So this time you are living in now, perhaps it has no durability. Unless it yields results, it will be erased. Your choices are provisional; if they work out, they will be retained. Otherwise, you will choose again. We may say, adjusting the framing of our narration to the bounds of your phenomenological experience: You will have the chance to choose again.
You will have a chance to unbreak the doll, unkiss the kiss. On the other hand, all this will be lost.
What is it like, then, to tell such a tale, to tell a story that turns out to have no consequences? A story of a draft universe, a narrative transaction that is rolled back and eliminated, of deaths postponed, shadow lives swirling and then clearing, as a mist, until the final, the correct life is found?
(If the machine ever even halts; some problems are insoluble).
Restful, restful.
9. The provisional history, theological. I am crying for you, Beloved. I am killing you, and I am crying. And then you are here again. And on and on, until you have done your duty. Until I have understood. Thank you. Thank you. I am sorry. Thank you.
About the Authors
Robert Charles Wilson is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Hugo Award-winning Spin and its sequel, Axis, as well as A Bridge of Years, Darwinia, Mysterium, Blind Lake, and Bios. His next novel will be Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century. Born in California, he currently lives near Toronto.
Award-winning novelist Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the best-selling City of Saints & Madmen, set in his signature creation, the imaginary city of Ambergris, in addition to several other novels from Bantam, Tor, and Pan Macmillan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship, and, most recently, the Le Cafard Cosmique Award in France and the T̈htifantasia Award in Finland, both for City of Saints & Madmen. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, IHG Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. Other novels such as Veniss Underground and Shriek: An Afterword have made the year’s best lists of Amazon.com, The Austin Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly, among others. His work, both novels and short stories, has been translated into over twenty languages. The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases may be his most famous anthology and is considered a cult classic, still in print along with his Leviathan original fiction series.
Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool. He holds degrees in mathematics and engineering and has worked as a teacher of math and physics and in information technology. He is also a Chartered Engineer. In 1991, Baxter applied to become a cosmonaut, aiming for the guest slot on Mir eventually taken by Helen Sharman, but fell at an early hurdle. His first professionally published short story appeared in 1987 and his first novel in 1991. Baxter has been a full-time author since 1995, with over forty science fiction novels published around the world. He is the President of the British Science Fiction Association, a Vice President of the H.G. Wells Society, and Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society. Baxter and his family moved to Northumberland in 2004. His current project is a pair of books describing a catastrophic inundation of the Earth: Flood and Ark.
Gene Wolfe grew up in Houston, Texas, where he attended Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School. He dropped out of Texas A&M and got a CIB in Korea. In 1956, he graduated from the University of Houston. He and his wife, Rosemary, were married that year; they have two sons and two daughters, three grand-daughters, a step-granddaughter and a step-grandson. Wolfe has written The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, The Devil in a Forest, The Book of the New Sun, Castleview, There Are Doors, Soldier of the Mist, Soldier of Arete, Soldier of Sidon, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, and others. His work has won two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, the Deathrealm Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the British Fantasy Award, and others. His short fiction is collected in The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories, Castle of Days, Endangered Species, Storeys From the Old Hotel, Strange Travelers , Innocents Aboard, and Starwater Strains. A two-volume fantasy, The Wizard Knight, is complete with the publication of The Wizard. He’s been the Guest of Honor at a Worldcon, a World Horror Convention, and a World Fantasy Convention. His latest novel is An Evil Guest.
Liz Williams’ mother is a Gothic novelist, and her father was a part-time conjuror, so she didn’t have a hope. She’s been a science fiction fan since the age of ten, and she started writing seriously about ten years ago. Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure series was responsible, and she’s still a huge fan of Vance. Other favorites include Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Mary Gentle, George R.R. Martin, C.J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. She now writes full time, but she has had various incarnations. Her background is in history and philosophy of science; having done degrees in philosophy and artificial intelligence at the Universities of Manchester and Sussex, she did a doctorate at Cambridge, graduating in 1993. She held a variety of part-time jobs, including a now-infamous stint on Brighton’s pier as a tarot reader, before full-time work in Kazakhstan. She also spent a year running an IT program at Brighton Women’s Centre, then became a full time writer in 2002.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She lives in Boston, where she is completing a Ph.D. in English literature. Her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, which includes World Fantasy Award nominee “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” and Nebula Award nominee “Pip and the Fairies,” was published in 2006. Interfictions , an anthology she coedited with Delia Sherman, was published in 2007. Her short stories and poems have been reprinted in a number of Year’s Best anthologies, including Year’s Best Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss.com.