Lightspeed Year One

SCALES

Alastair Reynolds

The enemy must die.

Nico stands and waits in the long line, sweating under the electric-yellow dome of the municipal force field.

They must die.

Near the recruiting station, one of the captives has been wheeled out in a cage. The reptile is splayed in a harness, stretched like a frog on the dissection table. A steady stream of soldiers-in-waiting leaves the line, jabbing an electro-prod through the bars of the cage to a chorus of jeers. It’s about the size of a man, and surprisingly androform except for its crested lizard head, its stubby tail and the brilliant green shimmer of its scales. Already they’re flaking off, black and charred, where the prod touches. The reptile was squealing to start with, but it’s slumped and unresponsive now.

Nico turns his head away. He just wants the line to move ahead so he can sign up, obtain his citzenship credits and get out of here.

The enemy must die.

They came in from interstellar darkness, unprovoked, unleashing systematic destruction on unsuspecting human assets. They wiped mankind off Mars and blasted Earth’s lunar settlements into radioactive craters. They pushed the human explorers back into a huddle of defenses around Earth. Now they’ve brought the war to cities and towns, to the civilian masses. Now force shields blister Earth’s surface, sustained by fusion plants sunk deep into the crust. Nico’s almost forgotten what it’s like to look up at the stars.

But the tide is turning. Beneath the domes, factories assemble the ships and weapons to take the war back to the reptiles. Chinks are opening in the enemy’s armour. All that’s needed now are men and women to do Earth’s bidding.

One of the recruiting sergeants walks the line, handing out iced water and candies. He stops and chats to the soldiers-to-be, shaking them by the hand, patting them on the back. He’s a thirty-mission veteran; been twice as far out as the orbit of the moon. He lost an arm, but the new one’s growing back nicely, budding out from the stump like a baby’s trying to punch its way out of him. They’ll look after you too, he says, holding out a bottle of water.

“What’s the catch?” Nico asks.

“There isn’t one,” the sergeant says. “We give you citizenship and enough toys to take apart a planet. Then you go out there and kill as many of those scaly green bastards as you can.”

“Sounds good to me,” Nico says.

Up in the fortified holdfast of Sentinel Station, something’s different. The tech isn’t like the equipment Nico saw at the recruiting station, or in basic training back on Earth. It’s heavier, nastier, capable of doing more damage. Which would be reassuring, if it wasn’t for one troubling fact.

Earth has better ships, guns and armour than anyone down there has heard about—but then so do the reptiles.

Turns out they’re not exactly reptiles either. Not that Nico cares much. Cold-blooded or not, they still attacked without provocation.

The six months of in-orbit training at Sentinel Station are tough. Half the kids fall by the wayside. Nico’s come through, maybe not top of his class, but somewhere near it. He can handle the power-armour, the tactical weapons. He’s ready to be shown to his ship.

It’s not quite what he was expecting.

It’s a long, sleek, skull-grey shark of a machine that goes faster-than-light.

“Top secret, of course,” says the instructor. “We’ve been using it for interstellar intelligence gathering and resource-acquistion.”

“How long have we had this?”

The instructor grins. “Before you were born.”

“I thought we never had any ambitions beyond Mars,” says Nico.

“What about it?”

“But the reptiles came in unprovoked, they said. If we were already out there . . . ”

They haul him out after a couple of days in the coolbox. Any more of that kind of questioning and he’ll be sent back home with most of his memories scrubbed.

So Nico decides it’s not his problem. He’s got his gun, he’s got his armour and now he’s got his ride. Who cares who started the damned thing?

The FTL transport snaps back into normal space around some other star, heading for a blue gas giant and an outpost that used to be a moon. The place bristles with long-range sensors and the belligerent spines of anti-ship railguns. Chokepoint will be Nico’s home for the next year.

“Forget your armour certification, your weapons rating,” says the new instructor, a human head sticking out of an upright black life-support cylinder. “Now it’s time to get real.”

A wall slides back to reveal a hall of headless corpses, rank on rank of them suspended in green preservative.

“You don’t need bodies where you’re going, you just need brains.” she says. “You can collect your bodies on the way back home, when you’ve completed your tour. We’ll look after them.”

