"David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 6" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

The DryadтАЩs Wedding

Michael F. Flynn
Built Upon the Sands of Time

Ted Chiang
Seventy-Two Letters

About the Editor




Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the continuing value of Mark KellyтАЩs short fiction reviews in Locus, and of
the various short fiction reviewers of the Tangent website. Also, I wish to thank Kathryn Cramer for
invaluable help in preparing this book, and Caitlin Blasdell for extra editorial devotion, and Diana Gill for
catching the ball.


Introduction
Last year I said that 1999 was one of the legendary years of the science fiction future, and we have lived
through it. So of course was 2000, the turning point, the end of a thousand-year period of growth and
change and a significant moment in the Christian Era (AD). Well, the world didnтАЩt end, nor did the
Second Coming come, nor the aliens in whatever form. Nor was there a socialist civilization in Boston,
Massachusetts, as envisioned by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward in the 1880s. And now that that
millennium is gone, we live in the Year One CE, and all the SF written about the тАЩ80s and тАЩ90s is just
fictionтАФnow robbed of most of its significant prophetic powerтАФand must stand or fall as fiction, on the
merits of its execution and/or historical importance. Even Arthur C. Clarke, whose special year is 2001,
will have to wait a while longer for commercial travel to the Moon. It is a sobering thought to consider
that fifty years ago 2000 looked like the relatively distant future, a time of wonders and radical difference.
Now the year 2000 looks somewhat like the 1950s, plus computers and minus the Cold War. Most of
the same buildings are standing in most major cities.
Some things donтАЩt change fast enough, other changes leave us breathless or shocked. Fifty years is
not so long, less than the career of Jack Williamson for instance, who published in 1929 and this year
too, in the course of seven decades of writing SFтАФand barring unforeseen circumstances, Williamson
will be in his eighth decade of writing when you read this. I leave you again with the thought that we
should set our SF stories farther ahead in time, lest we become outdated fantasy too soon.
Looking backward from December 2000, I see a past year of tremendous growth for the SF field,
and many reasons for optimism in the year ahead. Australia is still full of energy and big science-fictional
plans a year or two after the 1999 Melbourne world science fiction convention, and Australian writers
are continuing to break out worldwide, at least in the English language. Canadian SF is still thriving, and
Canada is still introducing new world-class SF and fantasy writers to the world stage each year. The UK
may not perhaps be the UK much longer, since Scotland is getting its own Parliament, but either way
England, Ireland, and Scotland are a major force in SF, and Interzone has grown into one of the three or
four leading SF magazines (Analog, AsimovтАЩs, F&SF are its peers) in the world. The best new SF
magazine of the year is Spectrum SF, from Scotland. There are stirrings of energy in France and in
French SF, new awards and conferences there, and German SF has recently produced at least one new
writer on the world stage, Andreas Eschbach. And the world SF convention is now becoming more
global and is likely to be held in Scotland, Australia, Japan, and perhaps elsewhere in the world in the