wanted to be perceived as writing a more literary and even more "realistic" type of science fiction often referred to their work as "speculative fiction."

  NORMAN SPINRAD

  Norman Spinrad was born in New York City on September 15, 1940, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1957 and the College of the City of New York, and married novelist N. Lee Wood in 1990.

  He published his first short story in 1963, held his last non-writing job as a literary agent in 1965, published his first novel in 1966, and has been a full-time career writer ever since.

  He is the author of about twenty novels, depending on the mode of publication, in various countries, and has been translated into over a dozen languages. In addition to the novels, he has published about 60 short stories which have been collected into eight books.

  Norman Spinrad has also written screenplays for American television, including the original Star Trek and Werewolf, and has recently written the framing material for the French television channel Canal+’s coverage of the 1997 Imagina Film Festival in Monaco. He was a film critic forCinema magazine and the Los Angeles Free Press and has done on-camera film criticism for Canal+. He has also written political columns, science essays, and songs.

  Norman Spinrad is a past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of American and World SF and is a member of the Writers Guild of America and SACEM.

  In addition to his writings, Norman Spinrad has been a radio talk show host, has sung on two records by Richard Pinhas, acted in a music video, and of late has been appearing in various capacities on television in France.

  He has lived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London, and for the last eight years has resided in Paris. He has travelled extensively in the United States, Mexico, and Europe, and a bit in Asia.

  His novel The Iron Dream (Reve de Fer) although banned in Germany for eight years, won the Prix Apollo in France and was nominated for the National Book Award in the United States.

  His novel Bug Jack Barron (Jack Barron et l’Éternité) although denounced in the British Parliament has been nominated for many awards, and has been under continuous film option since 1971.

  Subjectivity, by Norman Spinrad

  Boredom on a long, interstellar trip can be quite a problem ... but the entertainment technique the government dreamed up for this one was a leeetle too good...!

  Interplanetary flight having been perfected, the planets and moons of the Sol system having been colonized, Man turned his attention to the stars.

  And ran into a stone wall.

  After three decades of trying, scientists reluctantly concluded that a faster-than-light drive was an impossibility, at least within the realm of any known theory of the Universe. They gave up.

  But a government does not give up so easily, especially a unified government which already controls the entire habitat of the human race. Most especially a psychologically and sociologically enlightened government which sees the handwriting on the wall, and has already noticed the first signs of racial claustrophobia—an objectless sense of frustrated rage, increases in senseless crimes, proliferation of perversions and vices of every kind. Like grape juice sealed in a bottle, the human race had begun to ferment.

  Therefore, the Solar Government took a slightly different point of view towards interstellar travel—Man must go to the stars. Period. Therefore, Man will go to the stars.

  If the speed of light could not be exceeded, then Man would go to the stars within that limit.

  When a government with tens of billions of dollars to spend becomes monomaniacal, Great Things can be accomplished. Also, unfortunately, Unspeakable Horrors.

  Stage One: A drive was developed which could propel a spaceship at half the speed of light. This was merely a matter of technological concentration, and several billion dollars.

  Stage Two: A ship was built around the drive, and outfitted with every conceivable safety device. A laser-beam communication system was installed, so that Sol could keep in contact with the ship all the way to Centaurus. A crew of ten carefully screened, psyched and trained near-supermen was selected, and the ship was launched on a sixteen-year round-trip to Centaurus.

  It never came back.

  Two years out, the ten near-supermen became ten raving maniacs.

  But the Solar Government did not give up. The next ship contained five near-supermen, and five near-superwomen.

  They only lasted for a year and a half.

&nb
sp; The Solar Government intensified the screening process. The next ship was manned by ten bona-fide supermen.

  They stayed sane for nearly three years.

  The Solar Government sent out a ship containing five supermen and five superwomen. In two years, they had ten super-lunatics.

  The psychologists came to the unstartling conclusion that even the cream of humanity, in a sexually balanced crew, could not stand up psychologically to sixteen years in a small steel womb, surrounded by billions of cubic miles of nothing.

  One would have expected reasonable men to have given up.

  Not the Solar Government. Monomania had produced Great Things, in the form of a c/2 drive. It now proceeded to produce Unspeakable Horrors.

