Infinite Stars Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Anthologies Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Editor’s Note and Acknowledgements

  SPACE OPERA: AN INTRODUCTION

  by Robert Silverberg

  FLEET SCHOOL: RENEGAT

  by Orson Scott Card

  DUNE: THE WATERS OF KANLY

  by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

  LEGION OF THE DAMNED: THE GOOD SHEPHERD

  by William C. Dietz

  THE GAME OF RAT AND DRAGONS

  by Cordwainer Smith

  MILES VORKOSIGAN: THE BORDERS OF INFINITY

  by Lois McMaster Bujold

  VATTA’S WAR: ALL IN A DAY’S WORK

  by Elizabeth Moon

  LIGHTSHIP CHRONICLES: THE LAST DAY OF TRAINING

  by Dave Bara

  SKOLIAN EMPIRE: THE WAGES OF HONOR

  by Catherine Asaro

  BINTI

  by Nnedi Okorafor

  CODOMINIUM: REFLEX

  by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

  HOW TO BE A BARBARIAN IN THE LATE 25TH CENTURY

  by Jean Johnson

  STARK AND THE STAR KINGS

  by Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton

  IMPERIUM IMPOSTER

  by Jody Lynn Nye

  RED: REGION FIVE

  by Linda Nagata

  REVELATION SPACE: NIGHT PASSAGE

  by Alastair Reynolds

  DUEL ON SYRTIS

  by Poul Anderson

  STARBRIDGE: TWILIGHT WORLD

  by A.C. Crispin

  VIRTUES OF WAR: TWENTY EXCELLENT REASONS

  by Bennett R. Coles

  THE SHIP WHO SANG

  by Anne McCaffrey

  CAINE RIORDON: A TASTE OF ASHES

  by Charles E. Gannon

  THE IRON STAR

  by Robert Silverberg

  LT. LEARY: CADET CRUISE

  by David Drake

  THE LOST FLEET: SHORE PATROL

  by Jack Campbell

  HONORVERSE: OUR SACRED HONOR

  by David Weber

  Editor Biography

  Author Biographies

  Copyright and First Publication Information

  INFINITE

  STARS

  ANTHOLOGIES AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Acolytes of Cthulhu edited by Robert M. Price

  Aliens: Bug Hunt edited by Jonathan Maberry

  Associates of Sherlock Holmes edited by George Mann

  Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes edited by George Mann

  Dark Cities edited by Christopher Golden

  Dark Detectives edited by Stephen Jones

  Dead Letters edited by Conrad Williams

  Dead Man’s Hand edited by John Joseph Adams

  Encounters of Sherlock Holmes edited by George Mann

  Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes edited by George Mann

  The Madness of Cthulhu edited by S. T. Joshi

  The Madness of Cthulhu Volume Two edited by S. T. Joshi

  Mash Up edited by Gardener Dozois

  New Fears edited by Mark Morris

  Predator: If It Bleeds edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Shadows Over Innsmouth edited by Stephen Jones

  Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth edited by Stephen Jones

  Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth edited by Stephen Jones

  Wastelands edited by John Joseph Adams (US only)

  Wastelands 2 edited by John Joseph Adams

  INFINITE

  STARS

  THE DEFINITIVE ANTHOLOGY OF SPACE

  OPERA AND MILITARY SF

  Edited by

  BRYAN THOMAS SCHMIDT

  TITAN BOOKS

  INFINITE STARS

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785655937

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781785654596

  Paperback ISBN: 9781785654589

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: October 2017

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Collection and introduction copyright © 2017 by Bryan Thomas Schmidt.

  All rights reserved. Complete copyright and first publication Information listed here.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  To Bob Tucker for coining the term, and E.E. Smith, Jack Williamson, and Edmond Hamilton for paving the way, and George Lucas for helping me and so many fall in love with space opera.

  And to Bob Silverberg, whose Lord Valentine’s Castle made teenage me want to write novels, and whose friendship and support of adult me means so much.

  Lastly, for my cousin David Melson, who introduced me to Star Wars: A New Hope and books like Ender’s Game that led to genres that have been lifelong loves.

  EDITOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BRYAN THOMAS SCHMIDT

  In so many ways, space opera has been my entry gate into speculative fiction. From the Star Trek reruns and the original Star Wars movie, which made me want to be a storyteller, to my own first novels, a space opera series The Saga of Davi Rhii, I have probably read more in this subgenre of science fiction than any other. So assembling a definitive collection like this was a particular thrill.

  It also allowed me to work with some of my writing heroes and favorites. Who thought I’d ever edit an original Ender story by Orson Scott Card, or a Dune story? Or publish Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle, or Lois McMaster Bujold. All those dreams and more were realized with this volume, so I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did putting it together.

  There are fourteen new stories and ten reprints here. Most of them from popular space opera and military science fiction series spanning the decades from the 1950s to the present. These include Hugo and Nebula Award winners, New York Times bestsellers, and more. When Titan editor Steve Saffel and I met at the World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington, to discuss working on a project and he proposed this, I knew it was the chance of a lifetime.

