The Big Book of Science Fiction

by VanderMeer, Jeff; Vandermeer, Ann

• ISBN13: 9781101910092
• ISBN10: 1101910097
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781101910108
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-07-12
• Publisher: Vintage
• More Book Details

Summary

Quite possibly the GREATEST science-fiction collection of ALL TIME—past, present, and FUTURE! • "Nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries, like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as lesser-known authors." —The New York Times Book Review

What if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the Pope was a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the new wave, and more. Learn the secret history of science fiction, from literary icons who wrote SF to authors from over 25 countries, some never before translated into English. In THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Read the genre that predicted electric cars, travel to the moon, and the modern smart phone. We’ve got the worlds if you’ve got the time.
 
Including:
· Legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin!
· An unearthed sci-fi story from W.E.B. DuBois!
· The first publication of the work of cybernetic visionary David R. Bunch in 20 years!
· A rare and brilliant novella by Chinese international sensation Liu Cixin!

Plus:
· Aliens!
· Space battles!
· Robots!
· Technology gone wrong!
· Technology gone right!

Author Biography

Ann VanderMeer currently serves as an acquiring fiction editor for Tor.com, Cheeky Frawg Books, and weirdfictionreview.com. She was the editor-in-chief for Weird Tales for five years, during which time she was nominated three times for the Hugo Award, winning one. Along with multiple nominations for the Shirley Jackson Award, she also has won a World Fantasy Award and a British Fantasy Award for co-editing The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Other projects have included Best American Fantasy, three Steampunk anthologies, and a humor book, The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. Her latest anthologies include The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Sisters of the Revolution, an anthology of feminist speculative fiction and The Bestiary, an anthology of original fiction and art.
 
 
Jeff VanderMeer's most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), which Entertainment Weekly included on its list of the top ten novels of 2014 and which prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau.”  The series has been acquired by publishers in 34 other countries. Paramount Pictures/Scott Rudin Productions acquired the movie rights and Annihilation won both the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, and the Los Angeles Times. A three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, he has also edited or coedited many iconic fiction anthologies, taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, lectured at MIT, Brown, and Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp located at Wofford College. His forthcoming novel is Borne.

Table of Contents

The Star - H. G. Wells
Sultana’s Dream - Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein
The New Overworld - Paul Scheerbart
The Triumph of Mechanics - Karl Hans Strobl
Elements of Pataphysics - Alfred Jarry
Mechanopolis - Miguel de Unamuno
The Doom of Principal City - Yefim Zozulya
The Comet - W. E. B. Du Bois
The Fate of the Poseidonia - Clare Winger Harris
The Star Stealers - Edmond Hamilton
The Conquest of Gola - Leslie F. Stone
A Martian Odyssey - Stanley G. Weinbaum
The Last Poet and the Robots - A. Merritt
The Microscopic Giants - Paul Ernst
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - Jorge Luis Borges
Desertion - Clifford D. Simak
September 2005: The Martian - Ray Bradbury
Baby HP - Juan José Arreola
Surface Tension - James Blish
Beyond Lies the Wub - Philip K. Dick
The Snowball Effect - Katherine MacLean
Prott - Margaret St. Clair
The Liberation of Earth - William Tenn
Let Me Live in a House - Chad Oliver
The Star - Arthur C. Clarke
Grandpa - James H. Schmitz
The Game of Rat and Dragon - Cordwainer Smith
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov
Stranger Station - Damon Knight
Sector General - James White
The Visitors - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Pelt - Carol Emshwiller
The Monster - Gérard Klein
The Man Who Lost the Sea - Theodore Sturgeon
The Waves - Silvina Ocampo
Plenitude - Will Worthington
The Voices of Time - J. G. Ballard
The Astronaut - Valentina Zhuravlyova
The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink - Adolfo Bioy Casares
2 B R 0 2 B - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A Modest Genius - Vadim Shefner
Day of Wrath - Sever Gansovsky
The Hands - John Baxter
Darkness - André Carneiro
"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman - Harlan Ellison
Nine Hundred Grandmothers - R. A. Lafferty
Day Million - Frederik Pohl
Student Body - F. L. Wallace
Aye, and Gomorrah - Samuel R. Delany
The Hall of Machines - Langdon Jones
Soft Clocks - Yoshio Aramaki
Three from Moderan - David R. Bunch
Let Us Save the Universe - Stanisław Lem
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow - Ursula K. Le Guin
Good News from the Vatican - Robert Silverberg
When It Changed - Joanna Russ
And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side - James Tiptree Jr.
Where Two Paths Cross - Dmitri Bilenkin
Standing Woman - Yasutaka Tsutsui
The IWM 1000 - Alicia Yánez Cossío
The House of Compassionate Sharers - Michael Bishop
Sporting with the Chid - Barrington J. Bayley
Sandkings - George R. R. Martin
Wives - Lisa Tuttle
The Snake That Read Chomsky - Josephine Saxton
Reiko’s Universe Box - Kajio Shinji
Swarm - Bruce Sterling
Mondocane - Jacques Barbéri
Blood Music - Greg Bear
Bloodchild - Octavia E. Butler
Variation on a Man - Pat Cadigan
Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead - S. N. Dyer
New Rose Hotel - William Gibson
Pots - C. J. Cherryh
Snow - John Crowley
The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things - Karen Joy Fowler
The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets - Angélica Gorodischer
The Owl of Bear Island - Jon Bing
Readers of the Lost Art - Élisabeth Vonarburg
A Gift from the Culture - Iain M. Banks
Paranamanco - Jean-Claude Dunyach
Crying in the Rain - Tanith Lee
The Frozen Cardinal - Michael Moorcock
Rachel in Love - Pat Murphy
Sharing Air - Manjula Padmanabhan
Schwarzschild Radius - Connie Willis
All the Hues of Hell - Gene Wolfe
Vacuum States - Geoffrey A. Landis
Two Small Birds - Han Song
Burning Sky - Rachel Pollack
Before I Wake - Kim Stanley Robinson
Death Is Static Death Is Movement - Misha Nogha
The Brains of Rats - Michael Blumlein
Gorgonoids - Leena Krohn
Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ - Kojo Laing
The Universe of Things - Gwyneth Jones
The Remoras - Robert Reed
The Ghost Standard - William Tenn
Remnants of the Virago Crypto-System - Geoffrey Maloney
How Alex Became a Machine - Stepan Chapman
The Poetry Cloud - Cixin Liu
Story of Your Life - Ted Chiang
Craphound - Cory Doctorow
The Slynx - Tatyana Tolstaya
Baby Doll - Johanna Sinisalo