Above all, these are stories that I cannot forget.
I have grouped them in three general categories, by era. The Golden Age—from the beginning to the midsixties—includes the writers and stories that created science fiction as we know it. And yes, I’m aware that “Robot Dreams” was one of Asimov’s later works, but he remained a Golden Age writer—perhaps the best of them—throughout his career. At the same time, Sturgeon and Blish arguably are post–Golden Age, while Hamilton and Biggle might be considered holdovers from earlier. Give me a break here. Whatever you call this period, these are the writers who plowed and planted.
The New Wave period—the midsixties to the midseventies—was marked by writers who introduced dazzling style and a fervor, sometimes a rage, that reenergized the field and opened it to many new kinds of storytelling. At the same time, the older sci-fi tradition—the plain tale, the idea-based story, the moral dilemma, the character story—continued to be enriched by such writers as Larry Niven, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frederik Pohl, and Brian Aldiss.
If the New Wave–era writers were the children of the Golden Age, either rebelling against their parents or taking over the family business, the eighties and nineties were dominated by the grandchildren of the Golden Age—the writers who grew up watching Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Star Trek right along with reading “Call Me Joe,” “ ‘All You Zombies—’,” and “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” The Media Generation found that they could write any kind of story, and while some movements took on a separate identity—the Cyberpunks, the Humanists—most of us who began writing in this era found that we could do whatever we pleased and as long as our stories fit, more or less, within the ever-loosening borders of the genre, there would be readers who were eager to hear our voices and experience the stories we had to offer.
As you move from one era to the next, you’ll get a sense of how science fiction has developed through the years—without losing touch with its roots, without forgetting anything that we, as a community, have learned.
It’s possible that we have now reached and passed the Science Fiction Age. It’s possible that we’re ready for the next revolution in literature, the next group of storytellers. The post–science fiction age.
It’s also possible that we’re ready for the genre boundaries to dissolve. For us to say “literature” and include science fiction within the definition of that word.
Truth is, I don’t care. That’s a matter for critics and teachers to argue about. What I care about is this: Stories change us. They create communities of people with shared memories. And the stories that are ahead of you in these pages—they are among the very best of our time.
The Golden Age
POUL ANDERSON
Call Me Joe
A multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Poul Anderson has written more than fifty novels and hundreds of short stories since his science fiction debut in 1947. His first novel, Brain Wave, is a classic example of the techniques of traditional science fiction, extrapolating the impact that an abrupt universal rise in intelligence has on the totality of human civilization in the twentieth century. Anderson is highly regarded for the detail of his stories. His vast Technic History saga, a multibook chronicle of interstellar exploration and empire building, covers fifty centuries of future history spread out over the rise and fall of three empires of a galactic federation. The vast scope of the series has given Anderson the opportunity to develop colorful, well-developed characters and to explore the long-term impact of certain ideas and attitudes—free enterprise, militarism, imperialism, individual styles of governing—on the society and political structure of a created world. Two characters, distinct products of their different times and civilizations, dominate the series’ most notable episodes: Falstaffian rogue merchant Nicholas van Rijn, hero of The Man Who Counts, Satan’s World, and Mirkheim, and Ensign Dominic Flandry, whose adventures include We Claim These Stars, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, and Earthman, Go Home! Anderson has tackled many of science fiction’s classic themes, including near-light-speed travel in Tau Zero, time travel in the series of Time Patrol stories collected as Guardians of Time, and accelerated evolution in Fire Time. He is known for his interweaving of science fiction and history, notably in his novel The High Crusade, a superior first-contact tale in which a medieval army captures an alien spaceship. Much of Anderson’s fantasy is rich with undercurrents of mythology, notably his heroic fantasy Three Hearts and Three Lions, and The Broken Sword, an alternate history drawn from the background of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Anderson received the Tolkien Memorial Award in 1978. With his wife, Karen, he has written the King of Ys Celtic fantasy quartet, and with Gordon Dickson the amusing Hoka series. His short fiction has been collected in numerous volumes, including The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, All One Universe, Strangers from Earth, and Seven Conquests.
THE WIND CAME whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.
He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil, hunched down, and groped for his little smelter. The wind was an idiot bassoon in his skull. Something whipped across his back, drawing blood, a tree yanked up by the roots and spat a hundred miles. Lightning cracked, immensely far overhead where clouds boiled with night.
As if to reply, thunder toned in the ice mountains and a red gout of flame jumped and a hillside came booming down, spilling itself across the valley. The earth shivered.
Sodium explosion, thought Anglesey in the drumbeat noise. The fire and the lightning gave him enough illumination to find his apparatus. He picked up tools in muscular hands, his tail gripped the trough, and he battered his way to the tunnel and thus to his dugout.
It had walls and roof of water, frozen by sun-remoteness and compressed by tons of atmosphere jammed onto every square inch. Ventilated by a tiny smokehole, a lamp of tree oil burning in hydrogen made a dull light for the single room.
Anglesey sprawled his slate-blue form on the floor, panting. It was no use to swear at the storm. These ammonia gales often came at sunset, and there was nothing to do but wait them out. He was tired anyway.
It would be morning in five hours or so. He had hoped to cast an axehead, his first, this evening, but maybe it was better to do the job by daylight.
He pulled a decapod body off a shelf and ate the meat raw, pausing for long gulps of liquid methane from a jug. Things would improve once he had proper tools; so far, everything had been painfully grubbed and hacked to shape with teeth, claws, chance icicles, and what detestably weak and crumbling fragments remained of the spaceship. Give him a few years and he’d be living as a man should.
He sighed, stretched, and lay down to sleep.
Somewhat more than one hundred and twelve thousand miles away, Edward Anglesey took off his helmet.