THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW SCIENCE FICTION final SF22.indd 1 21/7/09 16:22:32 Also available The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Science Fiction, vol. 2 The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics The Mammoth Book of Best of the Best New SF The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga 3 The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21 The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics The Mammoth Book of Book of Bikers The Mammoth Book of Boys’ Own Stuff The Mammoth Book of Brain Teasers The Mammoth Book of Brain Workouts The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups The Mammoth Book of Crime Comics The Mammoth Book of The Deep The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits The Mammoth Book of Fast Puzzles The Mammoth Book of Funniest Cartoons of All Time The Mammoth Book of Great Inventions The Mammoth Book of Hard Men The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: In Britain The Mammoth Book of Illustrated True Crime The Mammoth Book of Inside the Elite Forces The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits The Mammoth Book of King Arthur The Mammoth Book of Limericks The Mammoth Book of Martial Arts The Mammoth Book of Men O’War The Mammoth Book of Modern Battles The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories The Mammoth Book of Monsters The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes The Mammoth Book of New Terror The Mammoth Book of On the Edge The Mammoth Book of On the Road The Mammoth Book of Pirates The Mammoth Book of Poker The Mammoth Book of Prophecies The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales The Mammoth Book of Tattoos The Mammoth Book of The Beatles The Mammoth Book of The Mafia The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings The Mammoth Book of True War Stories The Mammoth Book of Twenties Whodunnits The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes The Mammoth Book of Vintage Whodunnits The Mammoth Book of Wild Journeys The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics final SF22.indd 2 21/7/09 16:22:33 THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW SCIENCE FICTION 22nd Annual Collection Edited by GARDNER DOZOIS ROBINSON London final SF22.indd 3 21/7/09 16:22:33 CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Summation: 2008 xi turing’s apples • Stephen Baxter 1 from babel’s fall’n glory we fled • Michael Swanwick 18 the gambler • Paolo Bacigalupi 36 boojum • Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette 57 the six directions of space • Alastair Reynolds 73 n-words • Ted Kosmatka 122 an eligible boy • Ian McDonald 136 shining armour • Dominic Green 159 the hero • Karl Schroeder 175 evil robot monkey • Mary Robinette Kowal 196 five thrillers • Robert Reed 199 the sky that wraps the world round, past the blue and into the black • Jay Lake 236 incomers • Paul J. McAuley 245 crystal nights • Greg Egan 263 the egg man • Mary Rosenblum 284 his master’s voice • Hannu Rajaniemi 304 the political prisoner • Charles Coleman Finlay 315 balancing accounts • James L. Cambias 369 special economics • Maureen F. McHugh 385 days of wonder • Geoff Ryman 409 city of the dead • Paul McAuley 441 the voyage out • Gwyneth Jones 464 the illustrated biography of lord grimm • Daryl Gregory 480 g-men • Kristine Kathryn Rusch 498 the erdmann nexus • Nancy Kress 529 old friends • Garth Nix 588 the ray-gun: a love story • James Alan Gardner 595 lester young and the jupiter’s moons’ blues • Gord Sellar 614 butterfly, falling at dawn • Aliette de Bodard 642 the tear • Ian McDonald 662 honorable mentions: 2008 713 final SF22.indd 7 21/7/09 16:22:33 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and sup- port: Susan Casper, Jonathan Strahan, Gordon Van Gelder, Ellen Datlow, Peter Crowther, Nicolas Gevers, Jack Dann, Mark Pontin, William Shaffer, Ian Whates, Mike Resnick, Andy Cox, Sean Wallace, Robert Wexler, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Torie Atkinson, Jed Hartman, Eric T. Reynolds, George Mann, Jennifer Brehl, Peter Tennant, Susan Marie Groppi, Karen Meisner, John Joseph Adams, Wendy S. Delmater, Rich Horton, Mark R. Kelly, Andrew Wilson, Damien Broderick, Gary Turner, Lou Anders, Cory Doctorow, Patrick Swenson, Bridget McKenna, Marti McKenna, Jay Lake, Sheila Williams, Brian Bieniowski, Trevor Quachri, Alastair Reynolds, Michael Swanwick, Stephen Baxter, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, Ian McDonald, Paul McAuley, Ted Kosmatka, Paolo Bacigalupi, Elizabeth Bear, Robert Reed, Vandana Singh, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Daryl Gregory, James Alan Gardner, Maureen McHugh, L. Timmel Duchamp, Walter Jon Williams, Jeff VanderMeer, Gwyneth Jones, Dominic Green, William Sanders, Lawrence Watt-Evans, David D. Levine, Liz Williams, Geoff Ryman, Paul Brazier, Charles Coleman Finlay, Gord Sellar, Steven Utley, James L. Cambias, Garth Nix, David Hartwell, Ginjer Buchanan, Susan Allison, Shawna McCarthy, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, John Klima, John O’Neill, Rodger Turner, Tyree Campbell, Stuart Mayne, John Kenny, Edmund Schubert, Tehani Wessely, Tehani Croft, Karl Johanson, Sally Beasley, Connor Cochran, Tony Lee, Joe Vas, John Pickrell, Ian Redman, Anne Zanoni, Kaolin Fire, Ralph Benko, Paul Graham Raven, Nick Wood, David Moles, Mike Allen, Jason Sizemore, Karl Johanson, Sue Miller, David Lee Summers, Christopher M. Cevasco, Tyree Campbell, Andrew Hook, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Mark Watson, Sarah Lumnah, and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick. Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P. O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661. $60 in the United States for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via second class; credit card orders 510-339-9198) was used as an invaluable reference source throughout the summation; Locus Online (locusmag.com), edited by Mark R. Kelly, has also become a key reference source. final SF22.indd 9 21/7/09 16:22:33 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 sci- ence 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 collabo- ration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days and Time’s Eye, a Time Odyssey. His short fiction has been col- lected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chap- book novella, Mayflower II. Coming up are several new nov- els, including Weaver, Flood, and Ark. As the disquieting story that follows suggests, perhaps it’s bet- ter if the search for extraterrestrial intelligence doesn’t succeed. ear the centre of the Moon’s far side there is a neat, round, well- Ndefined 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 kilome- tres wide, laid sheets of metal mesh over the natural dish, and suspended feed horns and receiver systems on spidery scaffolding. And there you had final SF22.indd 1 21/7/09 16:22:35 2 Stephen Baxter 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 cov- ered 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.