The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (11 page)

The 2008 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Downtown Radisson Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 29 March, 2008, were: Best Novel,
The Missing
, by Sarah Langan; Best First Novel,
Heart-Shaped Box
, by Joe Hill; Best Long Fiction, “Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway,” by Gary Braunbeck; Best Short Fiction, “The Gentle Brush of Wings,” by David Niall Wilson; Best Collection,
Proverbs For Monsters
, by Michael A. Anzen and
5 Stories
, by Peter Straub (tie); Best Anthology,
Five Strokes
to
Midnight
, edited by Gary Braunbeck and Hank Schwaeble; Non-Fiction,
The Cryptopedia
:
A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange & Downright Bizarre
, by Jonathan Maberry and David F. Kramer; Best Poetry Collection
, Being Full of Light, Insubstantial
, by Linda Addison, and
Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet
, by Charlee Jacob and Marge B. Simon (tie); plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to John Carpenter and Robert Weinberg.

The 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by
In War Times
, by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

The 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story was won by “Finisterra,” by David Moles, and “Tideline,” by Elizabeth Bear (tie).

The 2007 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to
Nova Swing
, by M. John Harrison.

The 2008 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by
Black Man
, by Richard Morgan.

The 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by
The Carhullan Army
, by Sarah Hall.

The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award went to Stanley G. Weinbaum.

Death hit the SF and fantasy felds hard again this year. Dead in 2008 and early 2009 were:

