Selected Stories: Volume 1 Read online

  Book Description

  Kevin J. Anderson is one of the best-selling science fiction novelists working in the field today, but over the course of his long career he has also produced a steady stream of short fiction, ranging from hard science fiction, to fantasy, to horror, dark fantasy, and humor. He has won or been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, Shamus Award, Colorado Book Award, Scribe Award, New York Times Notable Book, and many others.

  This first volume of Anderson’s selected short fiction focuses on his science fiction stories, from flash fiction to novella length, written solo or with collaborators. These stories showcase his range of writing talent from military science fiction, to dystopian fiction, space adventure, humor, alternate timelines, and political and psychological extrapolation.

  Praise for Kevin J. Anderson

  “Kevin J. Anderson has become the literary equivalent of Quentin Tarantino.”

  —The Daily Rotation

  “Kevin J. Anderson is the hottest writer on (or off) the planet.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “The scope and breadth of Kevin J. Anderson’s work is simply astonishing.”

  —Terry Goodkind

  “Kevin J. Anderson is one of the best plotters in the business.”

  —Brandon Sanderson

  SELECTED STORIES

  Science Fiction, Volume 1

  KEVIN J. ANDERSON

  Contents

  Introduction

  Memorial

  Rough Draft

  Combat Experience

  Escape Hatch

  The Next Best Thing to Being There

  Terminal

  Collaborators

  A Whisper of Caladan Seas

  Change of Mind

  Reflections in a Magnetic Mirror

  Mammoth Dawn

  Job Qualifications

  Paradox & Greenblatt, Attorneys at Law

  Prisoner of War

  Log Entry

  Music Played on the Strings of Time

  Newts

  Ghosts of Mars

  Human, Martian—One, Two, Three

  Previous Publication Information

  About the Author

  If you liked

  Also by Kevin J. Anderson

  Selected Stories: Science Fiction, Volume 1

  by Kevin J. Anderson

  * * *

  Copyright © 2018 WordFire, Inc.

  Complete list of previous publication information at end of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  ISBN: 978-1-61475-653-8

  Cover design by Janet McDonald

  Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

  Published by

  WordFire Press, an imprint of

  WordFire, LLC

  PO Box 1840

  Monument CO 80132

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2018

  Printed in the USA

  Join our WordFire Press Readers Group and get free books, sneak previews, updates on new projects, and other giveaways.

  Sign up for free at wordfirepress.com

  Created with Vellum

  Introduction

  When I was a kid, the universe opened up for me with thought-provoking and imaginative space adventures, colonies on other planets, alien intelligences, time travel, and mind-bending scientific inventions.

  My real world was nowhere near as exciting. In fact, it was quite mundane, and I think I was the only dreamer for miles around. As a boy I lived in a speck-on-the-map small town in southeastern Wisconsin, not the sort of place that would inspire big thinking and lots of creativity. Sure, it was a charming laid-back environment straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with red barns and cornfields, where nobody locked their doors and where all of the neighbors were related to me somehow. Franksville, Wisconsin was a place with absolutely no imagination, and no excitement.

  Anyone who longed for adventure beyond the stars had to travel vicariously.

  And that’s where the library came in, with its science fiction section which comprised the top half of one tall set of metal bookshelves. At the time, reading four entire shelves of books—each book sporting a little rocket ship logo surrounded by an atom symbol—seemed a daunting task. Like the characters I watched on Star Trek (which my young imagination didn’t think was nearly as good as Lost in Space, because it had more monsters), I decided to embark on a five-year mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Or at least where no kid in my town had gone before. I wanted to read all the science fiction, every book in the world (and surely my library had them all on that one set of shelves). Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke—yes, I started at the beginning of the alphabet.

  But even that was too slow a delivery system. I needed more science fiction. And faster.

  I discovered that the way to get the most science fiction ideas delivered like a triple espresso was to read big SF anthologies. My small-town library had every volume of Nebula Award winners and an entire set of the Orbit anthology series edited by Damon Knight. But a lot of those stories were too artsy and esoteric for my 12-year-old tastes. I didn’t know anything about the New Wave movement or experimental writing; I just wanted great stories. I was in the Age of Wonder.

  Then I discovered the story collections of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. Asimov would take an idea and run with it. Bradbury blew my mind in collection after collection: The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Illustrated Man, R Is for Rocket, S Is for Space, The Martian Chronicles. Best of all, I discovered several giant SF anthologies edited by Groff Conklin: A Treasury of Science Fiction, The Big Book of Science Fiction, Great Short Novels of Science Fiction. These were massive tomes chock-full of adventures taken from the pages of the best pulp magazines, Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories, the true breeding ground of the genre.

