Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space Read online
ESCAPE FROM EARTH
New Adventures in Space
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edited by
JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS
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First published in hardcover in the United States of America by Science Fiction Book Club, 2006 Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008
13579 10 8642
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Compilation copyright ©Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, 2006
Introduction copyright ©Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, 2008
“Escape from Earth” copyright © Allen M. Steele, 2006
“Where the Golden Apples Grow” copyright © Kage Baker, 2006
“Derelict” copyright © Geoffrey A. Landis, 2006
“Spaceboy” copyright © Orson Scott Card, 2006
“Incarnation Day” copyright © Walter Jon Williams, 2006
“Combat Shopping” copyright© Elizabeth Moon, 2006
“The Mars Girl” copyright ©Joe Haldeman, 2006
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INTRODUCTION: Escaping from Earth
Back when there were no such things as home computers, cell phones, MTV, YouTube, or World of Warcraft, we found a way to escape our boring, humdrum lives, a way to escape from the Earth, a way to explore the other planets of the solar system and even wander beyond them to the distant stars, to meet aliens (sometimes fight with them, sometimes be them), to be introduced to galactic vistas of immense scope and scale, to visit landscapes of breathtaking beauty and strangeness, to face danger and risk our lives in desperate gambits, to adventure— and all without leaving our chairs.
It was called science fiction.
And, in those days, the gateway to science fiction was the ordinary, brick-and-mortar building that housed the public library—a place that, unbeknownst to most of our teachers and parents, contained thousands of doorways into thousands of faraway and dangerous places; and the most thrilling of all was that exotic and wondrous place called the future.
Back then, our entry-level introductions to science fiction were the so-called “juvenile novels”—today they would be called Young Adult novels—of writers such as Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein, of the “juvenile” line of books published by Winston that included novels by Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Lester Del Rey, Raymond F. Jones, Donald Wollheim, and Evan Hunter, or the “Lucky Starr” series by Isaac Asimov, the “Tripods” series by John Christopher, and even ostensibly “adult” SF novels, such as Hal Clement’s Cycle of Fire and Ice World.
These authors taught us how to navigate spaceships to the stars, train to uphold the peace of the solar system, colonize Mars, defeat aliens, travel to other dimensions, invent time machines, and acquire pets the size of elephants from other star systems. They also forced us to wrestle with the hard questions: How do we measure bravery, friendship, patriotism? How do we deal with fear, prejudice, love, death, authority? What makes us human? How do we determine what’s ethical, what’s right and what’s wrong? They demonstrated how people like us (and sometimes very different from us—Heinlein’s work was the first place where many of us came across heroes who weren’t white Anglo-Saxon American males—might come to terms with the profound questions of life and love and death and courage. What we needed, what we were hungry for, was a map of possibilities to help guide us into the uncharted future, to help us think about the future, to help us dream so that we might one day invent the future.
Even today, if you want to give someone a good “starter” SF book, you’re mostly reduced to handing them one of the Heinlein “juveniles” such as Red Planet or The Star Beast or Have Space Suit—Will Travel: all excellent books, but all books that were written and published in the 1950s or 1960s, and so have inevitably dated over the past forty years—perhaps too much so to appeal to modern readers.
The fantasy genre has maintained a strong YA tradition throughout the decades. Is there anybody anywhere who hasn’t heard of Harry Potter? And J. K. Rowling’s books are only one of the many good series available. Fantasy readers continue to be able to have a “gateway experience,” a passageway through which they can progress from children’s to young adult to adult material. But no such passageway has been available for science-fiction readers in recent decades, forcing new readers to make the transition to adult SF all in one jump, with no intermediate step—something that has probably proven to be too difficult a jump for many.
The two of us have, over the years, edited many adult SF anthologies. Where, we began to wonder, were the stories that would be as exciting to young adults in the Oughts as Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels were to us in the 1950s and 1960s?
With rare exceptions, much of the Young Adult SF writing that has been done in the past few years has produced only weak imitations of Heinlein juveniles, without the fun—dull, pompous, and condescending stuff, usually stuffed to the gunwales with didactic propaganda.
The launching point for this anthology, then, was to find stories that were fun. That were fun as well as thought-provoking, that dealt with that restless urge to explore, to escape from the humdrum and everyday, to see what’s over the next hill, or in the next valley, that is an inextinguishable part of the human spirit in every generation. Stories that help us to escape from the mundane limitations of Earth, stories that open up heretofore unexpected worlds and vistas to new readers, stories that generate that quintessential Sense of Wonder kick that is at the heart of the genre: gorgeously colored, fast-paced, richly detailed, lushly imaginative, widescreen. Exciting, colorful, and fun. The kind of thing that started us all reading science fiction in the first place.
