PRAISE FOR FUTURE ON ICE

  “Card has gathered stories from some of science fiction’s most celebrated names…. There are no weak entries, and the collection is certainly worth having on the merit of the stories alone. But what makes this book unusually interesting, especially for Card followers, is his lengthy and pointed introductory essay.…His opinions are refreshingly frank, and they add interesting and useful undertones to the reader’s appreciation for the very fine stories and why he chose them.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “A selection of some of the best stories of the 1980s…an excellent anthology with important work.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Card has chosen marvelous stories that raise an enormous range of issues…. Card gets kudos.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “This excellent all-star anthology [is] perfect for new readers.”

  —The Toronto Star

  “Just as powerful as Future on Fire…worth having just for Card’s introductory essay in which he takes an intriguing look at the way religious ’ideas’ can be and are often explored at some depth in this genre. Thought-provoking and illuminating reading, but best of all, entertaining.”

  —School Library Journal

  EDITED BY ORSON SCOTT CARD

  FUTURE ON ICE

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

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  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION: SCIENCE FICTION AND “THE FORCE”

  Robot Dreams Isaac Asimov

  Portraits of His Children George R. R. Martin

  Tourists Lisa Goldstein

  Blood Music Greg Bear

  Time’s Rub Gregory Benford

  Shanidar David Zindell

  Speech Sounds Octavia E. Butler

  Snow John Crowley

  Klein’s Machine Andrew Weiner

  Pots C. J. Cherryh

  Press Enter John Varley

  Dinosaurs Walter Jon Williams

  Face Value Karen Joy Fowler

  Cabracan Lewis Shiner

  Rockabye Baby S. C. Sykes

  The Pure Product John Kessel

  Out of All Them Bright Stars Nancy Kress

  The Fringe Orson Scott Card

  Copyright

  Tor Books by Orson Scott Card

  PREFACE

  THIS BOOK WAS intended to be a companion volume to Future on Fire, together forming a collection of major stories by the most important writers of short science fiction in the 1980s. In dividing the stories into two books, I had no intention of ranking them—if there was any honor in having a story selected, it would be the same honor to be in either book.

  But something happened between that intention and the present moment: eight years passed. During that time the stories in Future on Fire have borne that mark of approbation; these stories have not. And so despite my original intent, there has been a difference, and to the authors in this book I must apologize.

  Because of the long hiatus, I am not the same person I was in January 1989, when I wrote the introductions to Future on Fire and to the stories in it. I have learned many things since then, affecting my comments on many of these stories. The world has also changed, so that the concerns of the 1980s can seem either prescient or irrelevant to a contemporary viewer. Indeed, what surprised me most in rereading these stories in order to comment on them was how well they held up. This reassures me about my judgment in choosing them in the first place; it also proves to me that the best science fiction of the 1980s had staying power.

  Perhaps the most important change, for me, between January 1989 and February 1997, as I write these words, is this: eight years ago, I was a deeply involved member of the science fiction community, reading widely in the field, reviewing regularly, attending conventions and workshops, and corresponding with many writers in the field. Today, it has been at least five years since I last attended a science fiction convention in the United States. I gave up reviewing some years ago, and since then have read only a handful of science fiction novels that I did not write myself.

  In some senses I am still definitely within science fiction: I write it, I know the traditions of the literature, and I draw on a great deal of experience with the community. In another sense, though, I am a complete outsider: I have no idea what has been happening in the field of written science fiction since about 1992. Whether this sharpens my ability to see science fiction truthfully or dulls it is for you to decide, as you read—or mercifully skip over—my introductions.

  SCIENCE FICTION AND “THE FORCE”

  IN THE WINTER of 1997, the rerelease of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi set box office records and restored George Lucas’s masterworks to positions among the most-watched films of all time.

  For me, there is a personal tinge to the burst of sci-fi nostalgia that the rerelease set off. When Star Wars first came out in 1977, I was an editor at the Ensign magazine in Salt Lake City, and fellow editors Jay Parry and Lane Johnson and I ducked out of work a couple of hours early to catch an afternoon showing on the first day. The three of us had been brainstorming science fiction ideas and reading each other’s stories in an informal writing workshop during our lunch hours, and so it was natural for us to see this movie together. We loved it, of course, seeing our dreams brought to life in the first non-embarrassing special effects to be put in a gung-ho space opera (which is not to denigrate the “cooler” storytelling of 2001: A Space Odyssey).

  Part of the fun for me was something only my friends and I, in that audience, knew or cared about: I was about to be that miraculous thing—a published science fiction writer. My story “Ender’s Game” had been purchased by Ben Bova at Analog, and would appear later that summer (the August 1977 issue, to be exact). Ben had bought three more stories as well, including “Mikal’s Songbird,” which would grow into the novel Songmaster only a few years later. So as I watched space opera made “real” on the screen, I had a sense of possession of it—I was a maker of such tales myself. When I look back on the twenty years since that first public showing of Star Wars, it seems only a moment ago—a moment that contains my entire career.