So they strip Nico down to little more than a head and a nervous system, and plug what’s left into a tiny, hyper-agile fighter. The battle lines are being drawn far beyond conventional FTL now. The war against the reptiles will be won and lost in the N-dimensional tangle of interconnected wormhole pathways.

Wired into the fighter, Nico feels like a god with armageddon at his fingertips—not that he’s really got fingertips. He doesn’t feel much like Nico any more. He cracks a wry smile at Chokepoint’s new arrivals, gawping at the bodies in the tanks. His old memories are still in there somewhere, but they’re buried under a luminous welter of tactical programming.

Frankly, he doesn’t miss them.

They’re not fighting the reptiles any more. Turns out they were just the organic puppets of an implacable, machine-based intelligence. The puppetmasters are faster and smarter and their strategic ambitions aren’t clear. But it doesn’t concern thing-that-was-once-Nico.

After all, it’s not like machines can’t die.

Strategic Command sends him deeper. He’s forwarded to an artificial construct actually embedded in the tangle, floating on a semi-stable node like a dark thrombosis. Nico’s past caring where the station lies in relation to real space.

No one fully human can get this far—the station is staffed by bottled brains and brooding artificial intelligences. With a jolt, thing-that-was-once-Nico realises that he doesn’t mind their company. At least they’ve got their priorities right.

At the station, thing-that-was-once-Nico learns that a new offensive has opened up against the puppetmasters, even further into the tangle. It’s harder to reach, so again he must be remade. His living mind is swamped by tiny machines, who build a shining scaffold around the vulnerable architecture of his meat brain. The silvery spikes and struts mesh into a fighter no larger than a drum of oil.

He doesn’t think much about his old body, back at Chokepoint, not any more.

The puppetmasters are just a decoy. Tactical analysis reveals them to be an intrusion into the wormhole tangle from what can only be described as an adjunct dimension. The focus of the military effort shifts again.

Now the organic matter at the core of thing-that-was-once-Nico’s cybernetic mind is totally obsolete. He can’t place the exact moment when he stopped thinking with meat and started thinking with machinery, and he’s not even sure it matters now. As an organism, he was pinned like a squashed moth between two pages in the book of existence. As a machine, he can be endlessly abstracted, simulated unto the seventh simulation, encoded and pulsed across the reality-gap, ready to kill.

This he—or rather it—does.

And for a little while there is death and glory.

Up through the reality stack, level by level. By now it’s not just machines versus machines. It’s machines mapped into byzantine N-dimensional spaces, machines as ghosts of machines. The terms of engagement have become so abstract—so, frankly, higher-mathematical—that the conflict is more like a philosophical dialogue, a debate between protagonists who agree on almost everything except the most trifling, hair-splitting details.

And yet it must still be to the death—the proliferation of one self-replicating, pan-dimensional class of entities is still at the expense of the other.

When did it begin? Where did it begin? Why?

Such questions simply aren’t relevant or even answerable anymore.

All that matters is that there is an adversary, and the adversary must be destroyed.

Eventually—although even the notion of time’s passing is now distinctly moot—the war turns orthogonal. The reality stack is itself but one compacted laminate of something larger, so the warring entities traverse mind-wrenching chasms of meta-dimensional structure, their minds in constant, self-evolving flux as the bedrock of reality shifts and squirms beneath them.

And at last the shape of the enemy becomes clear.

The enemy is vast. The enemy is inexorably slow. As its peripheries are mapped, it gradually emerges that the enemy is a class of intellect that the machines barely have the tools to recognise, let alone understand.

It’s organic.

It is multi-form and multi-variant. It hasn’t been engineered or designed. It’s messy and contingent, originating from the surface of a structure, a higher-mathematical object. It’s but one of several drifting on geodesic trajectories through what might loosely be termed “space.” Arcane fluids slosh around on the surface of this object, and the whole thing is gloved in a kind of gas. The enemy requires technology, not just to sustain itself, but to propagate its warlike ambitions.

Triumph over the organic is a cosmic destiny the machines have been pursuing now through countless instantiations. But to kill the enemy now, without probing deeper into its nature, would be both inefficient and unsubtle. It would waste machines that could be spared if the enemy’s weaknesses were better understood. And what better way to probe those weaknesses than to create another kind of living thing, an army of puppet organisms, and send that army into battle? The puppets may not win, but they will force the adversary to stretch itself, to expose aspects of itself now hidden.