This anthology is our attempt to provide such stories. It’s our hope that if SF as a genre can provide stuff that newcomers are actually eager to read, rather than having it prescribed for them medicinally, then that will go a long way to assuring that there will be people around who still want to read the stuff even in the midd
le decades of the new century ahead.
And as the past, so the present—SF readers have always been movers, shakers, and visionaries.
If you’re reading this, you may well be one, too!
—Jack Dann
—Gardner Dozois
ESCAPE FROM EARTH
Allen M. Steele
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Most kids dream about getting away from home, from their dull little towns and the boring routines of daily life, of striking out into the unknown in search of adventure. Some, however, get to go a lot further a lot faster than they ever dreamed, and have adventures a lot wilder than any they ever thought possible .. .
Allen M. Steele made his first sale to Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in 1988, soon following it up with a long string of other sales to Asimov's, as well as to markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Science Fiction Age. In 1989, he published his critically acclaimed first novel, Orbital Decay, which subsequently won the Locus Poll as Best First Novel of the year, and soon Steele was being compared to Golden Age Heinlein by no less an authority than Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Clarke County, Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night, the chapbook novella The Weight, The Tranquility Alternative, A King of Infinite Space, Oceanspace, and Chronospace, Coyote, and Coyote Rising. His short work has been gathered in three collections, Rude Astronauts, All-American Alien Boy, and Sex and Violence in Zero-G. His most recent book is a new novel in the Coyote sequence, Coyote Frontier. He won a Hugo Award in 1996 for his novella "The Death of Captain Future," and another Hugo in 1998 for his novella . . Where Angels Fear to Tread." Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he has worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines, covering science and business assignments, and is now a full-time writer living in Whately, Massachusetts, with his wife, Linda.
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I ALWAYS WANTED to be an astronaut.
I don’t remember when the space bug first bit me. Maybe it was when I was six years old, and my dad took me to my first science fiction movie. It was the latest Star Trek flick, and maybe not one of the best—Steve, my older brother, fell asleep halfway through it—but when you’re a little kid, it’s the coolest thing in the world to sit in the Bellingham Theatre^ scarfing down popcorn and Milk Duds while watching the Enterprise gang take on the Borg. It’s also one of my favorite memories of my father, so that may have something to do with it.
Or perhaps it was when Mr. Morton moved away. Mr. Morton wasn’t well-liked in our neighborhood; he drank a lot, which was why his wife left him, and once he called the cops on Steve and me when he caught us skate-boarding in his driveway. So when the Narragansett Point nuclear power plant shut down and he—along with a few hundred other people who’d worked there—was forced to look elsewhere for a job, no one was sad to see him go. Mr. Morton packed as much as he could into a U-Haul trailer, and the rest was left on the street for Goodwill to pick up. His taillights had barely vanished when everyone on the block came over to see what they could scavenge.
Amid the battered Wal-Mart furniture and crusty cookware, I found a cardboard box of books, and among all those dogeared paperbacks I discovered two that interested me: A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin, and Rocket Boys: A Memoir by Homer H. Hickam, Jr. I took them home, and read and reread them so many times that the pages began to fall out. I was twelve years old by then, and those two books whetted my appetite for space. Mr. Morton may have been a nasty old coot, but he inadvertently did one good deed before he split town.
But what really put the lock on things was the first time I saw the space station. My eighth-grade science teacher at Ethan Allen Middle School, Mr. Ciccotelli, was trying to get the class interested in space, so shortly after the first components of the International Space Station were assembled in Earth orbit, he checked the NASA Web site and found when the ISS could be seen from southern Vermont. He told us when and where it would appear in the evening sky, then as a homework assignment told us to watch for it, and come to class the next day ready to discuss what we’d seen.
So my best friend, Ted Markey, and I got together in my backyard after dinner. The night was cold, with the first snow of the year already on the ground. We huddled within our parkas and stamped our feet to keep warm; through the kitchen window I could see Mom making some hot chocolate for us. We used my Boy Scout compass to get our bearings, and Ted’s father had loaned him a pair of binoculars, but for a long time we didn’t see anything. I was almost ready to give up when, just as Mr. Ciccotelli predicted, a bright spot of light rose from the northwest.
