Year's Best SF 11, page 1
Year’s Best SF 11
Edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
In memory of
Constance Elizabeth Nash Hartwell,
who liked good stories.
Contents
Introduction
David Langford
New Hope for the Dead
Hannu Rajaniemi
Deus Ex Homine
Gardner R. Dozois
When the Great Days Came
Daryl Gregory
Second Person, Present Tense
Justina Robson
Dreadnought
Ken MacLeod
A Case of Consilience
Tobias S. Buckell
Toy Planes
Neal Asher
Mason’s Rats
Vonda N. McIntyre
A Modest Proposal
Rudy Rucker
Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch
Peter F. Hamilton
The Forever Kitten
Matthew Jarpe
City of Reason
Bruce Sterling
Ivory Tower
Lauren McLaughlin
Sheila
Paul McAuley
Rats of the System
Larissa Lai
I Love Liver: A Romance
James Patrick Kelly
The Edge of Nowhere
Ted Chiang
What’s Expected of Us
Michael Swanwick
Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play
Stephen Baxter
Lakes of Light
Oliver Morton
The Albian Message
Bud Sparhawk
Bright Red Star
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Third Day Lights
Greg Bear
Ram Shift Phase 2
Gregory Benford
On the Brane
R. Garcia y Robertson
Oxygen Rising
Adam Roberts
And Future King…
Alastair Reynolds
Beyond the Aquila Rift
Joe Haldeman
Angel of Light
Liz Williams
Ikiryoh
Cory Doctorow
I, Robot
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
Praise
Other Books by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
The year 2005 was a science-fictional year in several ways. Think, for instance of SF-scale catastrophes and post-catastrophe civilizations. We were just beginning to understand the scale of the tsunami as the year 2005 dawned. The sheer enormity was hard to grasp, much of it first comprehensible through satellite images of the Aceh coastline wiped clean and the churning vortices of the retreating wave on a few videos. The destruction of New Orleans was disaster come to us, not over there in places we might never have heard of, a disaster made at least as much by our own institutions as by nature, and of science-fictional scale. And this time, especially with technology introduced in 2005, we had front row seats. Between the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, with the launch of Google Earth, Virtual Earth, and similar web sites, it became possible to have a different relationship to the destruction and the press photography. At the time of the tsunami, the press ran headlines like Spy satellites assessing tsunami damage. By the time of Katrina, we had become much more accustomed to the newer View from Above after only a few months of making it our own on the web. Tens of thousands of people checked on the conditions of their homes using Google Earth and overlaid photography. Many others used Google Maps or Virtual Earth. The story of how this affected the great Pakistan earthquakes only a month after Katrina is too complex to condense here, and it is not nearly over yet. People are still dying there as we write on the first day of 2006. Disasters now, and in the future, will be observed differently than in the past.
The year 2005 was also a time of war, not a twentieth-century loose lips sink ships kind of war, but a paranoia-ridden post-modern twenty-first-century war in which information spews as if from a firehose and is most difficult to control or comprehend. A number of countries are very uncomfortable with the world public’s new-found ability to look in on their military facilities; and in the U.S., a fake letter from a soldier claiming that Google Earth was used as a kind of phildickian Eye in the Sky by our enemies to spy on U.S. troop positions was posted in over 300 places on the internet. (GE cannot be used in that way.) But as the year ended with a political scandal over “domestic surveillance,” it turns out that, yes, Americans are being spied on, but mostly by Americans. If 2005 was about something, it was about ways of seeing. And in a most literal sense it seems that here in the twenty-first century we begin to see things differently. We can see the world, and most of it is not like the home we are used to.
There is always a bit of an international surge in SF when the World SF convention is held outside the U.S., as it was in 2005 in Glasgow, Scotland. Certainly there was a commemorative anthology of original SF by Scots, Nova Scotia, from which we selected a couple of fine stories for this book. But more than that, the convention inspired small press publishers in the UK and Europe to produce books and magazines in time to show off at the convention, and there were a number of them. And there was an excellent anthology of new SF from the UK published without much fanfare, Constellations (DAW), edited by Peter Crowther, who was also the editor of Postscripts, the new UK quarterly magazine. Interzone, the flagship magazine of the UK, has a bright new look and a new editor. Of special interest was the reappearance of the Futures page in the scientific journal Nature, in spring 2005, a page devoted to a single short piece of SF every week for the rest of the year. So it appears that we can look forward to continued innovation in SF from the UK quarter, in particular, in the next few years.