  And it has been, in every way, so here’s hoping it’s the read of a lifetime, too. Admittedly, there are gaps. James S.A. Corey’s stories were tied up with SyFy Channel, for example. Others were hindered by availability, space, and budget, but hopefully will show up in future volumes. I also used a somewhat broad definition of space opera which includes a few stories from closely related subgenres such as “sword and planet.” The crossover is obvious, and the genres have influenced one another such that many stories cross over, and authors frequently slide between them.

  For many readers, military science fiction and space opera are indistinguishable, but I tend to define the latter as being more focused on military infrastructure, rank and file, strategy, and war-related activites than space opera often is. Regardless of such distinctions, the two are intimatel
y intertwined, and the intent here is to represent definitive stories that influenced these subgenres—and science fiction as a whole—both then and now. I hope most readers will agree with the significance of my choices.

  This book wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of support, and here are a few to whom I must express my gratitude: fellow editors Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Steven Silver, Alex Shvartsman, and Robin Wayne Bailey for story suggestions. Fellow fans Charley and Linda McCue, Ken Keller, Mia Kleve, Peter J. Wacks, and Todd McCaffrey for their suggestions. Eugene Johnson and Carol Hightshoe for retyping stories from old sources. And of course, Steve Saffel and all at Titan Books for the opportunity.

  My cousin David Melson gets credit for taking me to Star Wars, a truly life-changing moment at age seven or eight. I’ve been addicted ever since. And for sharing so many wonderful books and stories, like introducing me to Ender, Dune, and more.

  I thank my friend and writing hero, Robert Silverberg, for a great introduction essay, and all the writers for being so dedicated to writing memorable stuff that would enhance the canons and entertain the fans of each universe included here. Last but not least, thank you to the readers, collectors, and fans who will make this book—the first of a series, we hope—a success and enjoy it for years to come.

  Without further ado, I am pleased to present Infinite Stars, a rich tapestry of space opera and adventure. May it inspire you to imagine, dream, and reach for the stars well into the future.

  Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Ottawa, KS

  January 2017

  SPACE OPERA: AN INTRODUCTION

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  “Birth, and copulation, and death,” said T.S. Eliot. “That’s all, that’s all, that’s all.” The critic Damon Knight, in one of the finest of his incisive essays on science fiction, simplified Eliot’s formula by eliminating copulation from the sequence and asserting that the only important themes of fiction are birth and death. Maybe so. I would not want to dispute these things with Messrs. Eliot and Knight, for whose critical acumen I have the highest respect.

  As a science fiction reader and writer, though, I have worked from a different set of criteria: the two fundamental themes of science fiction, I think, are journeys in time and journeys in space. We have been dealing in matters of time travel since H.G. Wells set us on that path with The Time Machine more than a hundred years ago. And as for space, well, we have had fictional voyages into space at least since the time of Lucian of Samosata, who lived in the second century AD and who, in his satiric fantasy The True History, sent his party of travelers flying off to the Moon. Since then, many another fictional voyager has gone into space, of course, even Cyrano de Bergerac (in a wonderfully wacky seventeenth-century tale), but in the twentieth century there developed a special subgenre of the space-voyage theme that we know as space opera.

  Space opera has been defined in a variety of ways. One good definition came from Jack Williamson, who as an early master of the genre knew whereof he spoke. Writing in The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in 1992, Williamson called it “romantic adventure set in space and told on a grand scale,” emphasizing that it was concerned primarily with “the mythic thread of human expansion.” For Williamson, born in Arizona in 1908 before Arizona had achieved statehood, and brought to New Mexico a few years later by covered wagon, it was an easy imaginative jump from the settlement of the American West to mankind’s colonization of the galaxy.

  Most other definitions of space opera have stressed the necessity of interstellar travel as an essential aspect of the form: starships, faster-than-light travel, galactic empires, the nearly god-like ability to move at will through the immeasurable vastnesses of the universe. A common feature, also, is violent conflict: the war of good against evil, the use of super-weapons, blasters, energy beams, disintegrators. There are some who would include fictions of a less cosmic sort in the genre: the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, that tell of the adventures of John Carter on Mars among alien beings of various colors and shapes. Other students of the field dismiss these as “planetary romances,” limiting space opera to galaxy-spanning tales that readily move beyond the confines of our solar system. Be that as it may, we can safely say that space opera is a subset of science fiction, romantic and colorful, that lays its main stress on the wonders and marvels of the distant realms of space. In its range it has included all manner of work from the most crude and juvenile of early science fiction to the complex and thought-provoking novels and stories of modern times.

  The term itself was coined by Wilson (“Bob”) Tucker, an early science fiction fan who was employed as a projectionist in Illinois movie theaters, though he later wrote some superb science fiction novels. In 1941 Tucker proposed “space opera,” by analogy with “soap opera” (popular serialized radio shows, romantic and sentimental, most often sponsored by manufacturers of soap products), out of which had come “horse opera” (Hollywood jargon for low-budget Western movies), to mean what he called the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn spaceship yarn”—a phrase that has gone ringing down the decades.