  During the summer when I was reading those anthologies, I might have slept in small-town Wisconsin, but my mind really lived in the wildest frontiers of space and time. That’s when I really fell in love with short stories.

  And it wouldn’t do just to read them. I decided to start writing stories of my own and send them to magazines. I began to get those published, nearly 150 of them so far.

  In 2001, Golden Gryphon Press published the hardcover limited edition of Dogged Persistence, my first story collection, which included some of my favorites, and then in 2006 Five Star Press published a second collection, Landscapes, with an introduction by Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart. But I kept writing stories, and the backlog of uncollected pieces grew larger and larger.

  For years now, as a back-burner project, I’ve wanted to collect my short stories into one or more volumes to be released by my own WordFire Press, but the task was daunting: gathering all the stories, collecting the copyright and publication information, organizing them, getting permissions from my numerous coauthors. And since I kept writing new stories, the list grew faster than I could even organize it.

  Sometimes you just have to buckle down and do it.

  I’ve organized my stories by genre: fantasy, horror/dark fantasy, and science fiction. SF is by far the bulk of my short work, and those stories will fill two volumes (at least!).<
br />
  This is by no means a complete collection. I published countless works in tiny small press magazines; some of them are (to put it kindly) not worth reprinting, and some are lost (I can’t even find my contributor’s copies anymore), and some of them are written in universes owned by someone else (Star Wars, X-Files, Planet of the Apes), and so I don’t have the right to reprint them.

  But there are some really good stories here. Enjoy this first volume, featuring my science fiction short work.

  * * *

  —Kevin J. Anderson, Colorado Springs, January 2018

  Why not start at the beginning? I’ll open this initial volume with my very first published story, a short that I wrote on a manual typewriter when I was a sophomore in high school. It was 1977, and I had already wanted to be a writer for years.

  When digging through old boxes and files a few months ago, I came upon my high school scrapbooks and found the magazine that printed the story, a Wisconsin High School Writings publication. I was 14 years old.

  Maybe Steven Spielberg will see it now and decide to make it into an epic $200M film! Or maybe not. Nevertheless, I was off and running.

  Memorial

  THE ROAR of the ocean echoed through the empty sky, but no one was left alive to hear it. Waves, glinting from filtered light, lapped up against a long beach, leaving a deposit of deadly radiation which had made even the life-spawning sea sterile.

  The sun burned down through a radioactive haze, warming nothing but the dead sands. No bird flew in the sky, no fish swam in the sea, no man walked the earth. Apart from the roar of the poisonous sea and the gentle sound of the just-as-deadly wind, the world was silent—the earth was dead.

  The waves washed the shore again, taking with them a few grains of sand, exposing something to the sun’s glare. More sand washed away, and the days passed.

  The object became uncovered, something made of glass, clear, uncolored, but clouded slightly. Its shape was not what it had been, but was now warped slightly from exposure to the furious, raging heat of countless atomic blasts.

  It had been a bottle once; and now it comprised the entire remnants of mankind. The bottle was the only representative of the human race, a memorial, a monument to the way of life which had been so suddenly destroyed.

  Visitors coming and finding the earth dead would find this bottle, and from it try to reconstruct the civilization which had spawned it.

  Paint on the bottle formed letters, now meaningless. The paint was blistered and burned, but the message, for all who could read it, was plain.

  The words read: COKE ADDS LIFE.

  When my professional writing career was just getting under way, I was eagerly pursuing book contracts, building my name, selling stories to the major magazines, clawing myself up one step at a time. A hot new author exploded on the scene with a universally celebrated first novel, which won a bunch of awards; everybody read it, everybody talked about it.

  And we never heard from him again. No second novel that I knew of, no short story publications. The guy had achieved the pinnacle of success that so many of us longed for … and then he just disappeared. Why would anyone do that? The question obsessed me, and I still don’t know the answer.

  “Rough Draft” explores that question, and I think it’s one of my most powerful stories.

  Rough Draft

  (WRITTEN WITH REBECCA MOESTA)

  AFTER A DECADE during which he wrote and published nothing new, the fan letters dwindled to a few a year.

  “Dear Mr. Coren, You’re the best science fiction writer ever!”

  “Dear Mr. Coren, Your book Divergent Lines changed my life. I felt as if you were speaking directly to me, and you helped me work through some major issues.”

  The entire experience, though great for the ego, had ultimately proved meaningless. Eventually he’d been forced to return the money for the second book advance, because he simply couldn’t do it again. After enjoying a pleasant day in the sun, Mitchell Coren had retreated to his small apartment to live a normal life. The gleaming Nebula Award and the silver Hugo—both dusty now—were little more than knickknacks on the mantel of a fireplace that he never used.

