From Amazon
Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimov's and the annual anthology series, The Year's Best Science Fiction, has assembled 23 stories by some of the best-known names in SF, past and present. The stories, which "explore the farthest reaches of the universe," were written between 1951 and 1998 and are presented in chronological order. As the stories progress, so does the terrain being explored.
"The Sentinel," a classic Arthur C. Clarke tale of a man discovering an alien artifact on the moon (the inspiration for 2001: A Space Odyssey), shows the quintessential explorer of the time: alone, in charge of his environment, and happy that way. "Grandpa," by James H. Schmitz, concerns the indomitable spirit of Man, or at least Boy, and his natural lordship over all things alien. In Niven's "Becalmed in Hell," we meet a cyborg, and Zelazny introduces us to a population genetically engineered to the edge of humanity in "The Keys to December." Le Guin's story, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," suggests that in order to explore alien territory, you must be insane. Tiptree's piece, "The Man Who Walked Home," is a brilliant portrayal of the tension between the need to explore the unknown, and the human cost of that need. Stories by Varley and Swanwick, Baxter and Egan, show humans from an alien perspective: we are no longer the sum and center of the universe, merely a part.
While it is possible to read this book as nothing more than a collection of adventure stories leavened with a pinch of a sense of wonder, a deeper reading reveals how the genre's gaze has turned from an examination of what lies Out There, the unknown place and the alien being, to a more inward contemplation: the question of what it is to be human. --Luc Duplessis.
Review
"The most imaginative editor in the field."--The Village Voice
"Dozois is to the 1980s and 1990s what John W. Campbell, Jr., was to the 1940s and 1950s-the finest editor in the world of short SF."-Publishers Weekly
"Dozois is to the 1980s and 1990s what John W. Campbell, Jr., was to the 1940s and 1950s-the finest editor in the world of short SF."-Publishers Weekly
Book Description
Distant planets, galaxies, alien races--the universe is vast and filled with an almost unimaginable range of possibilities. But imagine it we can. Here are more than twenty stories from the most inventive writers in the field, including:
Poul Anderson * Stephen Baxter * Greg Bear * Gregory Benford * Arthur C. Clarke * Hal Clement * Greg Egan * H. B. Fyfe * R. A. Lafferty * Geoffrey A. Landis * Ursula K. Le Guin * Jack McDevitt * Larry Niven * G. David Nordley * Edgar Pangborn * Kim Stanley Robinson * James H. Schmitz * Cordwainer Smith * Michael Swanwick * James Tiptree, Jr. * John Varley * Vernor Vinge
These are the stories of discovering those possibilities-the stories of the explorers and pioneers who push the envelope further out--exciting tales of alien landscapes and adventures on far distant shores that are the heart and soul of science fiction.
Poul Anderson * Stephen Baxter * Greg Bear * Gregory Benford * Arthur C. Clarke * Hal Clement * Greg Egan * H. B. Fyfe * R. A. Lafferty * Geoffrey A. Landis * Ursula K. Le Guin * Jack McDevitt * Larry Niven * G. David Nordley * Edgar Pangborn * Kim Stanley Robinson * James H. Schmitz * Cordwainer Smith * Michael Swanwick * James Tiptree, Jr. * John Varley * Vernor Vinge
These are the stories of discovering those possibilities-the stories of the explorers and pioneers who push the envelope further out--exciting tales of alien landscapes and adventures on far distant shores that are the heart and soul of science fiction.
From the Publisher
"The most imaginative editor in the field." -The Village Voice
"Dozois is to the 1980s and 1990s what John W. Campbell, Jr., was to the 1940s and 1950s - the finest editor in the world of short SF." -Publishers Weekly
"Dozois is arguably the most accomplished editor in the field of modern short fiction." -SF Site
About the Author
Gardner Dozois edits the Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies and Asimov's SF magazine from his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has won the Hugo Award for Best Editor ten times.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Explorers
The Sentinel
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps the most famous modern science-fiction writer in the world, seriously rivaled for that title only by the late Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke is probably most widely known for his work on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey but is also renowned as a novelist, short-story writer, and a writer of nonfiction, usually on technological subjects such as spaceflight. He has won three Nebula Awards, three Hugo Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a Grandmaster Nebula for Life Achievement. His best-known books include the novels Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars, The Deep Range, Rendezvous with Rama, A Fall of Moondust, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, Songs of Distant Earth, and The Fountains of Paradise and the collections The Nine Billion Names of God, Tales of Ten Worlds, and The Sentinel. He has also written many nonfiction books on scientific topics, the best-known of which are probably Profiles of the Future and The Wind from the Sun, and is generally considered to be the man who first came up with the idea of the communications satellite. His most recent books are the novel 3001: The Final Odyssey and the nonfiction collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds: Collected Works 1944-1998. Born in Somerset, England, Clarke now lives in Sri Lanka and was recently knighted
Clarke may well have written more, and more memorably, about the theme of exploration, particularly space exploration, than any other science-fiction writer, dealing with it with one degree or another of centralness in novels and stories such as Rendezvous with Rama, “A Meeting with Medusa” (to be found elsewhere in this anthology), “Before Eden,” The Sands of Mars, The City and the Stars, “Rescue Party,” “Summertime on Icarus,” “Out of the Sun,” Songs of Distant Earth, “The Star,” “Transit of Earth,” and all of the Odyssey novels, as well as in scores of other stories and in dozens of nonfiction articles.