  Lucas’s changes in the current release are really not much. The changes in me, however, have altered the movie for me. I cannot watch with the unalloyed pleasure of my first viewing that afternoon in Salt Lake City. Ironically, because Star Wars was such a success, it ushered in an era of increasingly sophisticated science fiction films. Lucas marked out the route for later science fiction films to pursue, but Star Wars itself remains forever frozen at the starting line.

  Besides, for twenty years I have been building stories myself, and now, like an experienced automobile mechanic, I can hear the grinding of the gears; I know when the machine is working smoothly, and when it’s stuck together with gum or string. Indeed, that’s part of the reason I finally stopped reading science fiction altogether—I’d get three pages into a pretty good book and I’d be saying to myself, Oh, it’s one of these; oh no, he’s using that one; too bad she didn’t see a better way to get out of that problem. That was bound to affect my viewing of a grand old movie.

  Then there’s the problem of the Force. Star Wars is supposed to be science fiction, right? A rational extrapolation of the future, right? And yet in the midst of all the droids and aliens and whooshing spaceships, we find that the whole plot hinges on faith in an irrational, supernatural, Manichaean Force that can be invoked, more or less, by prayer, asceticism, sacrifice, and faith. It’s no accident that Alec Guinness was costumed like a monk. The Jedi Knights are suspiciously like a combination of Jesuits and Knights Templar.

  Well, why not? Despite the constant assertion that science fiction is a “rational” literary medium, the fact is that written science fiction, just like filmed science fiction, is intertwined with metaphysical and moral themes and story elements. The Force is not radically out of line with this tradition. Since the Manichaean philosophy of the Force (not to mention the Calvinism that drives the plot of the movie as a whole) is definitely not a religion I believe in, I accepted it as a mere plot device. Now, though, I must take it more seriously.

  No, I don’t believe in the Force any more than before (less, in fact!)—but I must take it seriously because, defying all rational prediction, somehow the Force has found a following. Large numbers of people take it seriously. And not just in the way that trekkies talk gravely about that manual-shift warp drive in Star Trek as if it could actually exist. I hear people talking about the Force as if Star Wars had revealed to them the real underpinnings of the universe. And I see an astonishing number of people at every level of society living the religion of Star Wars, whether consciously or not.

  SCIENCE FICTION AS RELIGIOUS LITERATURE

  RELIGION? FROM SCIENCE fiction? It would be hard to imagine a more determinedly areligious genre. Even in the most ludicrous of space operas, everything must have a rational explanation, or at leas
t seem to. No one prays, or if they do, they certainly don’t get an answer; if some god seems to be real, he is not supernatural, but rather turns out to be a supercomputer, a collective unconscious, discorporeal descendants of some ancient race, or…a Force. But not a supernatural god, and certainly not God, the deity of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Science fiction treats religion, explicitly or implicitly, as if it were a stage of human development that the species either has or by now should have outgrown.

  Ironically, the lack of overt religion makes science fiction quite possibly the only genre of storytelling in which serious religious writing can take place today. Fifty years ago, Lloyd Douglas’s Christian novels, and thirty years ago Taylor Caldwell’s, could top the bestseller lists; today, openly religious writing is almost unfindable in mainstream bookstores, and compared to the religious fiction of the past, Christian fictions today are a poor, pious thing indeed. When mainstream fiction writers touch upon religion, it is almost invariably to depict religious leaders as cynical hypocrites and religious followers as mindless dupes. The rare exceptions—one thinks of Ann Tyler with Saint Maybe and Sue Grafton with the surprising turn in her recent M Is for Malice—deal rather well with religious people, but do not allow the possibility of divine intervention in their story. God can be worshipped, but he cannot act. Jewish writers have rather a better track record of including the religious side of life in their fiction, but almost all do so from an anthropological viewpoint: here is how religious people act. Aren’t they interesting holdovers from a more primitive time? The air is thick with nostalgia.

  In science fiction, on the other hand, religious ideas can be and often are explored with some depth. What is the purpose of life? Why are some human actions good and others evil? In a universe of entropy, what causes some to build, not just rage, against the dying of the light? I do not mean to imply that this literary community has any particular interest in tales devoted to advancing the agenda or propounding the doctrines of one sect. It is the deeply explored question that has value, though it must be said that the very asking of a question implies a multitude of assertions, for there must be a context in which the question is deemed to be worth asking.