Sir ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 91, one of the founding giants of modern science fiction, the last surviving member of the genre’s Big Three, which consisted of Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein, multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master Award, as famous for predicting the development of telecommunications satellites as for being involved in the production of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey, author of such classics as Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise, The Sands of Mars, A Fall of Moondust
, and
The City and the Stars
; ALGIS BUDRYS, 77, author, critic, and editor, author of the classic novel
Rogue Moon
, which many thought should have won the Hugo in its year, plus
Who?, Michaelmas, Hard Landing
, and distinguished short stories such as “A Scraping at the Bones”, “Be Merry”, “Nobody Bothers Gus”, “The Master of the Hounds”, and “The Silent Eyes of Time”; THOMAS M. DISCH, 68, writer and poet, one of the most acclaimed and respected of the New Wave authors who shook up SF in the mid-60s, also considered to be a major American poet, author of the brilliant
334
,
Camp Concentration
,
On Wings of Song
, a large body of biting and sardonic short fiction, and the acerbic critical study of SF
The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of
, which, ironically, finally won him a Hugo; JANET KAGAN, 63, author of the wildly popular “Mama Jason” stories, which were collected in
Mirabile
, as well as the novel
Hellspark
, and one of the most popular
Star Trek
novels ever,
Uhura’s Song
, winner of the Hugo Award for “The Nutcracker Coup”; a close personal friend; BARRINGTON J. BAYLEY, 71, British SF author whose highly inventive novels such as
The Fall of Chronopolis
,
The Pillars of Eternity
, and
The Zap Gun
were a strong infuence on the British New Space Opera of the 1980s and 90s; MICHAEL CRICHTON, 66, bestselling author of such technothrillers as
The Andromeda Strain
,
Jurassic Park
,
Timeline
,
Rising Sun
,
Eaters of the Dead
, and others, most of which were made into successful movies (
Eaters of the Dead
was filmed, pretty faithfully, as
The Thirteenth Warrior
); JOHN UPDIKE, 76, major American novelist, poet, and critic, author of literary novels such as
Rabbit, Run
and
Rabbit Redux
, perhaps best known to genre audiences as the author of fantasy novels
The Witches of Eastwick
(which was filmed under the same name) and
The Widows of Eastwick
; ROBERT ASPRIN, 62, creator and editor of the popular Thieves’ World series of braided anthologies and novels by many hands, as well as an author of comic novels such as
Another Fine Myth
,
Phule’s Company
, and their sequels; DONALD WESTLAKE, 75, who wrote some SF, including the novel
Anarchaos
under the name “Curt Clark,” but who was much better known as a multiple Edgar Award-winning mystery writer, author of two of the most important mystery series of our day, the Parker novels, under the name “Richard Stark,” and the John Dortmunder novels under his own name, plus many stand-alone novels; GEORGE W. PROCTOR, 61, author of sixteen SF and fantasy novels and two co-edited anthologies; JAMES KILLUS, 58, SF writer, atmospheric scientist, and technical writer, author of SF novels
Book of Shadows
and
SunSmoke
; RICHARD K. LYON, 75, SF novelist and research chemist; HUGH COOK, 52, SF/fantasy writer, author of the ten-volume Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series; LEO FRANKOWSKI, 65, SF writer, author of
The Cross Time Engineer
and its many sequels; STEPHEN MARLOWE, 79, prominent mystery novelist who also occasionally wrote SF as Milton Lesser; JODY SCOTT, 85, author of
Passing for Human
and
I, Vampire
; MICHAEL de LARRABEITI, 73, author of the surprisingly dark and violent YA
Borribles
trilogy; BRIAN THOMSEN, 49, SF editor, writer, and anthologist; EDWARD D. HOCK, 77, well-known mystery writer who also dabbled in fantasy and SF; GARY GYGAX, 69, sometimes called the father of fantasy gaming, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game
Dungeons and Dragons
, author also of fantasy novels
The Annubis Murders
and
The Samarkand Solution
; DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, 46, novelist and essayist, author of
Infinite Jest
; JOHNNY BYRNE, 73, veteran British SF/ writer; LINO ALDANI, 83, Italian SF writer; WERNER KURT GIESA, 53, German SF, fantasy, and horror writer; JOSE B. ADOLPH, 74, Peruvian author, playwright, and scholar; LYUBEN DILOV, 80, Bulgarian SF writer; HUGO CORREA, 81, Chilean SF author; GEORGE C. CHESBRO, 68, SF writer; SYDNEY C. LONG, 63, SF writer and Clarion Workshop graduate; EDD CARTIER, 94, veteran pulp illustrator, especially known for his many black-and-white illustrations for the pioneering fantasy magazine
Unknown Worlds
; JOHN BERKEY, 76, prominent SF cover artist; DAVE STEVENS, 52, cartoonist and comics writer, creator of the character
The Rocketeer
; ROBERT LEGAULT, 58, SF reader, professional copy editor, and former managing editor of Tor Books; a friend; FORREST J. ACKERMAN, 92, longtime fan and enthusiastic booster of horror films, also an agent and occasional writer/anthologist, founder of the long-running
Famous Monsters of Filmland
magazine, coiner of the term “sci-fi,” which is loathed in some genre circles, although mostly ubiquitous these days outside them; famed fantasy artist and illustrator JAMES CAWTHORN, 79; MURIEL R. BECKER, 83, SF scholar; JOSEPH PEVNEY, 97, film and TV director who directed many of the episodes of the original
Star Trek
series; BEBE BARRON, 82, who, with husband Lewis Barron, created the striking electronic score for
Forbidden Planet
; ALEXANDER COURAGE, 85, composer of the theme music for the original
Star Trek
series; ROBERT H. JUSTMAN, 82, supervising producer of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
; CHARLTON HESTON, 84, film actor best known to genre audiences for his roles in
Planet of the Apes
,
The Omega Man
, and
Soylent Green
; PAUL NEWMAN, 83, one of the most famous film actors of the twentieth century, whose genre connections were actually somewhat weak, limited to voiceover work in the animated film
Cars
, the unsuccessful SF movie
Quintet
, and
The Hudsucker Proxy
, which had some fantastic elements; ROY SCHEIDER, 76, film actor best known to genre audiences for his roles in
2010
and
Jaws
; JAMES WHITMORE, 87, probably best known to genre audiences for his roles in
Them!
and
Planet of the Apes
; JOHN PHILLIP LAW, 71, film actor best known to genre audiences for his role as the blind “angel” in
Barbarella
; HEATH LEDGER, 28, film actor no doubt to be recalled for a long time by genre audiences for his role as the Joker in
The Dark Knight
; film actor VAN JOHNSON, 92, best known to genre audiences for roles in
Brigadoon
and
The Purple Rose of Cairo
; comic film actor HARVEY KORMAN, 81, who had some minor genre connections for voiceover work on TV’s
The Flintstones
, but who is known by practically everybody for his role as Hedly Lamarr in
Blazing Saddles
; MAJEL BARRETT RODDENBERRY, 76, wife of
Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry, and also an actress in her own right, appearing in several
Star Trek
episodes and providing the voice of the Enterprise’s computer; PATRICK McGOOHAN, 80, acclaimed stage, television, and film actor, best known to genre audiences for his role as Number Six in TV’s
The Prisoner
; RICARDO MONTALBAN, 88, film and television actor, best known to genre audiences for his roles in TV’s
Fantasy Island
and as the villainous Khan in the movie
Star Trek II
:
The Wrath of Khan
; BOB MAY, 69, who played the Robot on TV’s
Lost in Space
; JACK SPEER, 88, long-time SF fan who wrote the first history of fandom,
Up to Now
, plus the
Fancyclopedia
; HARRY TURNER, 88, acclaimed British fan artist; KEN SLATER, 90, long-time SF fan who operated the UK mail-order list Operation Fantast; NORMA VANCE, 81, wife of SF writer Jack Vance; RAYMOND J. SMITH, 77, husband of writer Joyce Carol Oates; Dr CHRISTINE HAYCOCK, 84, widow of SF critic Sam Moskowitz; ANGELINA CANALE KONINGISOR, 84, mother of SF writer Nancy Kress; EVA S. WILLIAMS, 92, mother of SF writer Walter Jon Williams; BARNET EDELMAN, 77, father of SF editor and writer Scott Edelman; HAZEL PEARSON, 77, mother of SF writer William Barton; CLAUDIA LIGHTFOOT, 58, mother of SF writer China Miéville; MARION HOLMAN, 88, mother of SF editor and publisher Rachel Holman; and DANTON BURROUGHS, 64, grandson of SF writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I can think of no genre justification for mentioning them, but I can’t let the obituary section close without mentioning the deaths of TONY HILLERMAN, 83, one of the great mystery writers of the last half of the twentieth century, author of the adventures of Navaho policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, such as
Dance Hall of the Dead
,
Thief of Time
, and
Skinwalkers
; JAMES CRUMLEY, 68, mystery writer who in some ways was the natural heir to Raymond Chandler, author of one of the ten best mystery novels of all time,
The Last Good Kiss
, as well as other hard-edged detective novels such as
Dancing Bear
and
The Mexican Tree Duck
; STUDS TERKEL, 96, compiler of books of interviews on topics of historic significance, such as
The Good War
and
Working
; and Nobel Prize-winner ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, 89, probably the most famous of modern Russian writers, author of
The Gulag Archipelago
,
The First Circle
, and
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, among others, and who I suspect was an infuence on SF writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin (there, a genre connection at last!).

