Another World

213 Pages·2012·0.96 MB·English

by  Dozois Gardner

A Science Fiction Anthology
Edited, with introduction and commentary by
Gardner Dozois
Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
“The Oldest Soldier” by Fritz Leiber. Copyright © 1960 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of
the author and his agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
“After the Myths Went Home” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1969 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted
by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third
Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.
“The Stars Below” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1974, 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reprinted by
permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.
“Straw” by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1974 by UPD Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of
the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.
“On the Gem Planet” by Cordwainer Smith. Copyright © 1963 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted by
permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10022.
“Beam Us Home” by James Tiptree, Jr. Copyright © 1969 by Universal Publishing and Distributing Corp.
Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
“The Barbarian” by Joanna Russ. Copyright © 1968 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the
author.
“Among the Hairy Earthmen” by R.A. Lafferty. Copyright © 1966 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted
by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.
“Man in the Jar” by Damon Knight. Copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted by
permission of the author.
“Old Hundredth” by Brian W. Aldiss. Copyright © 1960 by Brian W. Aldiss. Reprinted by permission of
the author and the author’s agents, Georges Borchardt, Inc.
“The Signaller” by Keith Roberts. Copyright © 1966 by Keith Roberts. Reprinted by permission of the
author and the author’s agents, Wallace, Aitken & Sheil, Inc.
Copyright © 1977 by Gardner R. Dozois. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
International Standard Book Number: 0-695-40695-7 Titan Binding
International Standard Book Number: 0-695-80695-5 Trade Binding
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-19885 123456789 828180797877
Jacket by Carlos Ochagavia
eISBN: 978-1-61824-921-0
Digital version by Baen Ebooks
http://www.baen.com
For
Susan Casper,
who
taught me the
value
of π
The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support:
Virginia Kidd, Robert Silverberg, David G. Hartwell, Susan Casper, Kirby
McCauley, Fred Fisher of the Hourglass SF bookstore in Philadelphia, and Tom
Whitehead and his staff from the Special Collections Department of the Paley
Library at Temple University.
Introduction
EVEN TODAY, people still occasionally ask, “Why do you read science
fiction?” This is not always an easy question to answer in an increasingly time-
clocked, think-tanked, buttoned-down world. After all, SF won’t help you
balance your budget, lose weight, attain nirvana, play the stock market, find a
Perfect Mate, or get an exciting, high-paying job as a computer programmer.
So why read the stuff?
Let’s attack that hairy old animal from the flank, obliquely, and see if we can
pull it down.
I grew up in New England, an odd corner of the country where cultural
dinosaurs linger on long after they’ve died everywhere else, and as a result my
childhood is filled with memories that a person of my generation shouldn’t have:
working steam trains in operation along the North Shore, scissor-grinder men on
bicycle carts, stealing slivers of ice from trucks in the summer, televisionless
houses, automobiles that did not fall apart immediately after purchase.
It’s possible that I may also be one of the last people to have undergone the
scorn and opprobrium traditionally heaped on people who read science fiction.
That doesn’t happen much today, especially not among young people. An SF
writer going onto a college campus today is greeted as a celebrity, or at least as a
curiosity. He or she is invited into the faculty lounge for bad coffee and
surrounded by kids who are actually encouraged by their teachers to read SF,
and they ask him some pretty intelligent questions. The same thing applies when
an SF writer visits a high school, except that the kids are even more avid and the
questions even more intelligent. But when I was a boy, admitting that you read
SF was tantamount to admitting that you had lice or ringworm. It took real
devotion to keep reading the stuff in the face of constant adverse pressure from
parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, from the whole community, in fact. But I
did. I ate it up in ton lots with no discrimination whatsoever. And when I started
trying to write, SF stories were what I scribbled in my dime-store notebook at
night, sometimes writing with a flashlight under the covers, ducking everything
and pretending to be asleep when I heard my parents coming. They did not
approve of me wasting my time writing, and they especially did not approve of
my reading SF, that “mind-rotting junk.” But I kept reading SF. The ban slowed
