his anthology features the first published stories of 17 writers, along with commentary by the individual authors, except in the case of one, the late Murray Leinster, whose daughter, Betty Dehardit, stands in for him.
In Leinster's "The Runaway Skyscraper," a Manhattan building containing 2,000 hapless workers is catapulted through a rift in time back to pre-Columbian Manhattan. Only the efforts of one man, the industrious engineer Arthur Chamberlin, allow the castaways to survive and, with luck, return to their own time. A strange plague of transmigrating souls is gripping the United States in L. Sprague deCamp's "The Isolinguals." As civilization crumbles, scientists race against time to isolate the causes of this catastrophe. Anne McCaffrey's "Freedom of the Race" finds Earth women subjugated to invading Martians as brood mares. But Earth's own ecology might come to their rescue. Dwellers in the sun find life on cold worlds like Earth impossible to imagine in Hal Clement's "Proof." But when one of their ships is stranded on such a world, they must adjust their thinking.
A sanitary cordon is imposed on Earth by superior aliens in Arthur C. Clarke's "Loophole." But the aliens have not reckoned on some lateral thinking by humanity. Gene Wolfe follows the tragic post-life existence of a poor peasant in "The Dead Man." A remarkably clumsy time traveler manages to make his life a hellish farce in Barry Malzberg's "We're Coming Through the Windows." Humans are the military scourge of the galaxy in George R.R. Martin's "The Hero," and when one soldier tries to opt out of the system, he finds various roadblocks in his way. Mankind's first robotic expedition to Mars encounters a curious lifeform in Howard Waldrop's "Lunchbox."
The short version of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" surely needs no synopsis, although readers will be intrigued at how the original conception differs from future incarnation. "The Emerson Effect" by Jack McDevitt proves that a message from the past—from a famous man who was even more than he seemed—can transform the life of even the most mundane of souls. Hidden alien explorers on Earth find our strange planet's parameters challenging to their prejudices in Jerry Oltion's "Much Ado About Nothing," illustrating how assumptions can blind us to reality. Lois McMaster Bujold's "Barter" starts with a typical domestic situation—housewife driven to distraction by her family—then warps it with a visit from a mysterious figure.
How to survive a nova at close quarters? It helps to be in possession of the mysterious artifact known as "The Xeelee Flower," as Stephen Baxter shows us. Catherine Asaro's "Dance in Blue" finds a young female dancer trapped in deadly house of illusions—along with a man who has reason to be her enemy, but just might prove her only hope of rescue. What right-minded kid would sneak into school? If the school were as attractive as the virtual reality establishment in Michael Burstein's "Teleabsence," any child might be tempted. Finally, Julie Czerneda's "First Contact, Inc." follows the efforts of a firm of simulation makers who, unwittingly, are paving the way for the very probability they are modeling.
The future through the lens of the past
Forty years ago, Damon Knight compiled his anthology First Flight (1963), which had exactly the same premise as the book under discussion today. (Knight's choices obviously reflected the state of the field at the time, and we find only deCamp and Clarke as the overlaps between the two volumes.) It was a wonderful idea then, and it's a wonderful idea now. In fact, one could imagine this project turning into a series of volumes, since the list of 17 authors selected for the first go-round is just a tiny fraction of those who have sprouted up over the past four decades, or of those who started earlier but missed being in Knight's book. (It might also be mentioned that the short-lived semiprozine of the '70s UnEarth had a similar practice of running first sales by such luminaries as Harlan Ellison.)
The editors here are to be credited for a number of good decisions. First off is the variety of authors included. The earliest selection (Leinster) dates from 1919, while the latest (Czerneda) appeared only in 1997, with good fill-ins from nearly every decade in between. Sampling almost a century's worth of science fiction allows us to see how the field has changed and how debuts sometimes manage to reflect shifting literary and cultural trends and concerns.
But more importantly, each story here is worth reading on its own merits, without any reference either to larger currents or even to the future careers of the authors. (More on this latter topic below.) These stories are an amazingly accomplished bunch. Oh, sure, some are slighter than others, only through being short-shorts (the Malzberg and McCaffrey). But even if the premise of this volume was stripped away, the reader would still have a top-notch collection of speculative thrills to enjoy.
Additionally, the heartfelt, earnest and perceptive commentaries contributed by the authors illustrate both the writers' lives and the workings of the editorial machinery that ushered these stories into print. Any reader looking for tips on how to persevere in the face of rejections (15 years' worth in the case of Stephen Baxter!) and how to make acquaintance with one's own burgeoning talents will be amply rewarded by these mini-essays. Nothing has really changed since Leinster's breakthrough into the pulps: skills, ambition and a certain doggedness remain the keys to success.
Of course, the major goal of such a project as this is to illuminate the careers of writers we love with a retrospective spotlight on their beginnings. Here the book succeeds admirably as well. We note that some careers burst forth in fully mature form (Baxter, Martin, deCamp and Card, for instance, contribute stories utterly typical of their later work), while others start more tentatively, or on atypical notes. (I never would have guessed that Howard Waldrop wrote "Lunchbox" or that Lois Bujold wrote "Barter" if their bylines had been clipped from the tales.) By examining the foundations of our favorite practitioners, we are enlightened as to what motivates their current works as well.