It was also the year that SciFiction.com, the highest paying market for short fiction in SF & fantasy, was terminated. And at the end of the year, Infinite Matrix announced it was ceasing publication. So 2005 was perhaps the end of the first wave of the website magazines, leaving only Strange Horizons, a non-profit organization of the formerly top three fiction locations still intact. The electronic publishers on the internet maintained the levels of quality established a few years back, and remain an ambitious dimension of the SF field, but there was not a significant increase in the amount of good fiction originating on the internet. Perhaps we should be grateful for no decrease in 2005. It seems unlikely that a new magazine will arise soon on the internet to equal the pay and influence of SciFiction, but there are several that may be willing to try. Aeon, Revolution SF, Eidolon online, Fantastic Magnitude, and Challenging Destiny, for instance, show real promise.
We are still in the middle of some kind of short fiction boom in science fiction and the associated genres of the fantastic—we certainly hope not at the end. Not an economic boom—no one is getting paid much—but certainly a numbers increase, and it has been building for several years. The highest concentrations of excellence were still in the professional publications, the anthologies from the small press, and the highest paying online markets, though the small press zines were significant contributors too.
There are a lots of conclusions one might draw from this, but the one we highlight is that it makes this year’s best volume even more useful, since we try to sort through all this material. But the small press really expanded again this past year, both in book form and in a proliferation of ambitious little magazines, in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Each year we find ourselves pointing with some irony at the areas of growth in SF, as if they were double-edged swords. While many of the ambitious insiders want to break out, at least some ambitious outsiders are breaking in, and some of them at the top of the genre. This is now a trend several years old. Last year it was Karen Joy Fowler and then Kelly Link who made it firmly into the literary mainstream by continuing to do what they have always done, write excellently well. This year they really got noticed.
It is our opinion that it is a good thing to have genre boundaries. If we didn’t, young writers would have to find something else, perhaps less interesting, to transgress or attack to draw attention to themselves.
We try in each volume of this series to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. It is supposed to be fun to read, a special kind of fun you cannot find elsewhere. This is a book about what’s going on now in SF. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2005.
So we repeat, for readers new to this series, our usual disclaimer: This selection of science fiction stories represents the best that was published during the year 2005. It would take several more volumes this size to have nearly all of the best short stories—though even then, not all the best novellas. And we believe that representing the best from year to year, while it is not physically possible to encompass it all in one even very large book, also implies presenting some substantial variety of excellences, and we left some worthy stories out in order to include others in this limited space.
Our general principle for selection: This book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is clearly that and not something else. We have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and slipstream, and postmodern literature. We (Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s
Best Fantasy as well, a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy fiction, too. But here, we choose science fiction. You are invited.
David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
Pleasantville, NY
New Hope for the Dead
DAVID LANGFORD
David Langford (www.ansible.co.uk) lives in Reading, England. He publishes the fanzine Ansible, the tabloid newspaper of SF and fandom, which wins Hugo Awards, and is also excerpted as a monthly column in Interzone, and online at www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-archives/Ansible. He is the most famous humorous writer in fandom today—see his book He Do the Time Police in Different Voices—and keeps winning best fan writer Hugo Awards. He is an indefatigable book reviewer (some of his reviews are collected in The Complete Critical Assembly, Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980–2002, and The SEX Column and Other Misprints). For the last decade he has been publishing short SF of generally high quality, collected in Different Kinds of Darkness.
“New Hope for the Dead” appeared in Nature, the distinguished journal of science, that revived its one-page short fiction feature, Futures, in 2005. We think it is significant for the SF field that such a feature exists in such a place. This story is about the rewards and punishments of the electronic afterlife.
Hello, Mr. Hormel, this is your hosting system at Nirvana Infomatics. We apologize for interrupting your regular afterlife, but unfortunately the message is urgent. Otherwise we would not have intruded on your VR sex athletics competition.
We are sorry to hear that you were going for a new high score. Nevertheless the message is urgent.
In accordance with your contract for postmortem uploading and long-term maintenance as an Electronic-Golem Artificial Neurosystem or EGAN, we regret to inform you that your trust fund is not performing adequately. This is a result of global economic problems, arising from the continuing states of emergency in Iraq, Iran, Korea, France and the US Pacific Northwest.
To put it briefly, your current investment yield is no longer covering the monthly payments for full enjoyment of this digital afterlife.
You are quite correct to invoke the emergency insurance terms laid down in Clause 12 of your antemortem agreement. Unfortunately, our finance department has already taken the full potential claim into account.
Yes, the world economy truly is in appalling shape. Otherwise we would not be forced to mention the provisions of Clause 9, “Special Circumstances, Penalties and Termination.”
