Years best sf 10, p.1
Year's Best SF 10, page 1
YEAR’S BEST SF 10
EDITED BY
DAVID G. HARTWELL
and KATHRYN CRAMER
An extraordinary future
is waiting.
Embrace it.
Year’s Best SF 10
To Carl Caputo, for last-minute help and good cheer, and to Elizabeth Constance Cramer Hartwell, in the hope that you will sleep better.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Bradley Denton
Sergeant Chip
Gregory Benford
First Commandment
Glenn Grant
Burning Day
Terry Bisson
Scout’s Honor
Pamela Sargent
Venus Flowers at Night
Gene Wolfe
Pulp Cover
Ken Liu
The Algorithms for Love
Ray Vukcevich
Glinky
Janeen Webb
Red City
Jack McDevitt
Act of God
Robert Reed
Wealth
Matthew Hughes
Mastermindless
Jean-Claude Dunyach
Time, as It Evaporates…
James Stoddard
The Battle of York
Liz Williams
Loosestrife
James Patrick Kelly
The Dark Side of Town
Steven Utley
Invisible Kingdoms
Sean McMullen
The Cascade
Charles Coleman Finlay
Pervert
Steve Tomasula
The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects
Neal Asher
Strood
James L. Cambias
The Eckener Alternative
Brenda Cooper
Savant Songs
About the Editors
Edited by the Editors
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the help of Locusmag.com website and Locus, of Bestsf.com, and of Tangentonline.com, and of course, Google.
Introduction
We are in the middle of some kind of short fiction boom in science fiction and the associated genres of the fantastic. Not an economic boom, but certainly a numbers increase, and it has been building for several years. There seems to have been an increase in quality as well as in quantity, too, with well-edited semiprofessional magazines and small press anthologies of generally higher editorial standards than those anthologies issuing from big trade publishers proliferating. And all this in spite of the desperate battles of the distinguished professional magazines to secure enough distribution and sales to persist in business.
The electronic publishers on the internet maintained the levels of quality established a couple of years back, and remain a vigorous dimension of the SF field, but there was not a significant increase in the amount of good fiction originating on the internet. The increase was predominantly in the semiprofessional book and magazine publishing sphere, and even in the zine area (as opposed to fanzines—zines are analogous to the cutting edge little magazines of the literary world, published and carefully edited by individuals, rarely for profit).
Still, the highest concentrations of excellence were in the professional publications, the anthologies from the small press, and the highest paying online markets. The electronic fiction websites such as Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, and SciFiction continued to publish much fine work, though a majority of it was fantasy or horror.
There were hundreds of good stories to choose from this year to fill this volume (there were more than five hundred listed as candidates for the Locus recommended reading list for the year), making it clear that there are a really large number of talented writers of short fiction in our field, a real bonanza for readers. There are a lots of conclusions one might draw from this, but the one we highlight is that it makes this year’s best volume even more useful, since we try to sort through all this material. The small press really did expand again this past year, both in book form and in a proliferation of little magazines, in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Once again, books and magazines of high quality, often anthologies and short story collections, from Canada, Australia, and the UK, drew our attention. We have to say that this year was generally as good as the pinnacle year 2003 for original anthologies and story collections—even though most of them will not be found in local bookstores because they are available on the whole only by direct mail or internet order, or from specialty dealers at SF conventions. Still, the total of good SF stories, and perhaps even the total of all SF stories, increased noticeably last year.
But—and this is a significant but—the majority of small press publications contained only a minority of science fiction genre stories, and the bulk of the rest were speculative literature, fantasy, horror, magical realism, allegories, or uses of SF tropes and images in the context of mainstream or postmodern fiction. This commonly proceeded from a “breaking the bounds of genre” attitude on the part of the editors and publishers of small press short fiction, and many of their writers. Distinguished examples of this trend are Leviathan and Polyphony.
And to our continuing amusement, this attitude was again contradicted by one of the bastions of mainstream literary fiction, McSweeney’s magazine, which published a second genre fiction issue, McSweeney’s Astonishing Stories, in 2004, edited by Michael Chabon. It was filled mainly with genre stories, although no SF this time. Perhaps more significantly, the prestigious Denver Quarterly had an issue devoted principally to fantastic fiction without announcing the fact at all. Each year we find ourselves pointing with some irony at the areas of growth in SF, as if they were double-edged swords. While many of the ambitious insiders want to break out, at least some ambitious outsiders are breaking in, and some of them at the top of the genre. This is now a trend several years old.