And so they are sent. Volunteers, technically—although the concept of “volunteer” implies a straightforward altruism difficult to correlate with the workings of the machines’ multi-dimensional decision-making matrices. The flesh is grown in huge hangars full of glowing green vats, then shaped into organisms similar but not identical to the enemy. Into those vast, mindless bodies are decanted the thin, gruel-like remains of compactified machine intellects. It’s not really anything the machines would recognise as intelligence, but it gets the job done.

Memories kindle briefly back to life as compactification processes shuffle through ancient data, untouched for subjective millenia, searching for anything that might offer a strategic advantage. Among the fleeting sensations, the flickering visions, one of the machines recalls standing in line under an electric-yellow sky, waiting for something. It hears the crackle of an electro-prod, smells the black char of burning tissue.

The machine hesitates for a moment, then deletes the memory. Its new green-scaled puppet body is ready, it has work to do.

The enemy must die.





ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS


Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool, England. With a background in math and engineering, he is the author of over fifty novels and over a hundred published short stories. He has collaborated with Sir Arthur C. Clarke and is working on a new collaboration with Sir Terry Pratchett. Among his awards are BSFA awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, and Locus, Asimov, and Analog awards. His latest novel is Stone Spring, first of a new series.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has written four novels, including the New York Times bestseller Halo: The Cole Protocol. He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, twin daughters, and his wife.

Orson Scott Card is the bestselling author of more than forty novels, including Ender’s Game, which was a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The sequel, Speaker for the Dead, also won both awards, making Card the only author to have captured science fiction’s two most coveted prizes in consecutive years. His most recent books include another entry in the Enderverse, Ender in Exile, and the first of a new young adult series, Pathfinder. His latest book is The Lost Gates, the first volume of a new fantasy series.

Adam-Troy Castro’s seventeen books include Emissaries from the Dead (winner of the Philip K. Dick award), and The Third Claw of God, both of which feature his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator, Andrea Cort. His next books will be a series of middle-school novels about the adventures of a strange young boy called Gustav Gloom, the first of which will be Gustav Gloom and the People Taker, due out from Grossett and Dunlap in August 2012. His short fiction has been nominated for five Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Stokers. Adam-Troy, who describes the odd hyphen between his first and middle names as a typo from his college newspaper that was just annoying enough to embrace with gusto, lives in Miami with his wife Judi and a population of insane cats that includes Uma Furman and Meow Farrow.

Maggie Clark is an emerging Canadian writer with her toes in many literary waters. Alongside this first publication for science fiction, she’s been published for poetry in RATTLE, Pedestal Magazine, Ryga, and ditch, while a novelette is forthcoming at Vagabondage Press. Her first play was given a reading at Canada’s Magnetic North Theatre Festival, and among her current commissioned projects is a feature length film. Having devoured wide tracts of science fiction throughout her childhood, returning to the form as a mature writer feels a lot like coming home.

Tom Crosshill’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Sybil’s Garage and Flash Fiction Online. In 2009, he won the Writers of the Future contest. Originally from Latvia, he writes in English and lives in New York, where he’s a member of the writers’ group Altered Fluid. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, translated books and worked in a zinc mine, among other things. He’s currently working on a post-Singularity YA novel featuring superpowers and giant robots. Visit him at tomcrosshill.com.

Since 1997, Julie E. Czerneda has turned her love and knowledge of biology into science fiction novels and short stories that have received international acclaim, multiple awards, and bestselling status. A popular speaker on scientific literacy and SF, in 2009 Julie was Guest of Honor for the national conventions of New Zealand and Australia, as well as Master of Ceremonies for Anticipation, the Montreal Worldcon. She’s presently finishing her first fantasy novel, A Turn of Light, to be published by DAW in 2011. Most recently, Julie was a guest lecturer at the National Science Teachers convention in Philadelphia and participated in Laurentian’s Social Science & SF conference. As for new projects, Julie is co-editing Tesseracts 15: A Case of Quite Curious Tales with Susan MacGregor and will be a juror for the 2011 Sunburst Awards. (No matter what, she’ll be out canoeing, too.) For more about Julie’s work, visit czerneda.com.

