Contents

Title Page

Preface Ellen Datlow

The Elephant Ironclads Jason Stoddard

Ardent Clouds Lucy Sussex

Gather Christopher Rowe

Sonny Liston Takes the Fall Elizabeth Bear

North American Lake Monsters Nathan Ballingrud

All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World Carol Emshwiller

Special Economics Maureen F. McHugh

Aka St. Mark’s Place Richard Bowes

The Goosle Margo Lanagan

Shira Lavie Tidhar

The Passion of Azazel Barry N. Malzberg

The Lagerstätte Laird Barron

Gladiolus Exposed Anna Tambour

Daltharee Jeffrey Ford

Jimmy Pat Cadigan

Prisoners of the Action Paul McAuley and Kim Newman

About the Author

Copyright

Preface

As a child I was encouraged to read anything I chose, and that included books lying around the house like Bulfinch’s Mythology, Modern Library collections of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Guy de Maupassant, fairy tales from all over the world. A little later I read collections by Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Richard Matheson, plus anthologies like Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, the Carnell original anthologies from England, and many best-of-the-year anthologies. Still later, I was an avid reader of Angela Carter’s Fireworks and The Bloody Chamber and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Descent of Man and Greasy Lake, and I continue to revel in short-story writers in and outside the field. As you can see, I was seduced early by short fiction. I didn’t differentiate among science fiction, fantasy, and horror—I loved imaginative fiction any way it clothed itself. To me short stories are the heart and soul of fantastical fiction—especially science fiction. They are the medium in which writers can experiment in voice, in style, in structure. A writer can try out a theme that may later be expanded into a novel. A short story can introduce a reader to an unfamiliar writer’s work without the investment of time that reading a novel requires. As fiction editor of OMNI magazine and OMNI online for seventeen years, and editor of Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror and SCI FICTION, the fiction area of the SCIFI.com

website, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to indulge my preoccupation with the short story (including novelettes and novellas). My initial brief at OMNI was to publish science fiction, but over the years I was able to showcase some of the best fantasy and horror being written during that period as well—and once in a while published fantasy by writers better known outside the field, such as Patricia Highsmith, Daniel Pinkwater, William Kotzwinkle, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Joyce Carol Oates, William Burroughs, and Julio Cortázar.

This volume reflects the kinds of fiction I published while at SCI FICTION: fantasy, science fiction, a touch of horror—and even a possibly unclassifiable or two. I did not go out and try to pick a story to represent every type of SF, every type of fantasy or dark fantasy. You won’t find off-planet stories or hard science fiction, but you will find two very different alternate histories, some aliens, and some powerful, very timely political science fiction. There’s no sword and sorcery or elves but there are cities in bottles, a twisted fairy tale, and a woman who loves filming volcanoes. I’m often asked about the future of the short story. I can’t answer to the market question, but I can certainly respond to the quality of what is being written. That’s a happy constant, with some of my favorite established writers and talented new voices creating new worlds and re-imagining existing ones. I hope you enjoy your excursion into some of those following.

Ellen Datlow