  The cream of the race had failed, reasoned the Solar Government, therefore, we will give the dregs a chance.

  The fifth ship was manned by homosexuals. They lasted only six months. A ship full of lesbians bettered that by only two weeks.

  Number Seven was manned by schizophrenics. Since they were already mad, they did not go crazy. Nevertheless, they did not come back. Number Eight was catatonics. Nine was paranoids. Ten was sadists. Eleven was masochists. Twelve was a mixed crew of sadists and masochists. No luck.

  Maybe it was because thirteen was still a mystic number, or maybe it was merely that the Solar Government was running out of ideas. At any rate, ship Number Thirteen was the longest shot of all.

  Background: From the beginnings of Man, it had been known that certain plants—mushrooms, certain cacti—produced intense hallucinations. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists—and others less scientifically minded—had begun to extract those hallucinogenic compounds, chiefly mescaline and psilocybin. The next step was the synthesis of hallucinogens—L.S.D. 25 was the first, and it was far more powerful than the extracts.

  In the next few centuries, more and more different hallucinogens were synthesized—L.S.D. 105, Johannic acid, huxleyon, baronite.

  So by the time the Solar Government had decided that the crew of ship Number Thirteen would attempt to cope with the terrible reality of interstellar space by denying that reality, they had quite an assortment of hallucinogens to choose from.

  The one they chose was a new, as-yet-untested ("Two experiments for the price of one," explained economy-minded officials) and unbelievably complex compound tentatively called Omnidrene.

  Omnidrene was what the name implied—a hallucinogen with all the properties of the others, some which had proven to be all its own, and some which were as yet unknown. As ten micrograms was one day's dose for the average man, it was the ideal hallucinogen for a starship.

  So they sealed five men and five women—they had given up on sexually unbalanced crews—in ship Number Thirteen, along with half a ton of Omnidrene and their fondest wishes, pointed the ship towards Centaurus, and prayed for a miracle.

  In a way they could not possibly have foreseen, they got it.

  As starship Thirteen passed the orbit of Pluto, a meeting was held, since this could be considered the beginning of interstellar space.

  The ship was reasonably large—ten small private cabins, a bridge that would only be used for planetfalls, large storage areas, and a big common room, where the crew had gathered.

  They were sitting in All-Purpose Lounges, arranged in a circle. A few had their Lounges at full recline, but most preferred the upright position.

  Oliver Brunei, the nominal captain, had just opened the first case of Omnidrene, and taken out a bottle of the tiny pills.

  "This, fellow inmates," he said, "is Omnidrene. The time has come for us to indulge. The automatics are all set, we won't have to do a thing we don't want to for the next eight years."

  He poured ten of the tiny blue pills into the palm of his right hand. "On Earth, they used to have some kind of traditional ceremony when a person crossed the equator for the first time. Since we are crossing a far more important equator, I thought we should have some kind of ceremony."

  The crew squirmed irritably.

  I do tend to be verbose, Brunei thought.

  "Well ... anyway, I just thought we all oughta take the first pills together," he said, somewhat defensively.

  "So come on, Ollie," said a skinny, sour-looking man of about thirty years.

  "O.K., Lazar, O.K." Marashovski's gonna be trouble, Brunei thought. Why did they put him on the ship?

  He handed the pills around. Lazar Marashovski was about to gulp his down.

  "Wait a minute!" said Brunei. "Let's all do it together."

  "One, two, three!"

  They swallowed the pills. In about ten minutes, thought Brunei, we should be feeling it.

  He looked at the crew. Ten of us, he thought, ten brilliant misfits. Lazar, who has spent half his life high on baronite; Vera Galindez, would-be medium, trying to make herself telepathic with mescaline; Jorge Donner.... Why is he here?

  Me, at least with me it's simple—this or jail.

  What a crew! Drug addicts, occultists, sensationalists ... and what else? What makes a person do a thing like this?

  It'll all come out, thought Brunei. In sixteen years, it'll all come out.

  "Feel anything yet, Ollie?" said Marsha Johnson. No doubt why she came along. Just an ugly old maid liking the idea of being cooped up with five men.

  "Nothing yet," said Brunei.

  He looked around the room. Plain steel walls, lined with cabinets full of Omnidrene on two sides, viewscreen on the ceiling, bare floor, the other two walls decked out like an automat. Plain, gray steel walls....

