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I've already written a lot about Isaac Asimov: How I think him the supreme practitioner of the American tradition of plain style. How I find his work, though he was an avowed atheist, some of the most deeply religious writing I've read. How, unlike many other writers, he seemed only to get better (and wiser) as he got older. Those essays were printed elsewhere; they're still true, in my opinion.

"Robot Dreams"
by Isaac Asimov

"Last night I dreamed," said LVX-1, calmly.

Susan Calvin said nothing, but her lined face, old with wisdom and experience, seemed to under go a microscopic twitch.

"Did you hear that?" said Linda Rash, nervously. "It's as I told you." She was small, dark-haired, and young. Her right hand opened and closed, over and over.

Calvin nodded. She said, quietly, "Elvex, you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again."

There was no answer. The robot sat as though it were cast out of one piece of metal, and it would stay so until it heard its name again.

George R.R. Martin was the bane of my existence. Whatever I did, he was always there first. Did I win the Campbell award? So did he -- years before. The year my story "Unaccompanied Sonata" was up for a Hugo -- and I was sure it was the only chance I'd ever have to win one -- guess who beat me for the award? Yes, of course, it was George R.R. Martin, with "The Way of Cross and Dragon." And what really pissed me off was that he didn't even need that Hugo; his story "Sand Kings" also won that year in a longer category.

"Portrait of His Children"
by George R. R. Martin

Richard Cantling found the package leaning up against his front door, one evening in late October when he was setting out for his walk. It annoyed him. He had told his postman repeatedly to ring the bell when delivering anything too big to fit through the mail slot, yet the man persisted in abandoning the packages on the porch, where any passerby could simply walk off with them. Although, to be fair, Cantling's house was rather isolated, sitting on the river bluffs at the end of a cul de sac, and the trees effectively screened it off from the street. Still, there was always the possibility of damage from rain or wind or snow.

The one year that the American Book Awards included a science fiction category (immediately howled out of existence by the dreadfully sensitive literateurs who, quite properly, feel threatened by a fiction which they do not understand, yet which is taken seriously by many intelligent and educated people), Goldstein won the award with her first novel, a paperback original entitled The Red Magician. Who was this writer?

"Tourists"
by Lisa Goldstein

He awoke feeling cold. He had kicked the blankets off and the air conditioning was on too high. Debbie -- where was she? It was still dark out.

Confused, he pulled the blankets back and tried to go to sleep. Something was wrong. Debbie was gone, probably in the bathroom or downstairs getting a cup of coffee. And he was . . . he was on vacation, but where? Fully awake now, he sat up and tried to laugh. It was ridiculous. Imagine paying thousands of dollars for a vacation and then forgetting where you were. Greece? No, Greece was last year.

I remember attending a cyberpunk panel at a convention in (I think) Austin, where Greg Bear shared a platform with Lewis Shiner and John Shirley. Shiner, definitely a co-conspirator with Bruce Sterling in the movement that had just been christened cyberpunk, was not even sure he wanted to be a science fiction writer; Shirley had always been punk (in the musical sense) and was perfectly content to add the "cyber." But Greg Bear seemed genuinely baffled. Why was he being included on this panel? He was a hard-sf writer working within the tradition of cool-idea SF, but with real attention to believable characters. He didn't pose or wear mirrorshades, nor did his characters.

"Blood Music"
by Greg Bear

There is a principle in nature I don't think anyone has pointed out before. Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little live things -- bacteria, microbes, "animalcules" -- are born and die, not counting for much except in the bulk of their existence and the accumulation of their tiny effects. They do not perceive deeply. They do not suffer much. A hundred billion, dying, would not begin to have the same importance as a single human death.

Within the ranks of magnitude of all creatures, small as microbes or great as humans, there is an equality of "elan," just as the branches of a tall tree, gathered together, equal the bulk of the limbs below, and all the limbs equal the bulk of the trunk.