It is our opinion that it is a good thing to have genre boundaries. If we didn’t, young writers would have to find something else to transgress to draw attention to themselves.
So, for readers new to this series, we repeat our usual disclaimer: This selection of science fiction stories represents the best that was published during the year 2004. It would take several more volumes this size to have nearly all of the best short stories—though even then, not all of the best novellas. And we believe that representing the best from year to year, while it is not physically possible to encompass it all in one even very large book, also implies presenting some substantial variety of excellences, and we left some worthy stories out in order to include others in this limited space.
Our general principle for selection: This book is full of science fiction—every story in this book is clearly that and not something else. We have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and slipstream, and postmodern literature. We (Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s Best Fantasy in paperback from Eos, as a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy fiction, too. But here, we choose science fiction.
We try in each volume of this series to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. It is supposed to be fun to read, a special kind of fun you cannot find elsewhere. This is a book about what’s going on now in SF. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2004.
David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
Sergeant Chip
BRADLEY DENTON
Bradley Denton [www.sff.net/people/bradley.denton/] lives outside Austin, Texas, with his wife, Barbara, their cat, and their twin hound dogs. He began publishing in the science fiction field in 1984. His first novel, Wrack & Roll (1986), is an alternate history. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his second novel, Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede (1991). His next novel, Blackburn (1993), is a horror novel about a serial killer. Lunatics (1996) is fantasy. A new novel, Laughin’ Boy, about terrorism and daytime television, will appear from Subterranean Press in 2005. Most of his short fiction is fantastic, and collected in A Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians (1994)—two books which were published together in a slipcase and which won a World Fantasy Award for Best Collection—and in One Day Closer to Death (1998).
“Sergeant Chip” was published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, which had a particularly strong year in 2004. In this fine novella about the military virtues, the central character is a cybernetically enhanced dog. There is a war in the future in the Middle East, and something has gone terribly wrong.
But Sergeant Chip is intelligent, skilled, and a good dog who stands for the good, against anyone and anything. The story reverberates with contemporary political references and powerful sentiment. We didn’t read a better story this year.
To the Supreme Commander of the soldier who bears this message—
Sir or Madam:
Today before it was light I had to roll in the stream to wash blood from my fur. I decided then to send You these words.
So I think of the word shapes, and the girl writes them for me. I know how the words are shaped because I could see them whenever Captain Dial spoke. And I always knew what he was saying.
The girl writes on a roll of paper she foun d in the stone hut when we began using it as our quarters three months ago. She already had pencils. She has written her own words on the paper many times since then, but she has torn those words from the roll and placed them in her duffel. Her own words have different shapes than the ones she writes for me now. She doesn’t even know what my word shapes mean, because the shapes are all that I show her. So the responsibility for their meanings is mine alone.
Just as the responsibility for my actions is mine alone.
Last night I killed eighteen of Your soldiers.
I didn’t want to do that. They reminded me of some of the soldiers I knew before, the ones who followed Captain Dial with me. But I had to kill them because they came to attack us. And if I let them do that, I would be disobeying orders.
I heard them approach while the girl, the two boys, and the old man slept. So I went out and climbed the ridge behind the hut so I could see a long way. I have good night vision, and I had no trouble spotting the soldiers as they split into two squads and spread out. Their intent was to attack our hut from different angles to make its defense more difficult. I knew this because it was one of the things Captain Dial taught me.
So I did another thing Captain Dial taught me. As the two squads scuttled to their positions to await the order to attack, I crept down toward them through the grass and brambles. I crept with my belly to the earth so they couldn’t see me coming. Not even with their infrared goggles.
Captain Dial once said I was black as night and silent as air. He was proud when he said it. I remembered that when I crept to Your soldiers.
They didn’t hear me as I went from one to another. They were spread out too far. Their leader wasn’t as smart as Captain Dial. I bit each one’s throat so it tore open and the soldier couldn’t shout. There were some sounds, but they weren’t loud.
The first soldier had a lieutenant’s bar on his helmet. I had seen it from a long way away. It was the only officer’s insignia I saw in either squad. So I went to him first. That way he couldn’t give the order to attack before I was finished.
But the others would have attacked sooner or later, even without an order from their lieutenant. So I had to kill them all.
The last soldier was the only female among the eighteen. As I approached her, I smelled the same kind of soap that Captain Dial’s wife Melanie used. That made me pause as I remembered how things were a long time ago when I slept at the foot of their bed. But then the soldier knew I was there and turned her weapon toward me. So I bit her throat before she could fire.