  Then why were the gray steel walls turning pink?

  "Oh, oh ..." said Joby Krail, rolling her pretty blond head, "oh, oh ... here it comes. The walls are dancing...."

  "The ceiling is a spiral," muttered Vera, "a winding red spiral."

  "O.K., fellow inmates," said Brunei, "it's hitting." Now the walls were red, bright fire-engine red, and they were melting. No, not melting, but evaporating....

  "Like crystal it is," said Lin Pey, waving his delicate oriental hands, "like jade as transparent as crystal."

  "There is a camel in the circle," said Lazar, "a brown camel."

  "Let's all try and see the camel together," said Vera Galindez sharply. "Tell us what it looks like, Lazar."

  "It's brown, it's the two-humped kind, it has a two-foot tail."

  "And big feet," said Lin Pey.

  "A stupid face," said Donner.

  "Very stupid."

  "Your camel is a great bore," said the stocky, scowling Bram Daker.

  "Let's have something else," said Joby.

  "Okay," replied Brunei, "now someone else tell what they see."

  "A lizard," said Linda Tobias, a strange, somber girl, inclined to the morbid.

  "A lizard?" squeaked Ingrid Solin.

  "No," said Lin Pey, "a dragon. A green dragon, with a forked red tongue...."

  "He has little useless wings," said Lazar.

  "He is totally oblivious to us," said Vera.

  Brunei saw the dragon. It was five feet long, green and scaly. It was a conventional dragon, except for the most bovine expression in its eyes....

  Yes, he thought, the dragon is here. But the greater part of him knew that it was an illusion.

  How long would this go on?

  "It's good that we see the same things," said Marsha. "Let's always see the same things...."

  "Yes."

  "Yes!"

  "Now a mountain, a tall blue mountain."

  "With snow on the peak."

  "Yes, and clouds...."

  One week out:

  Oliver Brunei stepped into the common room. Lin Pey, Vera, and Lazar were sitting together, on what appeared to be a huge purple toadstool.

  But that's my hallucination, thought Brunei. At least, I think it is.

  "Hello Ollie," said Lazar.

  "Hi. What're you doing?"

  "We're looking at the dragon again," said Vera. "Join us?"

  Brunei thought of the dragon for
a moment. The toadstool disappeared, and the by-now-familiar bovine dragon took its place. In the last few days, they had discovered that if any two of them concentrated on something long enough to "materialize" it, anyone else who wanted to could see it in a moment.

  "What's so interesting about that silly dragon?" said Brunei.

  "How about the camel?" said Lazar.

  The dragon turned into the two-humped brown camel.

  "Phooey!" said Lin Pey.

  "O.K.," said Vera, "so what do you want?"

  Lin Pey thought for a moment.

  "How about a meadow?" he said. "A soft lawn of green grass, the sky is blue, and there are a few white clouds...."

  "Clover is blooming," said Lazar. "Smell it."

  Brunei reclined on the soft green grass. The smell of the earth beneath him was warm and moist. "A few apple trees here and there," he said, and there was shade.

  "Look over the hill!" said Lazar. "There's the dragon!"

  "Will you please get rid of that dragon?" snapped Brunei.

  "O.K., Ollie, O.K."

  One month out:

  "Get out of the way!" yelled Brunei. He gave the dragon a kick. It mooed plaintively.

  "That wasn't very nice, Ollie," said Lazar.

  "That dragon is always underfoot," said Brunei. "Why don't you get rid of it?"

  "I've taken a liking to it," said Lazar. "Besides, what about your Saint Bernard?"

  "This ship is getting too cluttered up with everyone's hallucinations," said Brunei. "Ever since ... when was it, a week ago?... ever since we've been able to conjure 'em up by ourselves, and make everyone else see 'em."

  Daker dematerialised the woman on his lap. "Why don't we get together?" he said.

  "Get together?"

  "Yes. We could agree on an environment. Look at this common room for example. What a mess! Here, it's a meadow, there it's a beach, a palace, a boudoir."

  "You mean we should make it the same for all of us?" asked Lazar.

  "Sure. We can have whatever we want in our cabins, but let's make some sense out of the common room."

  "Good idea," said Brunei. "I'll call the others."