My first contact with Greg Benford is just too embarrassing to write about. OK, I will anyway. He had been the first of the "young" sf writers that I saw in person at a convention. I didn't speak to him -- I couldn't get close. He was walking briskly from A to B, and was surrounded by several people struggling to keep up. Some of them, eagerly talking to him, had sort of a puppy-dog posture, walking sideways, hopping, skipping, trying to stay parallel with him while facing him. It was kind of pathetic, kind of funny, too, at least to the young kid, the outsider I was then.

"Time's Rub"
by Gregory Benford

At Earth's winter ebb, two crabbed figures slouched across a dry, cracked plain.

Running before a victor who was himself slow-dying, the dead-stench of certain destiny cloyed to them. They knew it. Yet kept on, grinding over plum-colored shales.

They shambled into a pitwallow for shelter, groaning, carapaces grimed and discolored. The smaller of them, Xen, turned toward the minimal speck of burnt-yellow sun, but gained little aid through its battered external panels. It grasped Fax's extended pincer -- useless now, mauled in battle -- and murmured of fatigue.

David Zindell is a writer who seems to function best at novel length -- at long novel length -- for it takes many pages to contain his worlds, his peoples, his lives. Indeed, "Shanidar" is a Promethean story so lush that when you've finished it you'll feel as if you've lived through a novel's worth of story somehow compressed into these few pages.

"Shanidar"
by David Zindell

He came in to my cutting shop on a quiet night when the air was black and still, the only sound the far-off hissing and humming of the machines as they hovered over the city streets, melting and smoothing the ice for the following day. He was a pale young man with brown, lively eyes beneath the white hood of his parka, and he wore a beard so dense and black that you would have thought him born on Gehenna or Shydveg and not, as he claimed, on Summerworld, where the men are nearly hairless and their skin is as dark as coffee. With his heavy brows and large, muscular face he nearly had the look of the Alaloi which had been the fashion -- you will presently understand why -- some twenty years ago. As he stood there in the stone hallway knocking the slush from his skates, he explained that he had need of my services. "You are Rainer, the cutter?" he asked me in a low, conspiratorial voice. I told him that was what the people of the city called me. "I want you to use all your skills," he said. "I want to become an Alaloi."

People sometimes ask me who, in my opinion, is the best science fiction writer working today. This is an impossible question, of course. Best at what kind of science fiction? For what audience? Do we include the average quality of all an author's works, or just his or her best? For sheer gung-ho swashbuckling sci-fi adventure, maybe Mike Resnick's Santiago but maybe Dave Wolverton's Golden Queen series; but that category does grave injustice to both writers because it seems to suggest that that's all their novels are. how about best writer of "hard" sf? Well, how hard? Or the best writer of good prose? Define "good," please. The questions quickly evaporate as soon as they're given any serious thought. Who is the best science fiction writer today? Don't waste my time.

"Speech Sounds"
by Octavia E. Butler

There was trouble aboard the Washington Boulevard bus. Rye had expected trouble sooner or later in her journey. She had put off going until loneliness and hopelessness drove her out. She believed she might have one group of relatives left alive -- a brother and his two children twenty miles away in Pasadena. That was a day's journey one-way, if she were lucky. The unexpected arrival of the bus as she left her Virginia Road home had seemed to be a piece of luck -- until the trouble began.

I first saw Crowley's name on the cover of a novel called The Deep. There was a cover quote from Harlan Ellison that said, if I remember correctly, that anyone who didn't buy and read this book immediately was too stupid to walk and hold their pants up. Or something like that. Anyway, I've always made it a practice in my life to do just what Harlan Ellison says, so I bought the book.

"Snow" by John Crowley

I don't think Georgie would ever have got one for herself: She was at once unsentimental and a little in awe of death. No, it was her first husband -- an immensely rich and (from Georgie's description) a strangely weepy guy, who had got it for her. Or for himself, actually, of course. He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died himself shortly after it was installed. If installed is the right word. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of what she'd inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway, but the Wasp couldn't really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.