Tananarive Due is a winner of the American Book Award and a two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. Her novels include the My Soul to Keep series, The Between, The Good House, and Joplin’s Ghost. Her short fiction has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in anthologies such as Dark Delicacies II, Voices from the Other Side, Dark Dreams, Dark Matter, and Mojo: Conjure Stories. She is a frequent collaborator with SF writer Steven Barnes: they’ve produced film scripts, short stories, and three Tennyson Hardwick detective novels, the latest of which (written with actor Blair Underwood) is From Cape Town With Love. (They also collaborate in another way: they’re married.)

Carol Emshwiller grew up in Michigan and in France. She lives in New York City in the winter and in Bishop, CA in the summer. She’s been doing only short stories lately. A new one will appear in Asimov’s soon. She’s wondering if she’s too old to start a novel but if a good idea came along she might do it anyway. PS Publishing is publishing two of her short story collections in a single volume (sort like an Ace Double), with her anti-war stories on one side and other stories on the other.

John R. Fultz (johnrfultz.wordpress.com) lives in the Bay Area, California, but is originally from Kentucky. His fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Black Gate, and Space & Time, as well as the comic book anthologies Zombie Tales and Cthulhu Tales. His graphic novel of epic fantasy, Primordia, was published by Archaia Comics. John’s literary heroes include Tanith Lee, Thomas Ligotti, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, William Gibson, Robert Silverberg, and Darrell Schweitzer (not to mention Howard, Poe, and Shakespeare). When not writing stories, novels, or comics, John teaches English Literature at the middle/high school level and plays a mean guitar. In a previous life he made his living as a wandering storyteller on the lost continent of Atlantis.

Eric Gregory lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is working toward his MFA at North Carolina State University. His stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Futurismic, Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, and other publications. Find more at ericmg.com.

Joe Haldeman writes for a living and teaches as an absorbing hobby. He has been a full-time writer since 1969, except for the occasional teaching and a short tenure as senior editor of Astronomy Magazine. He has taught writing at MIT every fall semester since 1983. Main hobbies are astronomy, bicycling, watercolor, and guitar. His latest books are Marsbound and Starbound. He’s hard at work on the final book of the trilogy, Earthbound.

Vylar Kaftan writes speculative fiction of all genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream. She’s published stories in places such as Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons. She lives with her husband Shannon in northern California and blogs at vylarkaftan.net.

James Patrick Kelly has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. His most recent book is a collection of stories entitled The Wreck of the Godspeed. His short novel Burn won the Nebula Award in 2007. He has won the Hugo Award twice: In 1996, for his novelette “Think Like A Dinosaur,” and in 2000, for his novelette, “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel he is co-editor of The Secret History of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Anthology. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and the Board of Directors of the Clarion Foundation. His website is jimkelly.net.

Caitlín R. Kiernan has published seven novels, most recently The Red Tree, which has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards. Her short fiction has been collected into several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. In Spring 2011, Subterranean Press will release Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). She studied geology and paleontology at the University of Alabama and the University of Colorado, and has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. She’s currently working on her next novel. Kiernan lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner, Kathryn.

Alice Sola Kim currently lives in San Francisco but occasionally finds herself in St. Louis, where she is completing an MFA program at Washington University. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Stephen King is the bestselling, award-winning author of innumerable classics, such as The Shining, Carrie, Cujo, and The Dead Zone—all of which have been adapted to film, as have many of King’s other novels and stories. Other projects include editing Best American Short Stories 2007, writing a pop culture column for Entertainment Weekly, scripting for the Vertigo comic American Vampire, and a collaboration on a musical with rocker John Mellencamp called Ghost Brothers of Darkland County. His most recent books are the novels Blockade Billy and Under the Dome, a thousand-plus-page epic he has been working on for more than twenty-five years. His latest book is Full Dark, No Stars, a short fiction collection of four all-new, previously unpublished stories. Another recent collection, Just After Sunset, came out in 2008. Other recent short stories include a collaboration with his son, Joe Hill, called “Throttle,” for the Richard Matheson tribute anthology He Is Legend, and “UR,” a novella written exclusively for the Amazon Kindle. His other work includes classics such as The Stand, The Dark Tower, Salem’s Lot, among others.

