The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Read online

  THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF

  Best Short SF Novels

  Also available

  The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Science Fiction

  The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime

  The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics

  The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics

  The Mammoth Book of Best of Best New SF

  The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 8

  The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

  The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga 3

  The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21

  The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics

  The Mammoth Book of Bikers

  The Mammoth Book of Boys’ Own Stuff

  The Mammoth Book of Brain Workouts

  The Mammoth Book of Celebrity Murders

  The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

  The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes

  The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

  The Mammoth Book of CSI

  The Mammoth Book of the Deep

  The Mammoth Book of Dirty, Sick, X-Rated & Politically Incorrect Jokes

  The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

  The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

  The Mammoth Book of Erotic Confessions

  The Mammoth Book of Erotic Online Diaries

  The Mammoth Book of Erotic Women

  The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

  The Mammoth Book of Funniest Cartoons of All Time

  The Mammoth Book of Hard Men

  The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits

  The Mammoth Book of Illustrated True Crime

  The Mammoth Book of Inside the Elite Forces

  The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

  The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper

  The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

  The Mammoth Book of the Kama Sutra

  The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

  The Mammoth Book of King Arthur

  The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica

  The Mammoth Book of Limericks

  The Mammoth Book of Maneaters

  The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

  The Mammoth Book of Modern Battles

  The Mammoth Book of Monsters

  The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters

  The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica

  The Mammoth Book of New Terror

  The Mammoth Book of On the Edge

  The Mammoth Book of On the Road

  The Mammoth Book of Pirates

  The Mammoth Book of Poker

  The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

  The Mammoth Book of Prophecies

  The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

  The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs and Rock ’N’ Roll

  The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels

  The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales

  The Mammoth Book of True Crime

  The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

  The Mammoth Book of True War Stories

  The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

  The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance

  The Mammoth Book of Vintage Whodunnits

  The Mammoth Book of Women Who Kill

  The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the USA by St Martin’s Press, 2007

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009

  Copyright © Gardner Dozois, 2007, 2009 (unless otherwise indicated)

  The right of Gardner Dozois to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  UK ISBN 978-1-84529-923-1

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

  Robert Silverberg

  SURFACING

  Walter Jon Williams

  THE HEMINGWAY HOAX

  Joe Haldeman

  MR. BOY

  James Patrick Kelly

  BEGGARS IN SPAIN

  Nancy Kress

  GRIFFIN’S EGG

  Michael Swanwick

  OUTNUMBERING THE DEAD

  Frederik Pohl

  FORGIVENESS DAY

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  THE COST TO BE WISE

  Maureen F. McHugh

  OCEANIC

  Greg Egan

  TENDELÉO’S STORY

  Ian McDonald

  NEW LIGHT ON THE DRAKE EQUATION

  Ian R. MacLeod

  TURQUOISE DAYS

  Alastair Reynolds

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following materials:

  “Sailing to Byzantium”, by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1985 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Surfacing”, by Walter Jon Williams. Copyright © 1988 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Hemingway Hoax”, by Joe Haldeman. Copyright © 1990 by Joe Haldeman. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Mr. Boy”, by James Patrick Kelly. Copyright © 1990 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress. Copyright © 1991 by Nancy Kress. First published as a chapbook by Axolotl Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Griffin’s Egg”, by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1991 by Michael Swanwick. First published as a chapbook by Century Legend in 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Outnumbering the Dead”, by Frederik Pohl. Copyright © 1991 by Frederik Pohl. First published as a chapbook by Century Legend in 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Forgiveness Day”, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency.