I've heard theories about how British science fiction differs in some systematic way from American science fiction, and there is some plausibility to the idea. After all, they grow out of separate evolutionary tracks, interbreeding frequently, but forced to grow in quite different soils. American science fiction was magazine-driven, pulpy, masked in lurid covers that protected it from the smothering embrace of academia but also drove off many of the serious-minded people who might have written, read, and commented within the field. British science fiction, however, was regarded as a continuation of the tradition of H. G. Wells, and included such writers as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis, all of whom exploited science fiction's power as a medium of satire and allegory. So British science fiction can include within its penumbra such older works as Frankenstein, Gulliver's Travels, Utopia, and Erewhon, while American science fiction, in search of roots, can only seize with any plausibility upon the works of Julies Verne, and before him the Thrilling Wonder stories form travelers and promoters like John Smith and Marco Polo and, of course, the extravagantly fictional claims of inventors filing for patents on perpetual motion machines.

"Klein's Machine" by Andrew Weiner

They took him off the bus in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His eyes were blank, and he had been sobbing quietly to himself for the past fifty miles. He was holding the crushed remains of a bright green flower in his left hand.

The driver turned him over to the ticket clerk, who called the local police. He was unresponsive to their questions. He had no identification and no possessions except a one-way ticket to San Francisco and a crumpled $20 bill.

They threw the flower in the garbage and took him to the emergency ward of the local hospital.

"He's spaced out," one of the police officers told the intern. "Flying high."

Subsequent blood and urine analysis, however, showed no trace of drugs.

The skeleton of this story, if you saw it bleached and wired together in a museum, could easily be taken as one of those unforgettable idea stories we sometimes call Campbellian and which were epitomized in classic stories like "The Star" and "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "Nightfall." When we first read those stories, they blew us away by the sheer power of the idea; only later, upon reexamining the story, do we realize that the idea is really all there is in this kind of tale. All the characters, all the dialogue, all the actual events exist solely in order to explain or expose the idea to the reader. They do not matter in themselves.

"Pots" by C. J. Cherryh

It was a most bitter trip, the shuttle-descent to the windy surface. Suited,encumbered by lifesupport, Desan stepped off the platform and waddled onward into the world, waving off the attentions of small spidery service robots: "Citizen, this way, this way, citizen, have a care -- do watch your step; a suit tear is hazardous."

Low-level sevitors. Desan detested them. The chief of operations had plainly sent these creatures accompanied only by an AI eight-wheel transport, which inconveniently chose to park itself a good five hundred paces beyond the shuttle blast zone, an uncomfortably long walk across the dusty pan in the crinkling, pack-encumbered oxy-suit. Desan turned, casting a forlorn glance at the shuttle waiting there on its landing gear, silver, dip-nosed wedge under a gunmetal sky, at rest on an ochre and rust landscape. He shivered in the skyview, surrendered himself and his meager luggage to the irritating ministries of the service robots, and waddled on his slow way down to the waiting AI transport.

OK, I'll tell you right now, my favorite John Varley story wasn't even published under his name, it came out as a story by "Herb Boehm." But that story didn't belong in this anthology for several reasons. First, it's already too familiar -- it has been turned into a novel and then into an HBO movie. Second, it was published in the 1970s, just like another of Varley's best stories, "The Persistence of Vision," and so is ineligible for this book.

"Press Enter " by John Varley

"This is a recording. Please do not hang up until--"

I slammed the phone down so hard it fell onto the floor. Then I stood there, dripping wet and shaking with anger. Eventually, the phone started to make that buzzing noise they make when a receiver is off the hook. It's twenty times as loud as any sound a phone can normally make, and I always wondered why. As though it was such a terrible disaster: "Emergency! Your telephone is off the hook!!!"

Phone answering machines are one of the small annoyances of life. Confess, do you really like to talk to a machine? But what had just happened to me was more than a petty irritation. I had just been called by an automatic dialing machine.

Imagine if Cortez could have sat down and negotiated with Moctezuma, or Pizarro with Atahualpa, or John Smith with Powhatan.

Wait. Come to think of it, they did. Hmmm.