TURING’S APPLES

Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter made his first sale to
Interzone
in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
Science Fiction Age
,
Analog
,
Zenith
,
New Worlds
, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well, one who works on the cutting edge of science, whose fiction bristles with weird new ideas, and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope. Baxter’s first novel,
Raft
, was released in 1991, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as
Timelike Infinity
,
Anti-Ice
,
Flux
, and the H. G. Wells pastiche – a sequel to
The Time Machine
–
The Time Ships
, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels
Voyage
,
Titan
,
Moonseed
,
Mammoth
,
Book One: Silverhair
,
Manifold: Time
,
Manifold: Space
,
Evolution
,
Coalescent
,
Exultant
,
Transcendent
,
Emperor
,
Resplendent
,
Conqueror
,
Navagator
,
Firstborn
, and
The H-Bomb Girl
, and two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke,
The Light of Other Days
and
Time’s Eye, a Time Odyssey
. His short fiction has been collected in
Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence
,
Traces
, and
Hunters of Pangaea
, and he has released a chapbook novella,
Mayfower II
. Coming up are several new novels, including
Weaver
,
Flood
, and
Ark
.

As the disquieting story that follows suggests, perhaps it’s better if the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
doesn’t
succeed. . .

N
EAR THE CENTRE
of the Moon’s far side there is a neat, round, well-defined crater called Daedalus. No human knew this existed before the middle of the twentieth century. It’s a bit of lunar territory as far as you can get from Earth, and about the quietest.

That’s why the teams of astronauts from Europe, America, Russia and China went there. They smoothed over the floor of a crater ninety kilometres wide, laid sheets of metal mesh over the natural dish, and suspended feed horns and receiver systems on spidery scaffolding. And there you had it, an instant radio telescope, by far the most powerful ever built: a super-Arecibo, dwarfing its mother in Puerto Rico. Before the astronauts left they christened their telescope Clarke.