He’s seldom handled the theme better, though, than in the classic story that follows, the inspiration for the later movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I think actually works better than the film in some ways—a near-perfect miniature that captures the odd blend of minutely detailed scientific accuracy and sweeping Stapeldonian mysticism that is the essence of Clark’s work and a story still capable of delivering in its last few lines that shiver of mingled fear and wonder that is one of the hallmarks of science fiction at its best.
The next time you see the full Moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain, one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium—the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.
Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisium is very flat. There are none of the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking us wherever we wished to go.
I was geologist—or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic—in charge of the group exploring the southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating down the flanks of those stupendous cliffs, retreating into the empty heart of the Moon. Over the land which we were crossing, the tideless ocean had once been half a mile deep, and now the only trace of moisture was the hoarfrost one could sometimes find in caves which the searing sunlight never penetrated.
We had begun our journey early in the slow lunar dawn, and still had almost a week of Earth time before nightfall. Half a dozen times a day we would leave our vehicle and go outside in the space suits to hunt for interesting minerals, or to place markers for the guidance of future travelers. It was an uneventful routine. There is nothing hazardous or even particularly exciting about lunar exploration. We could live comfortably for a month in our pressurized tractors, and if we ran into trouble we could always radio for help and sit tight until one of the spaceships came to our rescue.
I said just now that there was nothing exciting about lunar exploration, but of course that isn’t true. One could never grow tired of those incredible mountains, so much more rugged than the gentle hills of Earth. We never knew, as we rounded the capes and promontories of that vanished sea, what new splendors would be revealed to us. The whole southern curve of the Mare Crisium is a vast delta where a score of rivers once found their way into the ocean, fed perhaps by the torrential rains that must have lashed the mountains in the brief volcanic age when the Moon was young. Each of these ancient valleys was an invitation, challenging us to climb into the unknown uplands beyond. But we had a hundred miles still to cover, and could only look longingly at the heights which others must scale.
We kept Earth time aboard the tractor, and precisely at 2200 hours the final radio message would be sent out to Base and we would close down for the day. Outside, the rocks would still be burning beneath the almost vertical sun, but to us it was night until we awoke again eight hours later. Then one of us would prepare breakfast, there would be a great buzzing of electric razors, and someone would switch on the shortwave radio from Earth. Indeed, when the smell of frying sausages began to fill the cabin, it was sometimes hard to believe that we were not back on our own world—everything was so normal and homely, apart from the feeling of decreased weight and the unnatural slowness with which objects fell.
It was my turn to prepare breakfast in the corner of the main cabin that served as a galley. I can remember that moment quite vividly after all these years, for the radio had just played one of my favorite melodies, the old Welsh air “David of the White Rock.” Our driver was already outside in his space suit, inspecting our caterpillar treads. My assistant, Louis Garnett, was up forward in the control position, making some belated entries in yesterday’s log.
As I stood by the frying pan waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let my gaze wander idly over the mountain walls which covered the whole of the southern horizon, marching out of sight to east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course, there is no loss of detail with distance—none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and sometimes transfigures all far-off things on Earth.
Those mountains were ten thousand feet high, and they climbed steeply out of the plain as if ages ago some subterranean eruption had smashed them skyward through the molten crust. The base of even the nearest was hidden from sight by the steeply curving surface of the plain, for the Moon is a very little world, and from where I was standing the horizon was only two miles away.
I lifted my eyes toward the peaks which no man had ever climbed, the peaks which, before the coming of terrestrial life, had watched the retreating oceans sink sullenly into their graves, taking with them the hope and the morning promise of a world. The sunlight was beating against those ramparts with a glare that hurt the eyes, yet only a little way above them the stars were shining steadily in a sky blacker than a winter midnight on Earth.
I was turning away when my eye caught a metallic glitter high on the ridge of a great promontory thrusting out into the sea thirty miles to the west. It was a dimensionless point of light, as if a star had been clawed from the sky by one of those cruel peaks, and I imagined that some smooth rock surface was catching the sunlight and heliographing it straight into mv eves. Such things were not uncommon. When the Moon is in her second quarter, observers on Earth can sometimes see the great ranges in the Oceanus Procellarum burning with a blue-white iridescence as the sunlight flashes from their slopes and leaps again from world to world. But I was curious to know what kind of rock could be shining so brightly up there, and I climbed into the observation turret and swung our four-inch telescope round to the west.
I could see just enough to tantalize me. Clear and sharp in the field of vision, the mountain peaks seemed only half a mile away, but whatever was catching the sunlight was still too small to be resolved. Yet it seemed to have an elusive symmetry, and the summit upon which it rested was curiously flat. I stared for a long time at that glittering enigma, straining my eyes into space, unt...