  The kinship between crude space opera of the sort churned out by hack writers for cheap pulp magazines and the formularized horse operas produced by the movie industry in such vast numbers in the 1930s and 1940s was never more clearly set forth than in an advertisement written by H.L. Gold, the brilliant, cantankerous editor of the superb science fiction magazine Galaxy, for the back cover of Galaxy’s first issue, which appeared in the fall of 1950. Under the heading “YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY,” Gold offered the opening paragraphs of two short stories, set side by side in parallel columns.

  “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bblizznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol,” is the way the column on the left-hand side of the page began. “He cut out his super-hyper drive for the landing… and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun blaster in a space-tanned hand.

  “‘Get back from those controls, Bat Durston’, the tall stranger lipped thinly. ‘You don’t know it, but this is your last space trip.’”

  The right-hand paragraph offered this:

  “Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rock… and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.

  “‘Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston’, the tall stranger lipped thinly. ‘You don’t know it, but this is your last saddle jaunt through these here parts.’”

  Gold then went on to point out that the first story was simply a Western transplanted to an alien planet. “If this is your idea of science fiction,” he said, “you’re welcome to it. YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY.” And he kept his promise throughout his years as the magazine’s editor, bringing his readers such sophisticated science fiction as Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Isaac Asimov’s The Stars Like Dust, and the original version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

  But even in Galaxy the line between space opera and more sophisticated science fiction was hard to draw, as could be seen in such complex works as the Asimov novel, Alfred Bester’s second book, The Stars My Destination (which can be viewed as a translation of The Count of Monte Cristo into science-fictional terms), and Robert A. Heinlein’s furiously paced tale of alien invasion, The Puppet Masters, all of which Gold published. They could be considered space operas too. Obviously Wilson Tucker had intended the term “space opera” to be a pejorative one, describing the worst sort of science fiction, but most science fiction readers, Tucker included, quickly adopted a broader meaning for it, using it to represent not just the sort of dreary, clumsy pulp fiction typical of the host of cheaply produced pulp magazines that had sprung up just before World War II but also the wide-ranging, powerfully imaginative stories of galactic exploration, more careful
ly written, that had long held their place in the affections of science fiction readers.

  Plenty of space operas both good and bad had been written by the time Tucker coined his immortal phrase, and the best of them have become classics of the field, antiquated in style and technique but ably depicting the scope and grandeur of the immense universe and still giving pleasure to readers nearly a century after they first appeared. E.E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space, for example, written in 1915 but not published until 1928, tells a story that modern readers can only regard as preposterous, but tells it with such vigor and gusto that such readers, if they are willing to make allowances for the novel’s adherence to the stylistic norms of magazine fiction of a century ago, can find it an enjoyable period piece. As one reviewer said of Smith’s work in general when his novels were reissued in book form in the 1940s, it is marked by “incredible heroes, unbelievable weapons, insurmountable obstacles, inconceivable science, omnipotent villains, and unimaginable cataclysms.” That is virtually the complete catalog of ingredients characteristic of the prototypical kind of space opera Tucker was writing about. Even so, despite having been forced into the Procrustean modes of old-time magazine entertainment, those ingredients retain a certain power to this day.

  In Skylark of Space, we see Smith getting his story off to the sort of dynamic start that was de rigueur for the form from the beginning:

  “Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam bath upon which, a moment before, he had been electrolyzing his solution of ‘X’, the unknown metal. For as soon as he had removed the beaker, with its precious contents, the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing a dozen reagent bottles on its way, and was even now disappearing through the open window.”

  The intrepid Seaton learns how to employ X, the inadvertently discovered catalyst that releases the atomic energy of copper, not just to create a flying steam bath but to power a spaceship that will take him and an assortment of appropriate sidekicks on a cosmic odyssey across the galaxy, pursued, of course, by a villainous rival scientist in the pay of the evil Steel Trust that wants to steal Seaton’s secrets. But Smith was just warming up. After three Skylark novels he produced the six-book Lensman series (1934–1950), portraying the cosmic struggle between the wise and benevolent race of Arisians and the wholly evil Eddorians for control of the universe. The Arisians have created a Galactic Patrol to wage war against the Eddorians. Members of the Patrol are provided with the Lens, a bracelet that gives them telepathy and other powers. The main protagonist of these books is the dynamic square-jawed Earthman Kimball Kinnison, who can be considered the sheriff of this group of space operas; but whereas the Western story was populated almost entirely by white men, Kinnison works in collaboration with three alien life-forms, Worsel of Velantia, Tregonsee of Rigel Four, and Nadreck of Palain. It is very much as though a sheriff were rounding up the bad guys with the aid of a Navaho, a Comanche, and, perhaps, a Chinese. Off they go from world to world, doing battle with the Eddorians and their puppets wherever they turn up. It is all gloriously silly, and Smith’s prose style is something less than elegant, but the books still make irresistible reading after all this time.