Now the telescope is a ruin, and much of the floor of Daedalus is covered by glass, Moon dust melted by multiple nuclear strikes. But, I’m told, if you were to look down from some slow lunar orbit you would see a single point of light glowing there, a star fallen to the Moon. One day the Moon will be gone, but that point will remain, silently orbiting Earth, a lunar memory. And in the further future, when the Earth has gone too, when the stars have burned out and the galaxies fled from the sky, still that point of light will shine.

My brother Wilson never left the Earth. In fact he rarely left England. He was buried, what was left of him, in a grave next to our father’s, just outside Milton Keynes. But he
made
that point of light on the Moon, which will be the last legacy of all mankind.

Talk about sibling rivalry.

2020

It was at my father’s funeral, actually, before Wilson had even begun his SETI searches, that the Clarke first came between us.

There was a good turnout at the funeral, at an old church on the outskirts of Milton Keynes proper. Wilson and I were my father’s only children, but as well as his old friends there were a couple of surviving aunts and a gaggle of cousins mostly around our age, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, so there was a good crop of children, like little flowers.

I don’t know if I’d say Milton Keynes is a good place to live. It certainly isn’t a good place to die. The city is a monument to planning, a concrete grid of avenues with very English names like Midsummer, now overlaid by the new monorail. It’s so
clean
it makes death seem a social embarrassment, like a fart in a shopping mall. Maybe we need to be buried in ground dirty with bones.

Our father had remembered, just, how the area was all villages and farmland before the Second World War. He had stayed on even after our mother died twenty years before he did, him and his memories made invalid by all the architecture. At the service I spoke of those memories – for instance how during the war a tough Home Guard had caught him sneaking into the grounds of Bletchley Park, not far away, scrumping apples while Alan Turing and the other geniuses were labouring over the Nazi codes inside the house. “Dad always said he wondered if he picked up a mathematical bug from Turing’s apples,” I concluded, “because, he would say, for sure Wilson’s brain didn’t come from him.”

“Your brain too,” Wilson said when he collared me later outside the church. He hadn’t spoken at the service; that wasn’t his style. “You should have mentioned that. I’m not the only mathematical nerd in the family.”

It was a difficult moment. My wife and I had just been introduced to Hannah, the two-year-old daughter of a cousin. Hannah had been born pro- foundly deaf, and we adults in our black suits and dresses were awkwardly copying her parents’ bits of sign language. Wilson just walked through this lot to get to me, barely glancing at the little girl with the wide smile who was the centre of attention. I led him away to avoid any offence.

He was thirty then, a year older than me, taller, thinner, edgier. Others have said we were more similar than I wanted to believe. He had brought nobody with him to the funeral, and that was a relief. His partners could be male or female, his relationships usually destructive; his companions were like unexploded bombs walking into the room.

“Sorry if I got the story wrong,” I said, a bit caustically.

“Dad and his memories, all those stories he told over and over. Well, it’s the last time I’ll hear about Turing’s apples!”

That thought hurt me. “We’ll remember. I suppose I’ll tell it to Eddie and Sam some day.” My own little boys.

“They won’t listen. Why should they? Dad will fade away. Everybody fades away. The dead get deader.” He was talking about his own father, whom we had just buried. “Listen, have you heard they’re putting the Clarke through its acceptance test run? . . .” And, there in the churchyard, he actually pulled a handheld computer out of his inside jacket pocket and brought up a specification. “Of course you understand the importance of it being on Farside.” For the millionth time in my life he had set his little brother a pop quiz, and he looked at me as if I was catastrophically dumb.

“Radio shadow,” I said. To be shielded from Earth’s noisy chatter was particularly important for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to which my brother was devoting his career. SETI searches for faint signals from remote civilizations, a task made orders of magnitude harder if you’re drowned out by very loud signals from a nearby civilization.

He actually applauded my guess, sarcastically. He often reminded me of what had always repelled me about academia – the barely repressed bullying, the intense rivalry. A university is a chimp pack. That was why I was never tempted to go down that route. That, and maybe the fact that Wilson had gone that way ahead of me.

