Read The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Online
Authors: David G. Hartwell
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The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II
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Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the USA as part of
The Science Fiction Century
by Tor Books, 1997
This edition first published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2004
Copyright © David G. Hartwell 1997, 2004
The right of David G. Hartwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84119-514-6
eISBN 978-1-78033-418-9
Printed and bound in the EU
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
MICHAEL SHAARA
2066: Election Day
A. E. VAN VOGT
Enchanted Village
WOLFGANG JESCHKE
The King and the Dollmaker
GORDON EKLUND and GREGORY BENFORD
If the Stars Are Gods
GEORGE TURNER
I Still Call Australia Home
ALEXANDER KUPRIN
Liquid Sunshine
“A Work of Art” copyright © 1956 by James Blish, renewed © 1984 J. C. Blish, D. E. Blish. Used by permission.
“2066: Election Day” copyright © 1956 by Jeffrey M. Shaara and Lila E. Shaara. Used by permission.
“The Rose” copyright © 1953, 1981 by Charles Harness. First appeared in
Authentic Science Fiction
: reprinted by permission of the author and the
author’s agent, Linn Prentis.
“The Time Machine” copyright © 1954 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Used by permission.
“Mother” copyright © 1977 by Philip José Farmer. Used by permission of the author.
“Veritas” copyright © 1987 by James Morrow. Used by permission of the author.
“Enchanted Village” copyright © 1952 by A. E. van Vogt. First printed in
Destination Universe
, Pellgerini & Cudahy, 1952. Used by permission of the
author.
“The King and the Dollmaker” copyright © 1970 by Wolfgang Jeschke. Used by permission of the author.
“Drunkboat” copyright © 1963 by Cordwainer Smith. Used by permission of the author’s agent, Scott Meredith.
“Another World”. First published in 1895. Translation copyright © 1962 by Damon Knight. Used by permission of the translator, Damon Knight.
“If the Stars Are Gods” copyright © 1976 by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund. Used by permission of the authors.
“I Still Call Australia Home” copyright © 1990 by George Turner. Used by permission of the author’s agent, Cherry Weiner.
“Liquid Sunshine” translation copyright © 1982 by Leland Fetzer. Used by permission of the translator, Leland Fetzer.
“Greenslaves” copyright © 1965 by Frank Herbert. Used by permission of the author’s Estate.
“He Who Shapes” copyright © 1967 by Roger Zelazny. Used by permission of the author’s agent, The Pimlico Agency.
“Beggars in Spain” copyright © 1991 by Nancy Kress. First published by Axolotl Press. Used by permission of the author.
“Rumfuddle” copyright © 1973 by Jack Vance. Used by permission of the author.
To Maron Waxman, Susan Ann Protter, Les Pockell, and
Kathryn Cramer, without whom this book would never
have been completed
.
I would like to acknowledge the significant presence of John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur G. Clarke, and all the other science fiction writers who
are not reprinted in this book. I used their work to support my argument for the consideration of science fiction as a worthwhile literature in
The World Treasury of Science Fiction
. I used
many of them again to illuminate and uphold the value of the hard SF tradition in
The Ascent of Wonder
. In this book, I chose the work of other major writers, some of them less familiar,
some of them equally famous, so as not to allow my argument to get lost in the particular aesthetic of SF that is so dominant in their work. But their presence is here anyway, anyhow, even in the
absence of representative examples of their work.
Rooted as they are in the facts of contemporary life, the phantasies of even a second-rate writer of modern Science Fiction are incomparably richer, bolder, and stranger than
the Utopian or Millennial imaginings of the past
.
– ALDOUS HUXLEY
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. Most frequently, the scientific dressing clothes fantasy.
As fantasies are as meaningful as science, the phantasms of technology now fittingly embody our hopes and anxieties
.
– BRIAN W. ALDISS
The twentieth century was the science fiction century. We are now living in the world of the future described by the genre science fiction of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s –
a world of technologies we love and fear, sciences so increasingly complex and steeped in specialized diction and jargon that fewer and fewer of us understand science on what used to be called a
“high school level”. These are the days, as Paul Simon sings, of miracles and wonder.
Science fiction is a literature for people who value knowledge and who desire to understand how things work in the world and in the universe. In science fiction, knowledge is power and power is
technology, and technology is useful in improving the human condition. It is, by extension, a literature of empowerment. The lesson of the genre megatext – that body of genre literature that
in aggregate embodies the standard plots, tropes, images, specialized diction and clichés – is that one can solve problems through the application of knowledge of science and
technology. By further extension, the SF megatext is an allegory of faith in science. Everyone knows there are science fiction addicts – I am one – and this is why: it expresses,
represents, and confirms faith in science and reason.
Life is never so neat that abstract patterns, such as centuries, are more than arbitrary dividers. In the case of science fiction, the twentieth century really began about 1895, with the first
stories of H.G. Wells, the greatest writer in a vigorous literary tradition now superseded, called the Scientific Romance. Wells had many contemporaries writing Scientific Romances, such as George
Griffith and M.P. Shiel; predecessors include Jules Verne and Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. But the tradition did end in Wells’s lifetime, although Brian Stableford, in
Scientific Romance in
Britain, 1890–1950
(1985), revives the term, which fell out of usage by World War II, to emphasize the differences between the evolution of American and British science fiction. Olaf
Stapledon, S. Fowler Wright, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, for instance, might properly be considered as having written late examples of Scientific Romance.
But Wells, especially in his works between 1895 and 1911, was the primary model for a variety of other writers, in many languages, to explore the explosion of ideas and technologies that the
advent of the new century promised. Not the only model, I hasten to add. I have included a fine story by J.H. Rosny aîné, from the French, in this anthology. And as the genre of
science fiction began to coalesce in the teens and twenties of the new century, it became evident that a number of earlier writers, first of all Jules Berne but also many others from Mary Shelley
and Edgar Allan Poe to Fitz-James O’Brien and Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton might provide variant models for science fiction. Wells, however, was that spark that ignited the genre.
The fires of science fiction did not blaze in the United States until April 1926, when editor and publisher Hugo Gernsback launched
Amazing Stories –
the first magazine devoted to
the new genre and which provided, as it were, a fireplace. To give examples of the new literature he proposed to support and publish, Gernsback filled parts of his issues with “classic
reprints” of Wells and many of the others named above. And in his oft-quoted first editorial, in which he defined
scientifiction
(the term
science fiction
was not coined until
1929), he said it was in the manner of Poe, Verne and Wells: “charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision”.