  “The Cost to Be Wise”, by Maureen F. McHugh. Copyright © 1996 by Maureen F. McHugh. First published in Starlight 1 (Tor), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Oceanic”, by Greg Egan. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Tendeléo’s Story”, by Ian McDonald. Copyright © 2000 Ian McDonald. First published as a chapbook, Tendeléo’s Story (PS Publishing). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “New Light on the Drake Equation”, by Ian R. MacLeod. Copyright © 2001 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, May 23, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Turquoise Days”, by Alastair Reynolds. From Diamond Dog
s, Turquoise Days, by Alastair Reynolds, copyright © 2002 by Alastair Reynolds. Used by permission of Ace Books, an imprint of The Berkeley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PREFACE

  Gardner Dozois

  Outside of science fiction, the novella is rarely encountered these days, being, in fact, something of a literary endangered species. The novella is still alive and well in the science fiction world, though, and it’s a rare year that doesn’t see at least eight or ten of them published, often more.

  Perhaps this is because, in many ways, the novella or short novel is a perfect length for a science fiction story: long enough to enable you to flesh out the details of a strange alien world or a bizarre future society, to give such a setting some depth, complexity, and heft . . . and yet, still short enough to pack a real punch, some power and elegance and bite, unblunted and unobscured by padding. Unlike many of today’s novels, all too many of which strike me as novellas grossly padded-out to be five hundred pages long, there are rarely any wasted words in a good novella, a quality that they share with good short stories. A good novella is no longer than it needs to be. It does what it has to do, what it is designed to do, and then it stops. That novellas need to be as long as they are, long enough to justify the alternative term “short novels”, is a measure of just how complicated and difficult are the tasks that they are designed to do: to create a whole fictional world, a universe that no one has ever explored before, to set that world forth in intricate detail, to people it with living characters, and then to use the tumbling interactions of that world and those people to tell a story that could not be told without both those elements being present. This is a formidable task to accomplish even in the space of a five-hundred-page novel, yet a good novella accomplishes it in the space of twenty or thirty thousand words – the novellas here are marvels of compression, in spite of the amount of ground they have to cover, and it would be hard to find a page of slack to cut out of any of them, or to end them one page earlier than they do.

  As you can probably tell by now, I like novellas, and I’ve used a lot of them in my Best New SF anthologies over the years – more than a hundred of them, in fact. When I edited a retrospective look-back last year, the Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF, I included as many novellas as I had room to use and still have space for anything else in the book – Nancy Kress’s “Trinity,” Brian Stableford’s “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death,” Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” David Marusek’s “The Wedding Album,” Ian R. MacLeod’s “Breathmoss” – but that left so many excellent novellas unused that I decided that there was justification for another retrospective anthology, the one that you’re (presumptively; you might, I suppose, have telekinetic powers, and be floating the book in midair) holding in your hands at this moment, an anthology dedicated exclusively to the many first-rate novellas or short novels that have appeared in the Best New SF series over the years.

  Or as many of them as we could fit in, anyway. Even with a huge anthology such as this one, there’s no way that more than a small percentage of the more than a hundred novellas we’ve published could be made to fit into the amount of space that was physically possible. I quickly came to the realization that there was no list of deserving novellas that I could draw up that wouldn’t exceed the space available by at least six or seven stories (and indeed, when I did finalize the line-up you see in this book, there were at least six or seven other novellas I wished I had room to use; we’ll have to wait for the multi-dimensional, infinitely expansible version of this anthology to do the job right). I also quickly became aware, from talking to fans and readers on the Asimov’s online forum and elsewhere, that there was no possible line-up I could come up with that was going to please everyone; no matter how many stories I included, since there wasn’t room to include all of them, there was always somebody who was going to be disappointed that their favourite story was left out.

  The brute fact was, though, that since there wasn’t room for everything, or even everything that deserved to be in the book, that something was going to have to go. That called for hard decisions.