But in the words of the classic novel—Don’t Panic! Several alternative plans are available for financially challenged and differently solvent entities in our care.
The simplest scheme is what our client-advisers amusingly call “being dead for tax reasons.” Maintaining your full activity as an EGAN requires continuing exabyte-scale storage capacity and very substantial 24/7 processor power. We can enormously reduce the associated expenses by storing you in static, compressed Zip format for reactivation in a time of better economic weather.
Yes, it is true that we cannot guarantee a major future upturn. Shares can, alas, not only go down but plunge and even plummet. Yes, it is possible that current issues such as global warming, fossil-fuel exhaustion and scrotty abuse may conceivably reduce our technological capacity to a level where stored EGANs can no longer be restarted. But, you know, you wouldn’t feel a thing.
We understand your viewpoint. So much, then, for the first and easiest option.
Plan two has the droll motto, “Poverty is nature’s way of telling you to slow down!” What happens here is that to all intents and purposes you continue your luxury electronic afterlife exactly as at present—but with substantial savings achieved by slowing your clock rate and reducing processor load. A thousandfold reduction, for example, would make no subjective difference but…
Well, yes, you would inevitably lose contact with other posthuman friends running at normal clockspeed in the EGANverse. And, indeed, a century would pass in little more than five weeks. But try to look on the bright side: you could see the glittering wonders of the future. Who would have thought, even a few years ago, that scrotties would prove to be of such momentous significance today? What other fascinating surprises await?
Ah, so you doubt our troubled world’s ability to sustain life, high-information technology and thus your own digital substrate for as much as another century. Just between you and ourselves, Mr. Hormel, we agree. One doesn’t want to go actively looking for future shock.
So it seems as though you’ll be opting for plan number three. As our client-advisers like to explain this one: “You’re dead but you needn’t lie down!” Posthumous vocational choices are restricted by a variety of union agreements, but there are still opportunities for EGAN personalities to carry out useful and profitable work!
Your key marketing point is the unparalleled human—sorry, posthuman—ability to perform advanced pattern recognition. No, not SETI radio-telescope data scanning. That was a good guess, but surprisingly crude software can handle the mere search for alien signals. For you we have a much subtler, trickier and constantly mutating challenge.
According to your premortem life record (we apologize for the intrusion, but Clause 9(vii) grants us direct access to your stored memories under the present circumstances), your highly profitable career as a Florida-based disseminator of unsolicited commercial e-mail should make you ideally qualified for this filtration job. Everyone knows your old catch-phrase: Just Press Delete.
It’s a simple, straightforward task, with VR rewards for accuracy and disincentives for wrong decisions: see Clause 9(xvi) regarding valid occasions for negative reinforcement via simulated discomfort. You merely need to use your posthuman powers of judgment to separate relevant content from the surrounding white noise of coded promotional material for pØrn, HyperViagra, illicit scrotties and the like—plus, of course, all solicitations with any hint of a Nigerian accent.
Here are your first ten billion e-mails.
Scan them rapidly, diligently and well.
And as you come to each undesirable item…Just Think Delete.
Deus Ex Homine
HANNU RAJANIEMI
Hannu Rajaniemi (http://tomorrowelephant.net/) is a Finn living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is now working on his PhD thesis in string theory. His bio says “Hannu was born in Ylivieska, Finland, in 1978 and survived the polar bears, the freezing cold and the Nokia recruiting agents long enough to graduate from the University of Oulu. After brief stints in Cambridge University and working as a research scientist for the Finnish Defense Forces, he moved to Edinburgh.” And he “only recently switched to Queen’s English as his primary medium of expression. His favorite method of writing involves starting at a blank A4 page until drops of blood form on his forehead.”
“Deus Ex Homine” was published in Nova Scotia. An AI plague turns humans into deadly, near-omnipotent gods. Being a god is like having a disease, and it turns out that this can be sexually transmitted: fullblown godhood can appear in the child even if the parent has been cured. Jukka is an ex-god, his infection now burned away and part of his mind with it—human again, but not quite whole, a survivor of the war against the gods.
As gods go, I wasn’t one of the holier-than-thou, dying-for-your-sins variety. I was a full-blown transhuman deity with a liquid metal body, an external brain, clouds of self-replicating utility fog to do my bidding and a recursively self-improving AI slaved to my volition. I could do anything I wanted. I wasn’t Jesus, I was Superman: an evil Bizarro Superman.
I was damn lucky. I survived.
The quiet in Pittenweem is deeper than it should be, even for a small Fife village by the sea. The plague is bad here in the north, beyond Hadrian’s Firewall, and houses hide behind utility fog haloes.