David Barr Kirtley has been described as “one of the newest and freshest voices in sf.” His work frequently appears in Realms of Fantasy, and he has also sold fiction to the magazines Weird Tales and Intergalactic Medicine Show, the podcasts Escape Pod and Pseudopod, and the anthologies New Voices in Science Fiction, The Dragon Done It, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. He’s also appeared in several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies: The Living Dead and The Living Dead 2, and he has a story forthcoming in the anthology The Way of the Wizard that’s due out in November. Kirtley is also the co-host (with John Joseph Adams) of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Ted Kosmatka is the author of numerous short stories and novelettes. His work has appeared in F&SF and Asimov’s, the anthology Seeds of Change, and has been reprinted in seven best-of-the-year anthologies, serialized over the radio, and translated into Hebrew, Russian, Polish, and Czech. He is a winner of the Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award and has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His first novel, The Helix Game, is forthcoming from Del Rey. Ted worked for most of the last decade in laboratories in Indiana but now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest, where he writes science fiction video games for a living.

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-six books: three fantasy novels, twelve SF novels, three thrillers, four collections of short stories, one YA novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain, which was based on the Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name. She won her second Hugo in 2009 in Montreal, for the novella “The Erdmann Nexus.” Kress has also won three additional Nebulas, a Sturgeon, and the 2003 John W. Campbell Award (for her novel Probability Space). Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories; a bio-thriller, Dogs; and an SF novel, Steal Across the Sky. Kress’s fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country and blogs at nancykress.blogspot.com.

Geoffrey A. Landis is a physicist who works at the NASA John Glenn Research Center on developing advanced technologies for human and robotic space exploration. He is also a Hugo- and Nebula-award winning science fiction writer; the author of the novel Mars Crossing, the short-story collection Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities, and more than eighty short stories, which have appeared in places including Analog, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous best-of-the-year volumes. Most recently, his poem “Searching” won the 2009 Rhysling award for best science-fiction poem, and his poetry collection Iron Angels appeared from Van Zeno. His most recent story, “Sultan of the Clouds,” appears in the September 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and her most recent novel, Audrey’s Door, won the 2009 Stoker for best novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies Darkness on the Edge and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father’s Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet. Her work has been translated into ten languages and optioned by the Weinstein Company for film. It has also garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an American Library Association Award, two Dark Scribe Awards, a New York Times Book Review editor’s pick, and a Publishers Weekly favorite book of the year selection. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and rabbit.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and two hundred short pieces, fiction and non-fiction. He has received the Edgar Award, seven Bram Stokers, the British Fantasy Award, and many others. His novella, Bubba Hotep, was made into a movie of the same name.

Tanith Lee was born in 1947, didn’t learn to read till nearly eight, and started to write aged nine—and she hasn’t stopped since. In 1975, DAW Books published her epic fantasy The Birthgrave (soon due for re-release from Norilana) and so rescued Lee from lots of silly jobs at which she was extravagantly bad. Since then, she’s written more than ninety novels and collections plus almost three hundred short stories. She lives on the S.E coast of England with her husband, writer/artist John Kaiine, in a house full of books and plants, under the firm claw of two cats.

Yoon Ha Lee’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Farrago’s Wainscot, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, and Sybil’s Garage. She’s also appeared in the anthologies Twenty Epics, Japanese Dreams, In Lands That Never Were, The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Fantasy 6, and Science Fiction: The Best of 2002. Her poetry has appeared in such venues as Jabberwocky, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Mythic Delirium, and Goblin Fruit. Learn more at pegasus.cityofveils.com.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of innumerable SF and fantasy classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and A Wizard of Earthsea (and the others in the Earthsea Cycle). She has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the winner of five Hugos, six Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and twenty Locus Awards. She’s also a winner of the Newbery Medal, The National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) was a programmer before he became a lawyer, and he thinks legal drafting can benefit from some software coding practices. His fiction has appeared/will appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Science Fiction World, the Writers of the Future anthology, The Dragon and the Stars, and Panverse, among other places. He lives in the Greater Boston Area with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, and they welcomed their daughter into the world in 2010. Those late nights when the newborn wouldn’t sleep proved a good time to think about stories. He is currently working on his first novel.

“Postings from an Amorous Tomorrow” is Corey Mariani’s first piece of published fiction. He lives in northern California with his beautiful wife. In his free time, he plays bass in the rock band, Shays’ Rebellion, which tours extensively throughout Humboldt County every winter.

