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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection - Hardcover

Buch 25 von 35: The Year's Best Science Fiction
 
9780312378592: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312378599 ISBN 13: 9780312378592
Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The latest edition of the critically acclaimed annual anthology collects a broad spectrum of outstanding science fiction tales written during the previous year, including contributions by Stephen Baxter, Ian McDonald, Kage Baker, Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, and other talented masters of the genre, along with a recommended reading guide and a summation of the year in science fiction. Simultaneous. 40,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GARDNER DOZOIS has been working in the science fiction field for more than thirty years. For twenty years he was the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction, during which he received the Hugo Award for Best Editor fifteen times.

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Year's Best Science Fiction, 25th Ed.
Finisterra
DAVID MOLES
New writer David Moles has sold fiction to Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Polyphony, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Say, Flytrap, and elsewhere. He coedited with Jay Lake, 2004's well-received "retro-pulp" anthology All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, as well as coediting with Susan Marie Groppi the original anthology Twenty Epics. He's had stories in our Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth Annual Collections.
In the vivid and fast-paced story that follows, he takes us to a world of living, floating islands in the sky, to teach us the uncomfortable lesson that you're never safe from predation no matter how big you are. Or from your own past, either.
1. ENCANTADA
Bianca Nazario stands at the end of the world.
The firmament above is as blue as the summer skies of her childhood, mirrored in the waters of la caldera; but where the skies she remembers were bounded by mountains, here on Sky there is no real horizon, only a line of white cloud. The white line shades into a diffuse grayish fog that, as Bianca looks down, grows progressively murkier, until the sky directly below is thoroughly dark and opaque.
She remembers what Dinh told her about the ways Sky could kill her. With a large enough parachute, Bianca imagines, she could fall for hours, drifting through the layered clouds, before finding her end in heat or pressure or the jaws of some monstrous denizen of the deep air.
If this should go wrong, Bianca cannot imagine a better way to die.
Bianca works her way out a few hundred meters along the base of one of Encantada's ventral fins, stopping when the dry red dirt beneath her feet begins to give way to scarred gray flesh. She takes a last look around: at the pall of smoke obscuring thezaratán's tree-lined dorsal ridge, at the fin she stands on, curving out and down to its delicate-looking tip, kilometers away. Then she knots her scarf around her skirted ankles and shrugs into the paraballoon harness, still warm from the bungalow's fabricators. As the harness tightens itself around her, she takes a deep breath, filling her lungs. The wind from the burning camp smells of wood smoke and pine resin, enough to overwhelm the taint of blood from the killing ground.
Blessed Virgin, she prays, be my witness: this is no suicide.
This is a prayer for a miracle.
She leans forward.
She falls.
2. THE FLYING ARCHIPELAGO
The boatlike anemopter that Valadez had sent for them had a cruising speed of just less than the speed of sound, which in this part of Sky's atmosphere meant about nine hundred kilometers per hour. The speed, Bianca thought, might have been calculated to bring home the true size of Sky, the impossible immensity of it. It had taken the better part of their first day's travel for the anemopter's point of departure, the ten-kilometer, billion-ton vacuum balloon Transient Meridian, to drop from sight--the dwindling golden droplet disappearing, not over the horizon, but into the haze. From that Bianca estimated that the bowl of clouds visible through the subtle blurring of the anemopter's static fields covered an area about the size of North America.
She heard a plastic clattering on the deck behind her and turned to see one of the anemopter's crew, a globular, brown-furred alien with a collection of arms like furry snakes, each arm tipped with a mouth or a round and curious eye. The firija were low-gravity creatures; the ones Bianca had seen on her passage from Earth had tumbled joyously through the Caliph of Baghdad's inner-ring spaces like so many radially symmetrical monkeys. The three aboard the anemopter, in Sky's heavier gravity, had to make do with spindly-legged walking machines. There was a droop in their arms that was both comical and melancholy.
"Come forward," this one told Bianca in fractured Arabic, its voice like an ensemble of reed pipes. She thought it was the one that called itself Ismaíl. "Make see archipelago."
She followed it forward to the anemopter's rounded prow. The naturalist, Erasmus Fry, was already there, resting his elbows on the rail, looking down.
"Pictures don't do them justice, do they?" he said.
Bianca went to the rail and followed the naturalist's gaze. She did her best to maintain a certain stiff formality around Fry; from their first meeting aboard Transient Meridian she'd had the idea that it might not be good to let him get too familiar. But when she saw what Fry was looking at, the mask slipped for a moment; she couldn't help a sharp, quick intake of breath.
Fry chuckled. "To stand on the back of one," he said, "to stand in a valley and look up at the hills and know that the ground under your feet is supported by the bones of a living creature--there's nothing else like it." He shook his head.
At this altitude they were above all but the highest-flying of the thousands of beasts that made up Septentrionalis Archipelago. Bianca's eyes tried to make the herd (or flock, or school) of zaratánes into other things: a chain of islands, yes, if she concentrated on the colors, the greens and browns of forests and plains, the grays and whites of the snowy highlands; a fleet of ships, perhaps, if she instead focused on the individual shapes, the keel ridges, the long, translucent fins, ribbed like Chinese sails.
The zaratánes of the archipelago were more different from one another than the members of a flock of birds or a pod of whales, but still there was a symmetry, a regularity of form, the basic anatomical plan--equal parts fish and mountain--repeated throughout, in fractal detail from the great old shape of Zaratán Finisterra, a hundred kilometers along the dorsal ridge, down to the merely hill-sized bodies of the nameless younger beasts. When she took in the archipelago as a whole, it was impossible for Bianca not to see the zaratánes as living things.
"Nothing else like it," Fry repeated.
Bianca turned reluctantly from the view to look at Fry. The naturalist spoke Spanish with a flawless Miami accent, courtesy, he'd said, of a Consilium language module. Bianca was finding it hard to judge the ages of extrañados, particularly the men, but in Fry's case she thought he might be ten years older than Bianca's own forty, and unwilling to admit it--or ten years younger, and in the habit of treating himself very badly. On her journey here she'd met cyborgs and foreigners and artificial intelligences and several sorts of alien--some familiar, at least from media coverage of the hajj, and some strange--but the extrañados bothered her the most. It was hard to come to terms with the idea of humans born off Earth, humans who had never been to Earth or even seen it; humans who often had no interest in it.
"Why did you leave here, Mr. Fry?" she asked.
Fry laughed. "Because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life out here." With a hand, he swept the horizon. "Stuck on some godforsaken floating island for years on end, with no one but researchers and feral refugees to talk to, nowhere to go for fun but some slum of a balloon station, nothing but a thousand kilometers of air between you and Hell?" He laughed again. "You'd leave, too, Nazario, believe me."
"Maybe I would," Bianca said. "But you're back."
"I'm here for the money," Fry said. "Just like you."
Bianca smiled and said nothing.
"You know," Fry said after a little while, "they have to kill the zaratánes to take them out of here." He looked at Bianca and smiled, in a way that was probably meant to be ghoulish. "There's no atmosphere ship...

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Verlag
St Martins Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312378599
ISBN 13 
9780312378592
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
652
Herausgeber
Dozois Gardner R.
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Verantwortliche Person
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