my consumption of it not at all, even if I had to smuggle it into the house and
hide it the way kids hide grass today. And it made me high in an oddly similar
way.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, Doc Smith, H.G. Wells!
Boy, did I love it! The wind that whistled across the dead sea bottoms of
Barsoom blew also through my bedroom, although the roses on the wallpaper
did not stir as it passed. The molten sunlight of enchanted Africa shone upon my
room throughout the New England winter; Tharks and dinosaurs came to call;
Lemuria rose again in the aspect of our weed-overgrown backyard. I flew the
Skylark. I was the Invisible Man. And the key and the conduit for all this magic
were the lurid paperbacks that were sold to me like contraband by disdainful
drugstore proprietors.
It was the magic that drew me first, the lure of fantastic places and heroic
deeds, the dark thrill of Mystery and Distance. Eventually I learned that the best
SF was also full of ideas, concepts, codifications, insights into the workings of
the world, and that, far from being dry or boring, it was even more exciting,
more magical, more full of the “sense of wonder.” I came eventually to agree
with Vonnegut’s Mr. Rosewater that SF writers were almost the only ones who
“really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us,
what big, simple ideas do to us . . . the only ones zany enough to agonize over
time and distances without limit.”
And yet, for all of that, SF has kept its magic. The best SF is seldom stuffy or
pretentious or arrogant in that particularly purblind way that excludes
automatically the validity of ideas and viewpoints other than your own. SF is one
of the few remaining forms of literature—perhaps the only remaining form—that
is entertaining in the full sense of the word, producing both intellectual and
emotional excitement, molding magic and rationality, producing healthy hybrids
of “escapist entertainment” and “relevancy” that satisfy both the emotions and
the mind. The most profound and mind-stretching of stories are apt to be full of
excitement, mystery, action, humor. The most lighthearted of romps or the most
fast-paced adventure tale is still likely to contain something to make you think,
to wonder, to reconsider your values and ideas, to make you suddenly sit bolt
upright, covered in cold sweat.
This anthology demonstrates the full range of modern SF, its strength, its
eclecticism, its vitality, its ability to conjure up new worlds and new lives, and,
more importantly, to make us live in those worlds and through those lives as
naturally as if they were our own, without losing any of the wonder, joy, terror,
or beauty of the experience. Here is life on another world, in another place,
another time. Here is what it is like to wear an alien skin. Here are new concepts,
new vistas, magic: a far future society conjures up all the gods and devils and
heroes of the distant past with disastrous results; a young semaphore Signalman
faces elves, isolation, and a lonely winter death in a twentieth-century England
that never was; a self-styled coward, inadvertently caught up in a universe-wide
time war, must match wills with a monster in nighttime Chicago; a persecuted
astronomer looks into his soul to find wonders as vast as the stars; a barbarian
adventuress has a deadly battle of wits with a seemingly omnipotent time-
traveler; an intelligent sloth and a mutated baluchitherium roam a haunted future
Earth from which humans have forever departed; a boy keeps a lifelong secret
that he hopes will take him to the stars; in an alternate Dark-Age Europe, sword-
wielding mercenaries travel the countryside in hot-air balloons seeking war and
employment; an alien bellhop must deal with his most deadly customer; children
from the stars assume human form and play at war and statesmanship with real
nations for pawns; an interplanetary wanderer, with his own life at stake, must
decide the fate of an immortal horse on a world where precious gems are more
common than dirt.
SF is alive—still growing, still changing, still vital. That’s the answer to the
question, “Why read science fiction?” It’s alive in a world of dead art, dead
minds, dead institutions; it’s a bright-eyed, irreverent little animal scurrying
through a petrified landscape of old dead trees; it’s unashamedly potent and
prolific in a world that grows increasingly weary and sterile; it dares to raise its
voice in boisterous joy, sorrow, and anger in a place full of sour silence and dead
echoes.
Gardner Dozois
THE OLDEST
SOLDIER
Fritz Leiber
Hugo-and Nebula-winner Fritz Leiber has long been recognized as one of the
modern masters of science fiction. It is less widely known that he is also a master
of the macabre, perhaps the foremost modern practitioner of the suspense and
supernatural horror tale.
Here he adroitly mingles both genres in a chilling tale of preternatural cat
and mouse: a bizarre rearguard action fought through the shadowed streets of
nighttime Chicago, where the flap and scurry above you might be wind-blown
trash or the beating of dark wings; where the smoldering red pinpoints behind
you might he car taillights or cigarette butts or the hungry eyes of something
alien and evil.