The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois Page B
Authors: Gardner Dozois
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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
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
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