  The first and in some ways most important decision I had to make was whether I should use novellas such as Joe Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax” and Nancy Kress’ “Beggars in Spain,” that were later expanded into novels, or whether I should stick with less-famous stand-alone novellas that weren’t subsequently turned into novels. After a great deal of soul-searching, I decided that to justify a title such as Best Short SF Novels, I had to include stories such as “The Hemingway Hoax” and “Beggars in Spain,” even if they are available elsewhere in other forms – the anthology just wouldn’t live up to its name otherwise. While I hoped to include lesser-known novellas that weren’t as readily available and perhaps hadn’t been seen or weren’t findable by newer readers, it was clear that the only fair determining characteristic was literary quality: if it couldn’t justifiably be called one of the best, it wasn’t going to get in, all other practical and demographic considerations aside. (Don’t bother to tell me that there are too many stories from Asimov’s here; I know that already . . . and if I didn’t have to give at least some consideration to demographics, there’d probably be more of them. In defence of that, though, Asimov’s was one of the premier markets for novellas throughout the 1980s and 1990s and, along with markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, and Analog, remains one of the prime sources for novellas to this day . . . plus, not all the Asimov’s stories here were bought by me. It also quickly became clear that there was no way that every year that the Best New SF has been published could be represented; first-rate novellas tend to clump, for some reason, and thus there were inevitably going to be two or three novellas from the same year, and none from others.)

  Having decided that everything was eligible even the best-known stories and novellas that had been turned into novels, I then had to re-read everything, all hundred-plus novellas. Although a few of them turned out, unsurprisingly, to be too heavily dated to use after twenty years or more, most of them held up amazingly well, even some of the oldest stories. Eliminating most of them turned out to be one of the hardest editorial jobs I’ve ever undertaken; the quality of the available pool of novellas was so high that I drew up list after list after list (complicated by the fact that some authors had two or three excellent novellas that would have served my purposes just as well as the one I ended up actually using) right up until the last possible moment, and you could make as good an argument for most of them as for the one I ended up with; in fact, if I’d finalized on Tuesday rather than Monday, you’d have probably ended up with a different list altogether. Chances are, it still would probably have lived up to the title, though. The quality of the pool of novellas there was to draw upon was so high that, even if I’d closed my eyes, stabbed out a finger, and picked stories at random, you’d probably still be getting a pretty good anthology out of it.

  In closing, I’d like to thank the often-unsung acquisitions editors who had the good taste to buy these stories in the first place: Ellen Datlow, Shawna McCarthy, Peter Crowther, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Deborah Beale, Patrick Nielson Hayden, as well as all the editors over the last twenty years who bought all the stories in those twenty volumes that didn’t happen to make the cut for this particular retrospective. I’d like to thank the writers, who laboured long into the night over keyboards in lonely rooms to write all the stories in this anthology, and all the other stories in the volumes of Best New SF, and all the good stories that didn’t make it into any of them in the first place – because there’ve always been more good stories than we have room to use, every year from the beginning to now.

  And lastly, I’d like to thank you, the readers, for buying and appreciating the volumes of this series, and thus making it a success. May you continue to enjoy future volumes, and may you enjoy this one as well!

  Gardner Dozois

  SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

  Robe
rt Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor (he was editor of the original anthology series New Dimensions, perhaps most acclaimed anthology series of its era), Silverberg was one of the most influential figures of the Post–New Wave era of the ’70s, and continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, plus SFWA’s prestigious Grandmaster Award.

  His novels include the acclaimed Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrack in the Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Midnight, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, The Mountains of Majipoor, and two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and a massive retrospective collection, The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. His reprint anthologies are far too numerous to list here, but include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One and the distinguished Alpha series, among dozens of others. His most recent books are the novel The Longest Way Home, the mosaic novel Roma Eterna, and a massive new retrospective collection, Phases of the Moon: Six Decades of Masterpieces. Coming up is a new collection, In the Beginning. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.

  Here, in the one of the most distinguished stories of a long and distinguished career, a story that won him both Hugo and Nebula awards, he takes us to the very far future, on tour with a twentieth-century man in a world where everyone is a tourist, and nothing is quite what it seems.

  At dawn he arose and stepped out onto the patio for his first look at Alexandria, the one city he had not yet seen. That year the five cities were Chang-an, Asgard, New Chicago, Timbuctoo, Alexandria: the usual mix of eras, cultures, realities. He and Gioia, making the long flight from Asgard in the distant north the night before, had arrived late, well after sundown, and had gone straight to bed. Now, by the gentle apricot-hued morning light, the fierce spires and battlements of Asgard seemed merely something he had dreamed.