George R.R. Martin is the wildly popular author of the A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series, and many other novels, such as Dying of the Light and The Armageddon Rag. His short fiction—which has appeared in numerous anthologies and in most if not all of the genre’s major magazines—has garnered him four Hugos, two Nebulas, the Stoker, and the World Fantasy Award. Martin is also known for editing the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero anthologies, and for his work as a screenwriter on such television projects as the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. A TV series based on A Song of Ice and Fire debuted on HBO in 2011.

Anne McCaffrey is a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, a SFWA Grand Master, and an inductee into the SF Hall of Fame. Her work is beloved by generations of readers. She is best known for authoring the Dragonriders of Pern series, but she has also written dozens of other novels. She was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1926 and currently makes her home in Ireland, in a home named Dragonhold-Underhill.

Jack McDevitt, who Stephen King describes as “the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke,” is the author of sixteen novels, nine of which were finalists for the Nebula Award. His novel Seeker won the Nebula in 2007, and other award-winners include his first novel, The Hercules Text, which won the Philip K. Dick Special Award, and Omega, which received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel. McDevitt’s most recent books are Time Travelers Never Die and The Devil’s Eye, both from Ace Books. A Philadelphia native, McDevitt had a varied career before becoming writer, which included being a naval officer, an English teacher, a customs officer, a taxi driver, and a management trainer for the US Customs Service. He is married to the former Maureen McAdams, and resides in Brunswick, Georgia, where he keeps a weather eye on hurricanes.

Tessa Mellas is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. She is an editorial assistant for The Cincinnati Review. Her fiction has been published in StoryQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, Fugue, and New Orleans Review. She has been a vegetarian for over two decades, was formerly a competitive synchronized figure skater, grew up on the St. Lawrence River, where each June shadflies rose out of the water in great gray clouds, and is an aficionado of snow.

Nnedi Okorafor is the author of the novels Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Speaker, and Who Fears Death. Her book for children, Long Juju Man, won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. She is also the winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature and the Carl Brandon Society’s Parallax Award, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, Andre Norton Award, and the Essence Magazine Literary Award. Forthcoming books include Akata Witch and Iridessa the Fire-Bellied Dragon Frog. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and in anthologies such as Eclipse Three, So Long Been Dreaming, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, and in John Joseph Adams’s Seeds of Change and The Way of the Wizard.

Variously known as a student of Linguistics, a web application developer, a graduate of the 2008 Clarion West class, a writer of speculative fiction, and a purveyor of medieval armor and fine baked goods, An Owomoyela mostly resides in places contrary to consensus reality but is compelled to list a university town in the American Midwest as home on most official documents. Fiction bearing the mark of this elusive author can be found in an increasing variety of “here”s and “there”s, and more general information can be found at an.owomoyela.net.

Susan Palwick’s publication credits include the novels Flying In Place, The Necessary Beggar, and Shelter. Much of her short fiction—which has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere—was recently collected in the volume The Fate of Mice. Her work has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic awards, and Flying in Place won the Crawford Award for best first fantasy novel. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada with her husband and three cats.

Cat Rambo writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, appeared from Paper Golem Press in 2009, following her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories in 2007. Among the places her work has appeared are Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Clarkesworld.

Robert Reed is the author of more than two hundred works of short science fiction, with the occasional fantasy and odd horror thrown into the mix. He has also published various novels, including Marrow and The Well of Stars, two epic tales about a world-sized starship taking a lap around the galaxy. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo in 2007. Reed lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter, and a computer jammed with forgotten files.

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry in 1966. He spent his early years in Cornwall, then returned to Wales for his primary and secondary school education. He completed a degree in astronomy at Newcastle, then a PhD in the same subject at St Andrews in Scotland. He left the UK in 1991 and spent the next sixteen years working in the Netherlands, mostly for the European Space Agency, although he also did a stint as a postdoctoral worker in Utrecht. He had been writing and selling science fiction since 1989, and published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 2000. He has recently completed his tenth novel and has continued to publish short fiction. His novel Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award three times. In 2004 he left scientific research to write full time. He married in 2005 and returned to Wales in 2008, where he lives in Rhondda Cynon Taff.