  Having convinced himself of the wisdom of J.D. Salinger’s approach to authorial fame, Mitchell had squelched all thoughts of returning to writing. He immersed himself in a normal life with all its petty concerns.

  Today, with an indifference born of long practice, Mitchell opened his bills and junk mail before finally tearing open the padded envelope that obviously contained a book. Another intrusion, no doubt. An annoying reminder of his old life. He still received advance reading copies from editors trying to wheedle a rare cover quote from him, rough draft manuscripts from aspiring authors who begged for comments or critiques, and books presented to him by new authors who had been inspired by his lone published novel.

  Inside this envelope, however, he found his own name on the dust jacket of a novel he had never written.

  Infernities

  Mitchell Coren

  Multiple Award-winning Author of Divergent Lines

  Whirling flakes of confusion compacted into a hard snowball in the pit of his stomach. “What the hell?”

  His initial, and obvious, thought was that someone had stolen his name. But that didn’t make sense. Though many editorial positions had changed in the decade since he’d published Divergent Lines, Mitchell was still well enough known in the insular science fiction community that somebody in the field would have noticed an imposter. Besides, how much could his byline be worth after all this time? It wasn’t worth stealing.

  Someone had tucked a folded sheet of paper between the book’s front cover and the endpaper. He read it warily.

  Dear Mr. Coren,

  As a longtime fan of yours, I thought you’d appreciate seeing this novel I came across in a parallel universe.

  I’m a timeline hunter by profession. Perhaps you’ve heard of Alternitech? Our company uses a proprietary technology to open gateways into alternate realities. My colleagues and I explore these parallel universes for breakthroughs or useful discrepancies that Alternitech can profitably exploit: medical and scientific advances, historical discoveries, artistic variations. My specialty is the creative arts.

  I stumbled upon this book in an alternate timeline while searching for a new Mario Puzo. Since the science fiction market isn’t nearly as large or profitable as the mainstream, I couldn’t spend much time checking out its background, but a brief search showed that the “alternate” Mitchell Coren published a dozen or so short stories after Divergent Lines, then produced this second novel. I’m hoping Alternitech will want to arrange for its publication, but naturally I felt you should see it first.

  With deepest respect,

  Jeremy Cardiff

  Mitchell stared at the letter with mistrust and growing irritation. He had heard of this company that searched alternate realities for everything from new Beatles records, to evidence of UFOs or Kennedy assassination conspiracies, to cures for obscure diseases. He could understand the more humanitarian objectives, but why fiction? What gave Alternitech the right to infringe on his life like this?

  He opened to the dust jacket photo and saw that the picture did resemble him, though this other Mitchell Coren wore a different hairstyle and a cocky, self-assured grin. The bio mentioned that after completing Infernities he was “already at work on his next novel.”

  Oddly unsettled, Mitchell pushed the book away. Its very existence raised too many disturbing questions.

  THREE INCREASINGLY URGENT phone calls to his former agent went unreturned. Since Mitchell had neither delivered anything new nor generated much income, his agent wasn’t in a great hurry to attend to his so-called emergency. Even in the days when he’d briefly been a hot client, Mitchell had been relatively high-maintenance, needing encouragement and constant contact.

  He decided to contact his entertainment attorney instead. After all, Sheldon Freiburg charged by the hour and therefore had an incen
tive to get right on the matter.

  “Mitch Coren! I haven’t heard from you since the last ice age.” Freiburg’s voice was bluff and hearty on the telephone. “What on earth have you been doing? You dropped off the map.”

  “I’ve been working a real-world job, Sheldon. You know, regular paycheck, benefits … security?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of those. Hopped off the old fame-and-fortune bandwagon, eh?”

  “A modicum of fame, not a whole lot of fortune—as you well know.”

  Freiburg had handled the entertainment contracts for the two movie options on Divergent Lines. Mitchell had been young and naïve then, believing the Hollywood hype and enthusiasm. He’d been surrounded by smiling fast-talkers whose eager assertions of certain box-office appeal and guaranteed studio support were built on a foundation as strong as a soap bubble. After the attorney’s fees and the agent’s commission, the option money had been just enough to pay off his car, which was now ten years old.

  “So, Mitchell,” Freiburg said now, “people don’t call me unless they have a situation—either good or bad—so let’s hear it.”

  “Someone’s trying to publish an unauthorized Mitchell Coren novel.”

  “You’ve actually done other work?” The lawyer sounded surprised. “Something new? I thought you’d turned hermit on us. Did somebody steal your manuscript?”

  “This is trickier than that. It isn’t exactly a matter of stealing. This is a novel from a parallel universe, and Alternitech wants to get it published here.” He explained the situation in full.

  “Oh, that is tricky—but not unheard of. Listen, since it’s Tuesday, I’ll give you a special deal, a quick and inexpensive answer.”