"David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 7" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

2500 titles, quoted the figure of 88 copies as the average sale of a print-on-demand title.
Of the several high-paying online short fiction markets announced last year that helped to cushion the
loss of print media markets for short fiction, one survives. We found some excellent science fiction from
editor Ellen Datlow's Scifiction site, now the highest-paying market in the genre for short fiction. We offer
three stories from it, for perhaps the first time in print, in this book.
It was another good year to be reading the magazines, both pro and semi-professional. It was a
strong year for novellas, and there were more than a hundred shorter stories in consideration, from which
we made our final selection. So we repeat, for readers new to this series, the usual disclaimer: This
selection of science fiction stories represents the best that was published during the year 2001. It would
take two or three more volumes this size to have nearly all of the bestтАФthough even then, not all the best
novellas. 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 fictionтАФevery story in the 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 z in
paperback from Eos as a companion volume to this oneтАФlook for it if you enjoy short fantasy fiction,
too. But here, we chose science fiction.
We try 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. 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 2001.
David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Pleasantville, NY
Computer Virus
NANCY KRESS


Nancy Kress [www. sff. net/people/nankress] is one of today's leading SF writers. She is known
for her complex medical SF stories, and for her biological and evolutionary extrapolations in such
classics as Beggars in Spain (1993), Beggars and Choosers (1994), and Beggars Ride (1996). In
recent years, she has written Maximum Light (1998), Probability Moon (2000), and last year
published Probability Sun (2001), the second book in a trilogy of hard SF novels set against the
background of a war between humanity and an alien race. In 1998 she married SF writer Charles
Sheffield. Her stories are rich in texture and in psychological insight, and have been collected in
Trinity and Other Stories (1985), The Aliens of Earth (1993), and Beaker's Dozen (1998). She has won
two Nebulas and a Hugo for them, and been nominated a dozen more times. She teaches regularly
at summer writing workshops such as Clarion, and during the year at the Bethesda Writing
Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the Fiction columnist for Writer's Digest
"Computer Virus" is major Kress, a moving, exciting near future hostage story, fusing with
unusual grace and plausibility the notions of a biological virus and a computer virus. It appeared
in Asimov's, a magazine that definitely kept its competitive edge this year. It was one of several
fine stories Kress published in 2001.


"It's out!" someone said, a tech probably, although later McTaggart could never remember
who spoke first. "It's out!"
 "It can't be!" someone else cried, and then the whole room was roiling, running, frantic with
activity that never left the workstations. Running in place.