  And let me dispose right now of the standard anti-religious canard that religion is bad because of all the terrible things that have been done in the name of God. Since, until very recent times, there was no such thing on this earth as a community that did not have an official religion deemed to be universal or at least dominant (and I include China in this, despite the wishful thinking of some Sinologists), even the most cursory examination of history will show that every awful act of any nation, kingdom, or people, as well as every good thing, was done in the name of their god or gods, or at least of superior virtue. And when we look at post-religious states (which, as I will show, are “postreligious” only as a propaganda ploy), such as the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or Communist China, one is hard-pressed to see any improvement in human behavior when deities are removed from the religious mix. Religions sometimes provoke the worst sort of behavior—check out the Aztecs—but often nations that do horrible things do them because they ignore the tenets of their official religion even as they invoke the name of their god to sanction their atrocities. If anything, religion is often a meliorative influence; it was partly because the Spanish were “priest-ridden” that much larger populations of Indians survived in Spanish-held America than in areas conquered by European nations that lacked an institutional conscience.

  So when I say that science fiction is a haven for religious literature, it is no accident that almost no one but me in the field is saying it—primarily because the word religious has something of a curse on it, and is studiously avoided by some of the writers whose fiction best exemplifies exactly the kind of serious religious writing that I’m talking about.

  For several years I put on a one-man show at various SF conventions called “The Secular Humanist Revival Meeting.” While I opened it with the standard religion-bashing pose, making fun of revival-style preaching, by the end it was quite clear that I was speaking about religion as a believer in a particularly demanding faith. And yet the audience moved along with me. Over the year many hundreds of people made the effort to tell me, in person or by mail, how they appreciated the revival meeting; each thought he was the only religious person in the world of science fiction fandom. I got the opposite impression. From the way the audience seemed to love to play along with the revival meeting, from the fervor with which they answered back in the dialogue between preacher and congregation, I got the feeling that a good many were getting exactly what they came to science fiction for: a religious experience.

  RELIGION IN POST-RELIGIOUS AMERICA

  ON THE SURFACE, it seems that America no longer separates church and state. America is a state, period. Where churches survive, they keep their heads down or find themselves taking a good many bricks and tomatoes when they foolishly stand and try to get themselves heard. A good many members of the irreligious elite still talk as if various religious groups—the Catholic Church, the religious right—were a grave danger to America, but theirs is the rhetoric of the triumphant revolutionary, long in possession of the spoils of battle, but calling up the names of long-vanquished enemies in order to whip the crowd into a frenzy.

  But no human society can survive without religion, and few human individuals are able to conceal the innate human need for it. When the old religions are struck down, new ones rise, though because religion itself has been given a bad name by those who opposed the old ones, the new ones insist they are not religions at all. But all the quacking suggests there are still ducks around.

  The religious impulse is at the heart of civil life—of civilization, of society, of the ability of groups of biologically unrelated people to live together without violence among themselves. A prophet speaks (or sometimes a group of prophets, from whom a synthesis arises), and he or she is believed. The believers, absolutely certain they have now received the Truth, proceed to offer that truth to everyone within hearing. Gradually (or sometimes quickly) it becomes clear that many do not understand or, understanding, refuse to accept the revealed word, and at that point paths diverge. Some religious groups withdraw from the larger society and, while they might proselytize, mainly live for and with each other. Other religious groups, certain that no society can possibly be decent unless it lives by their moral vision, set out to persuade, then compel obedience by seizing the instruments of civil power.

  Far from being a shocking idea, this should be obvious to practically anyone who has been awake during the last fifty years. For instance, psychology calls itself a science, but functions as a new revealed religion, with each new prophet claiming to have a truer religion than his rivals—Freud, Jung, Skinner, Maslow—and each prophet’s followers calling themselves scientists while behaving exactly like the competing religious camps of the early centuries of Christianity, struggling to stamp out heresy while affirming the authority of the priesthood. The place ministers once occupied in American life is now occupied by psychiatrists and therapists, analysts and researchers. People speak of seeing their therapist as casually and yet respectfully as they used to speak of seeing their minister.

  So established is their religion that therapists testify as experts in court, though the content of their testimony is as ephemeral and too often as unconnected with reality as the esoteric arguments of the doctors of religion in medieval debates. One thinks of the solemn testimony of learned ministers about the workings of the devil, with judges and juries listening carefully in order to determine from these “facts” whether or not the defendant was a witch.

  Freud and his brethren are not the only prophets of god-free state religion. Marxism had its day, as well, and anyone who has ever tried to argue with a Marxist knows that for fervor and sheer willful blindness, many a Marxist is a match for the most ignorant and arrogant of born-again creationists. All evidence is distorted to fit a preexisting worldview; nothing can be allowed to alter one’s faith in the original vision of the prophet. If Marxism has been more disciplined than the warring religious camps of psychology, it is probably because no group of psychologists ever took control of a powerful state and therefore had the power to shoot heretics. The Inquisitors still rule in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, where the church is the state; but even in America, where supposedly Marxism has never prevailed, all our governmental decisions on economic matters are decided after consultation with theorists who accept the fundamental postulate of Marxism: that human beings act only for economic reasons.