If there's one kind of story that science fiction is notorious for doing very, very badly, it's the "ruling class" story. Ambassadors, generals, presidents, corporate CEOs, congressmen, judges, politicians as a group and as individuals, as soon as they take the stage in a science fiction story, we find our eyes glazing over as the author inadvertently reveals his or her ignorance of how power is actually wielded, or of the delicacy with which the powerful must treat each other.

"Dinosaurs"
by Walter Jon Williams

The Shars seethed in the dim light of their ruddy sun. Pointed faces raised to the sky, they sniffed the faint wind for sign of the stranger and scented only hydrocarbons, far-off vegetation, damp fur, the sweat of excitement and fear. Weak eyes peered upward, glistened with hope, anxiety, apprehension, and saw only the faint pattern of stars. Short, excited barking sounds broke out here and there, but mostly the Shars crooned, a low ululation that told of sudden onslaught, destruction, war in distant reaches, and now the hope of peace.

The crowds surged left, then right. Individuals bounced high on their third legs, seeking a view, seeing only the wide sea of heads, the ears and muzzles pointed to the stars.

Fish-out-of-water stories are a staple of Hollywood. Sometimes they can lead to charming fables like Splash, and sometimes to formulaic extravaganzas like Beverly Hills Cop III. But, while Hollywood finds humor in thrusting characters from one milieu into another, it's worth remembering that when fish are too long out of the water, they die. (They also begin to stink, which is an aspect that Hollywood has not neglected.)

"Face Value"
by Karen Joy Fowler

It was almost like being alone. Taki, who had been alone one way or another most of his life, recognized this and thought he could deal with it. What choice did he have? It was only that he had allowed himself to hope for something different. A second star, small and dim, joined the sun in the sky, making its appearance over the rope bridge which spanned the empty river. Taki crossed the bridge in a hurry to get inside before the hottest part of the day began.

Something flashed briefly in the dust at his feet and he stooped to pick it up. It was one of Hesper's poems, half finished, left out all night. Taki had stopped reading Hesper's poetry. It reflected nothing, not a whisper of her life here with him, but was filled with longing for things and people behind her.

Lew Shiner and Bruce Sterling are friends and, through playing ideas off each other, have come to have some opinions in common. Shiner also seemed to enjoy the early notoriety of the movement that later became "cyberpunk," but wore his mirrorshades as a joke, really. For at the same time that cyberpunk was first penetrating the consciousness of a certain segment of the American culture, Shiner was talking with real excitement about mainstream authors that he admired, and how he wanted to write something other than science fiction. Or perhaps I should say, "in addition to" science fiction, for with Shiner there was no ringing declaration that he was not a sci-fi-writer.

"Cabracan"
by Lewis Shiner

When Eddie got to the godhouse he still had to wait outside for the old man to notice him. Chan Ma'ax sat and mashed yellow pine gum into pom for the incense pots and pretended he hadn't seen. Eddie was sweating and his nerves were bad, but the old man demanded patience.

In their time the Mayans had worked out the cycles of the planets and built stone temples so graceful they made Eddie's eyes burn. And all that survived was a dozen wood poles and a thatched roof, and a wrinkled old man sitting crosslegged on a mat.

What if somebody offered you the chance to be president, and all you had to do in order to have that lofty office was to cease to be yourself, and instead become Bill Clinton.

(Come to think of it, isn't that how Bill Clinton got to be president in the first place?)

When you think about it, you have to realize: What a cheat! Because then I wouldn't be president, Bill Clinton would. And since he already is, nothing would be changed except that I would no longer be me. So no thanks.

"Rockabye Baby"
by S. C. Sykes

He could remember hearing his neck snap. In fact, Cody could remember every long minute after the accident, crumpled in a limp ball against the van's roof. He remembered the immediate numbing sensation, as if everything from his Adam's apple down had gone to sleep. He wondered if this was what death was like and felt cheated. Not a thing passed before his eyes, except a fly which had been in the van all afternoon in spite of his swipes at it with the road map. His St. Christopher's medal, a gift from Jenny before he went into the Navy, had fallen across his right nostril and he was having trouble breathing. He decided it was somewhat ironic to be suffocated by the demoted patron saint of travelers. Okay, so he had no business heading down to Tijuana for the deliberate purpose of losing a weekend in hedonistic debauchery -- a broken neck, he felt, was rather severe punishment for a sin only in the planning stages.