I dragged the soldiers to the ravine near the southern end of the ridge. You’ll find them there side by side if You arrive before the wild animals do. I did my best to treat them with honor.
Then I went to the stream. The stream is near the hut, so I tried to be quiet. I didn’t want to wake my people before sunrise.
After washing, I went into the grass and shook off as much water as I could. But there was no one to rub me with a towel. There was no one to touch my head and tell me I was good.
I remembered then that no one had ever told Captain Dial he was good, either.
This is what it means to be the leader.
I wanted to howl. But I didn’t. My people were still asleep.
I take care of them. I don’t let anyone hurt them. These were Captain Dial’s orders, and I will not disobey.
Captain Dial was my commanding officer. I was his first sergeant. If You examine the D Company roster, You will see that my pay grade is K-9.
My name is Chip.
Whenever Captain Dial gave me an order, I obeyed as fast as I could. And then he always touched my head and told me I was good. Sometimes when I was extra fast, he gave me a treat. I liked the treats, but I liked the touch even more.
There was never a time when Captain Dial wasn’t my leader. But he wasn’t always a captain, and I wasn’t always his first sergeant. In the beginning he was a lieutenant, and I was his corporal.
We were promoted because of the day we demonstrated our training to the people in the bleachers.
That morning, in our quarters, Lieutenant Dial said that what we would participate in that afternoon was political bullshit. Money for the war was about to be cut, so public-relations events like this were an attempt to bolster civilian support. But Lieutenant Dial said that only two things had ever motivated the public to support the military: heroism and vengeance.
He also said that we had to do well regardless. He said I would have to do a good job and make him proud. So I stood at attention, and I thought about running fast to find mines and attack enemies. I thought about making Lieutenant Dial proud.
Then he touched my head. He knew my thoughts. He always knew my thoughts. He told me I was good and gave me permission to be at ease.
So I wiggled and pushed my head against his knees, and my tail wagged hard as he buckled my duty harness. Even though he had said it was bullshit, I could smell that he was excited about the job ahead. That made me excited too. And as we left our quarters, Lieutenant Dial’s wife Melanie came with us. That made me even more excited, because she was almost never with us except in our quarters.
Melanie spoke to me every morning, and although I couldn’t understand her thoughts too well, I knew she was telling me to take care of Lieutenant Dial throughout our day of training. And every night when Lieutenant Dial and I returned, Melanie touched my head and said I was good. Then, after we all ate supper, she and Lieutenant Dial would climb into their bed, I would lie down on my cushion at its foot, and we would sleep. Sometimes in the night their scents grew stronger and blended together, and they made happy sounds. But I stayed quiet because I wanted them to stay happy. Other times I smelled or heard strangers outside our quarters, and I would go on alert even though Lieutenant Dial was still asleep and had not given me an order. But the strangers always went away, and then I slept again too.
Those were the only times Melanie was with us, and that one order every morning was the only order she ever gave me. All of my other orders, all of my treats, and all of my food came from Lieutenant Dial.
But Lieutenant Dial loved Melanie. I could see the word “love” whenever he thought of her. And that made me glad because it made him glad. So we were all happy on the day she came with us. She smelled like a hundred different flowers all mixed together, and she was wearing new clothes that seemed to float around her.
She also wore a gift that Lieutenant Dial had given her the night before. It was a shiny rock on a silver chain that she wore around her neck. Lieutenant Dial told me that Melanie liked the color of the rock. It just looked like a rock on a chain to me. But when Lieutenant Dial put it around Melanie’s neck, it made me think of the chain and tags that Lieutenant Dial wore around his own neck whenever he was on duty. And it also made me think of the collar he put on me when I wasn’t wearing my duty harness. So then I understood why Melanie was so happy to receive the rock and chain. Now we all had things to wear around our necks.
We didn’t go to our usual training area at the fort that day. Instead we went to a park by the ocean. There were flags and people everywhere. It was busy and noisy, and I wanted to run around and smell everything. But Lieutenant Dial ordered me to stay beside him, and that was fun too. I still got to smell everything. We walked from one tree to another, with me on one side of Lieutenant Dial and Melanie on the other. And at every tree, people gathered around while Lieutenant Dial told them who he was and who I was. Then he would give me a few orders—easy things like attention, on guard, and secure-the-perimeter—and we would move on. A lot of people asked if they could touch me, but Lieutenant Dial said they couldn’t. He explained that I was on duty. I wasn’t a pet. I was a corporal.