Hugo-award winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch publishes fiction in many genres under many names. Her novels have appeared in fifteen countries, and her short stories have appeared in many year’s best collections. Once upon a time, she edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, but she gave all that up for writing. Over the next three years, WMG Publishing will put her entire backlist into print, including all of her short stories (in electronic form). For more information on her work, visit kristinekathrynrusch.com.

Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com.

Bruce Sterling is the author of many novels, including Islands in the Net, Heavy Weather, Distraction, Holy Fire, The Zenith Angle, The Caryatids, and, with William Gibson, The Difference Engine. He is the winner of three Locus Awards, two Hugos, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is also the editor of the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades. Much of his short fiction, which has appeared in magazines such as F&SF and Omni, was recently collected in Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.

David Tallerman is the author of around a hundred short stories, many of them published or forthcoming in markets such as Bull Spec, Andromeda Spaceways, Space and Time, Flash Fiction Online, and John Joseph Adams’s zombie best-of anthology The Living Dead. He’s also published poetry (in Chiaroscuro), film reviews (in Son and Foe) and a comic script (in the award-winning British comic Futurequake.) His first novel, tentatively known as Giant Thief, is currently seeking a good home, and he recently completed the first draft of his second. He can be found online at davidtallerman.net.

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Andre Norton Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009, and the Lambda and Hugo Awards in 2010. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat. Learn more at catherynnemvalente.com.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and more. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, genevievevalentine.com.

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. The eighth volume, Kitty Goes to War, is due out in July. She has also written a young adult novel, Voices of Dragons, and a stand-alone fantasy novel, Discord’s Apple. Her short fiction has appeared many times in Realms of Fantasy, and in a number of anthologies, such as Fast Ships, Black Sails and Warriors. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

Charles Yu received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection, Third Class Superhero. He has also had work published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Eclectica, The Gettysburg Review, The Malahat Review, Oxford American, and Sou’wester. His first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon) was published in September. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


Many thanks to the following:

Lightspeed’s publisher, Sean Wallace, for publishing Lightspeed and choosing me to edit it.

The brilliant and dedicated Lightspeed editorial team: Molly Tanzer, Esther Inglis-Arkell, Stefan Rudnicki, Christie Yant, Erin Stocks, Stacey Friedberg, and Robyn Lupo. I couldn’t edit the magazine without your support; although only my name goes on the cover and may be recognized by award committees, you guys are every bit as much a part of this as I am. Additionally, a huge thanks goes out to former team members Andrea Kail and Jordan Hamessley—both of whom were with us from the very start and were instrumental in getting Lightspeed off the ground.

Our amazing webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert, for creating such a beautiful design for the magazine, and making all of the behind-the-scenes coding and whatnot work without a hitch.

Our ever-vigilant slush readers: Kate Galey, Andrew Liptak, Shannon Rampe, Caleb Schulz, Moshe Siegel, and LaShawn Wanak.

Our nonfiction writers—including especially our most prolific contributor Genevieve Valentine—for balancing our fiction with some fact.

All of our wonderful artists who provided our covers.

Astronomers Mike Brotherton and Pamela Gay, for not only providing some of Lightspeed’s nonfiction content, but also advising on the astronomical science in some of our stories.

My intern, Rebecca McNulty, for her tireless devotion to the occasionally mundane tasks I assign her, and for always being there when I need her.

My agent, Joe Monti, for the incredible amount of support he’s provided since taking me on as a client—he’s gone above and beyond the call of duty. To any writers reading this: you’d be lucky to have Joe in your corner.

Gordon Van Gelder, for mentoring me, and giving me my start in the field. None of my successes would have been possible without his tuteledge.

My mom, for her endless enthusiasm for all my new projects.

My dear friends Robert Bland, Desirina Boskovich, Christopher M. Cevasco, Douglas E. Cohen, David Barr Kirtley, and Matt London, for all of their support.

The readers and critics who have praised Lightspeed and made our first year such a huge success.