When Bruce Sterling fired the first salvoes of the movement that eventually was branded as cyberpunk, he included in his gunsights the "boring old farts" of "humanist" science fiction. It was John Kessel who adopted both names, the first with humor and the second with earnestness, issuing a "humanist manifesto" and becoming the spokesman of a movement that didn't know it existed until it was attacked.

"The Pure Product" by John Kessel

I arrived in Kansas City at one o'clock on the afternoon of the thirteenth of August. A Tuesday. I was driving the beige 1983 Chevrolet Citation that I had stolen two days earlier in Pocatello, Idaho. The Kansas plates on the car I'd taken from a different car in a parking lot in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City was founded by the Mormons, whose god tells them that in the future Jesus Christ will come again.

I drove through Kansas City with the windows open and the sun beating down through the windshield. The car had no air conditioning, and my shirt was stuck to my back from seven hours behind the wheel. Finally I found a hardware store, "Hector's" on Wornall. I pulled into the lot.

Nancy Kress is so nice that if I wrote a character like her, you wouldn't believe she could exist. But she does.

I've taught a class with her; I've been a guest in her home; I've shared hours of conversation with her at writing workshops we both attended. I read her how-to-write column in Writer's Digest with pleasure (only slightly tinged with envy that she got that gig and I didn't). Above all, I read and love her fiction, and no story more than "Out of All Them Bright Stars," a tale so real and fragile and lovely that to say more about it would be to risk damaging it, like touching a butterfly's wing or the petal of a camellia. It's the Heisenberg principle: You can't analyze this story without moving it to another place, so it's no longer the story that it would have been.

"Out of All Them Bright Stars"
by Nancy Kress

So I'm filling the catsup bottles at the end of the night, and I'm listening to the radio Charlie has stuck up on top of a movable panel in the ceiling, when the door opens and one of them walks in. I know right away it's one of them -- no chance to make a mistake about that -- even though it's got on a nice-cut suit and a brim hat like Humphrey Bogart used to wear in Casablanca. But there's nobody with it, no professor from the college or government men like on the TV show from the college or even any students. It's all alone. And we're a long way out the highway from the college.

It stands in the doorway, blinking a little, with rain dripping off its hat. Kathy, who's supposed to be cleaning the coffee machine behind the counter, freezes and stares with one hand still holding the used filter up in the air like she's never going to move again. Just then Charlie calls out from the kitchen, "Hey, Kathy, you ask anybody who won the Trifecta?" and she doesn't even answer him.

My own story? On the one hand, it is repulsively immodest thing to do, to include a story of my own in an anthology of the "important" sf stories of the 1980s. On the other hand, the publisher told me he wouldn't publish these volumes if a story of mine weren't included. And on the third hand, if somebody else had edited this anthology and didn't include something of mine, I would never have forgiven him. So I'm not going to pretend my publisher had to twist my arm very hard to get me to include a story. I wanted to have something in here, and if that proves me to be vain and ambitious, please remember that it was Nancy Kress, not myself, that I set up as a model of virtue.

"The Fringe"
by Orson Scott Card

LaVon's book report was drivel, of course. Carpenter knew it would be from the moment he called on the boy. After Carpenter's warning last week, he knew LaVon would have a book report -- LaVon's father would never let the boy be suspended. But LaVon was too stubborn, too cocky, too much the leader of the other sixth-graders' constant rebellion against authority to let Carpenter have a complete victory.

"I really, truly loved Little Men," said LaVon. "It just gave me goose bumps."

The class laughed. Excellent comic timing, Carpenter said silently. But the only place that comedy is useful here in the New Soil country is with the gypsy pageant wagons. That's what you're preparing yourself for, LaVon, a career as a wandering parasite who lives by suckering laughter out of weary farmers.

Copyright © 1998 Orson Scott Card