At first, we thought it was just an A-10 Thunderbolt from Barnes Air National Base down in Massachusetts, perhaps on a night training mission. Dad was in the National Guard, so I’d been to Barnes a couple of times, and we were used to seeing their Warthog squadron over Bellingham. Yet as the light came over the bare branches of the willow tree at the edge of our property, I noticed that it didn’t make the dull drone the way Warthogs usually do. It sailed directly above us, moving too fast for Ted to get a fix on it with his binoculars, yet for a brief instant it looked like a tiny t moving across the starry sky.
I suddenly realized that there were men aboard that thing, and at that very same moment they were probably looking down at us. In that instant, I wanted to be there. Out in space, floating weightless within a space station, gazing upon Earth from hundreds of miles up. I didn’t say that to Ted or Mr. Ciccotelli, and especially not to Steve, who had all the imagination of a cucumber, because I thought it would have sounded stupid, but that was when I knew what I was going to do when I grew up.
Some kids want to be pro athletes. They idolize the Red Sox or the Patriots or the Bruins, and spend their afternoons playing baseball or football or ice hockey. In my town, there’s a lot of farm kids who follow the family trade, so they join 4-H and bring the roosters, pigs, and calves they’ve raised to the state fair in hopes of taking home a blue ribbon. Ted read a lot of comic books; he drew pictures of Spider-Man and the Teen Titans in his school notebooks, and dreamed of the day when he’d move to New York and go to work for Marvel or DC. And, of course, there’s guys like Steve, who never really figure out what they want to do, and so end up doing nothing.
That night, I decided that I was going to be an astronaut.
But sometimes you get what you want out of life, and sometimes you don’t. Maybe it was impossible for Eric Cosby from Bellingham, Vermont, to be an astronaut. A couple of years later, I was beginning to think so. By then my father had been killed in Iraq, my mother was working two jobs, my brother had become a poster child for DARE, and the night I stood out in my backyard and watched the space station fly over had become a fading memory.
That was before I met the weird kids. After that, nothing would ever be the same again.
It happened early one evening in late October. Just before sundown, that time of day when the sun is fading and the streetlights are beginning to come on. I was hanging in front of Fat Boy’s Music Store on the corner of Main and Birch, wondering what I was going to do that Friday night.
Fat Boy’s was a block from the Bellingham Youth Club, where I’d become accustomed to spending my free time until federal cutbacks for after-school programs caused them to shut their doors. One more thing I owe Uncle Sam, along with sending my dad to some hellhole called Falluja. The corner of Main and Birch wasn’t so bad, though. It was in the middle of downtown Bellingham, with the Bellingham Theatre just a half-block away. I missed the foosball and pool tables of the BYC, but Fat Boy’s had speakers above the door, and if you stood outside you could listen to new CDs. The guys who ran the store didn’t mind so long as you didn’t make a public nuisance of yourself, and that constituted blocking the door, leaving empty soda cans on the sidewalk, or doing anything that might attract the cops.
Which amounted to doing anything above and beyond breathing, and that was why hanging out at Main and Birch wasn’t such a good idea. The leaf-peepers fr
om New York and Connecticut had come up for the fall foliage, and the local constables didn’t want ruffians like me loitering on the streets of Ye Olde New England Towne. Once already a cop car had cruised by, with Officer Beauchamp—aka “Bo,” as he was not-so-fondly known—giving me the eye. If he’d stopped to ask what I was doing here, I would’ve told him I was waiting for Mom to pick me up.
Mom was still at the factory, though, and after that she’d only have an hour or so before she started serving drinks at Buster’s Pub. Dinner was in the freezer: another microwave entree, a choice between beef-this or chicken-that. I’d see her late tonight, if I stayed up long enough. And if I stayed up even later, I might catch the reappearance of Smokin’ Steve, Bellingham’s favorite convenience store clerk and part-time dope dealer.
So ask me why I was propping up a wall on the street corner, watching what passed for rush hour in my town. I’m not sure I knew, either. I told myself that I was waiting for Ted to show up, and after that we’d grab a bite to eat and maybe catch whatever was showing at the theatre—it looked like another horror flick about evil children with butcher knives—but the fact of the matter was that I was trying to avoid going home. The house seemed to have become empty now that Dad was gone, and every minute I spent there only reminded me how much I missed him.
But it wasn’t just that. I was sixteen years old, and lately it had occurred to me that I might be stuck in Bellingham for the rest of my life. Only a year ago, my dream had been to follow my heroes—Alan Shepard and John Glenn, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, John Young—and become the first man to set foot on Mars. Heck, I would’ve settled for a seat on a shuttle flight to deliver a satellite to orbit. But the only person who’d ever encouraged my ambitions was now six feet under, and no matter how many times I’d bicycled out to the cemetery to have a talk with him, he never answered back.