I was faintly relieved when people started to move out of the churchyard. There was going to be a reception at my father’s home, and we had to go.

“So are you coming for the cakes and sherry?”

He glanced at the time on his handheld. “Actually I’ve somebody to meet.”

“He or she?”

He didn’t reply. For one brief moment he looked at me with honesty. “You’re better at this stuff than me.”

“What stuff? Being human?”

“Listen, the Clarke should be open for business in a month. Come on down to London; we can watch the first results.”

“I’d like that.”

I was lying, and his invitation probably wasn’t sincere either. In the end it was over two years before I saw him again.

By then he’d found the Eagle signal, and everything had changed.

2022

Wilson and his team quickly established that their brief signal, first detected just months after Clarke went operational, was coming from a source 6,500 light years from Earth, somewhere beyond a starbirth cloud called the Eagle Nebula. That’s a long way away, on the other side of the Galaxy’s next spiral arm in the Sagittarius.

And to call the signal “brief” understates it. It was a second-long pulse, faint and hissy, and it repeated just once a year, roughly. It was a monument to robotic patience that the big lunar ear had picked up the damn thing at all.

Still it was a genuine signal from ET, the scientists were jumping up and down, and for a while it was a public sensation. Within days somebody had rushed out a pop single inspired by the message: called “Eagle Song,” slow, dreamlike, littered with what sounded like sitars, and very beautiful. It was supposedly based on a Beatles master lost for five decades. It made number two.

But the signal was just a squirt of noise from a long way off. When there was no follow-up, when no mother ship materialized in the sky, interest moved on. That song vanished from the charts.

The whole business of the signal turned out to be your classic nine-day wonder. Wilson invited me in on the tenth day. That was why I was resentful, I guess, as I drove into town that morning to visit him.

The Clarke Institute’s ground station was in one of the huge glass follies thrown up along the banks of the Thames in the profligate boomcapitalism days of the noughties. Now office space was cheap enough even for academics to rent, but central London was a fortress, with mandatory crawl lanes so your face could be captured by the surveillance cameras. I was in the counter-terror business myself, and I could see the necessity as I edged past St Paul’s, whose dome had been smashed like an egg by the Carbon Cowboys’ bomb of 2018. But the slow ride left me plenty of time to brood on how many more
important
people Wilson had shown off to before he got around to his brother. Wilson never was loyal that way.

Wilson’s office could have been any modern data-processing installation, save for the all-sky projection of the cosmic background radiation painted on the ceiling. Wilson sat me down and offered me a can of warm Coke. An audio transposition of the signal was playing on an open laptop, over and over. It sounded like waves lapping at a beach. Wilson looked like he hadn’t shaved for three days, slept for five, or changed his shirt in ten. He listened, rapt.

Even Wilson and his team hadn’t known about the detection of the signal for a year. The Clarke ran autonomously; the astronauts who built it had long since packed up and come home. A year earlier the telescope’s signal processors had spotted the pulse, a whisper of microwaves. There was structure in there, and evidence that the beam was collimated – it looked artificial. But the signal faded after just a second.

Most previous SETI searchers had listened for strong, continuous signals, and would have given up at that point. But what about a lighthouse, sweeping a microwave beam around the Galaxy like a searchlight? That, so Wilson had explained to me, would be a much cheaper way for a transmitting civilization to send to a lot more stars. So, based on that economic argument, the Clarke was designed for patience. It had waited a whole year. It had even sent requests to other installations, asking them to keep an electronic eye out in case the Clarke, stuck in its crater, happened to be looking the other way when the signal recurred. In the end it struck lucky and found the repeat pulse itself, and at last alerted its human masters.

“We’re hot favourites for the Nobel,” Wilson said, matter of fact.

I felt like having a go at him. “Probably everybody out there has forgotten about your signal already.” I waved a hand at the huge glass windows; the office, meant for fat-cat hedge fund managers, had terrific views of the river, the Houses of Parliament, the tangled wreck of the London Eye. “Okay, it’s proof of existence, but that’s all.”

He frowned at that. “Well, that’s not true. Actually we’re looking for more data in the signal. It is very faint, and there’s a lot of scintillation from the interstellar medium. We’re probably going to have to wait for a few more passes to get a better resolution.”

“A few more passes? A few more years!”