And last, but certainly not least: a big thanks to all of the authors who appear in Lightspeed and in this anthology.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IS MADE FOR PERMISSION TO PRINT THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL:


“Gossamer” by Stephen Baxter. © 1995 by Stephen Baxter. Originally published in Science Fiction Age. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Manumission” by Tobias Buckell. © 2008 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Elephants of Poznan” by Orson Scott Card. © 2000 by Orson Scott Card. Originally published in Fantastyka. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro. © 2010 by Adam-Troy Castro. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, August 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Saying the Names” by Maggie Clark. © 2011 by Maggie Clark. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, March 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son” by Tom Crosshill. © 2011 by Tom Crosshill. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, April 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Passenger” by Julie E. Czerneda. © 1999 by Julie E. Czerneda. Originally published in Treachery & Treason, edited by Laura Anne Gilman and Jennifer Heddle. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Patient Zero” by Tananarive Due. © 2000 by Tananarive Due. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“No Time Like the Present” by Carol Emshwiller. © 2010 by Carol Emshwiller. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, July 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Taste of Starlight” by John R. Fultz. © 2010 by John R. Fultz. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, October 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Harrowers” by Eric Gregory. © 2011 by Eric Gregory. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, May 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“More Than the Sum of His Parts” by Joe Haldeman. © 1985 by Joe Haldeman. Originally published in Playboy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan. © 2010 by Vylar Kaftan. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, June 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Breakaway, Backdown” by James Patrick Kelly. © 1996 by James Patrick Kelly. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Faces in Revolving Souls” by Caitlín R. Kiernan. © 2005 by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Originally published in Outsiders, edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim. © 2010 by Alice Sola Kim. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, November 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Beachworld” by Stephen King. © 1984 by Stephen King. Originally published in Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Cats in Victory” by David Barr Kirtley. © 2010 by David Barr Kirtley. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, June 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“In-Fall” by Ted Kosmatka. © 2010 by Ted Kosmatka. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, December 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Ej-Es” by Nancy Kress. © 2003 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in the anthology, Stars, edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Eliot Wrote” by Nancy Kress. © 2011 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, May 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Long Chase” by Geoffrey A. Landis. © 2002 by Geoffrey A. Landis. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Hindsight” by Sarah Langan. © 2010 by Sarah Langan. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, October 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” by Joe R. Lansdale. © 1986 Joe R. Lansdale. Originally published in Nukes edited by John MacLay. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Silence of the Asonu” by Ursula K. Le Guin. © 1998 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Originally published in Orion. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Black Fire” by Tanith Lee. © 2011 by Tanith Lee. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, January 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” by Yoon Ha Lee. © 2010 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, September 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Simulacrum” by Ken Liu. © 2011 by Ken Liu. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, February 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Postings from an Amorous Tomorrow” by Corey Joshua Mariani. © 2011 by Corey Joshua Mariani. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, January 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“ . . . for a single yesterday” by George R.R. Martin. © 1975 by George R.R. Martin. Originally published in Epoch. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Velvet Fields” by Anne McCaffrey. © 1973 by Anne McCaffrey. Originally published in Worlds of If. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency.

“The Cassandra Project” by Jack McDevitt. © 2010 by Cryptic, Inc. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, June 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Bibi From Jupiter” by Tessa Mellas. © 2007 by Tessa Mellas. Originally published in StoryQuarterly. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor. © 2008 by Nnedi Okorafor. Originally published in Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“All That Touches the Air” by An Owomoyela. © 2011 by An Owomoyela. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, April 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Cucumber Gravy” by Susan Palwick. © 2001 by Susan Palwick. Originally published in SCI FICTION. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Amid the Words of War” by Cat Rambo. © 2010 by Cat Rambo. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, September 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Long Enough and Just So Long” by Cat Rambo. © 2011 by Cat Rambo. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, February 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Woman Leaves Room” by Robert Reed. © 2011 by Robert Reed. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, March 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Scales” by Alastair Reynolds. © 2009 by Alastair Reynolds. Originally published in The Guardian. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Observer” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. © 2008 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Originally published in Front Lines edited by Denise Little. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Travelers” by Robert Silverberg. © 1999 by Agberg, Ltd. Originally published in Amazing Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Maneki Neko” by Bruce Sterling. © 1998 by Bruce Sterling. Originally published in Hayakawa’s Science Fiction Magazine (Japanese language) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (English language). Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Jenny’s Sick” by David Tallerman. © 2010 by David Tallerman. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, December 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“How to Become a Mars Overlord” by Catherynne Valente. © 2010 by Catherynne Valente. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, August 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball” by Genevieve Valentine. © 2010 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, July 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn. © 2010 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, June 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Standard Loneliness Package” by Charles Yu. © 2010 by Charles Yu. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, November 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.