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  For Penny

  contents

  Introduction: Nostalgia for the Future

  HENRY GEE

  Introduction: Nostalgia for the Future (Revisited)

  HENRY GEE

  Cognitive Ability and the Light Bulb

  BRIAN ALDISS

  Don’t Imitate

  GILLES AMON

  Check Elastic Before Jumping

  NEAL ASHER

  Twenty2

  NATE BALDING

  Under Martian Ice

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  RAM SHIFT PHASE 2

  GREG BEAR

  A Life with a Semisent

  GREGORY BENFORD

  Damned If You Don’t

  LUCY BERGMAN

  The Punishment Fits the Crime

  DAVID BERREBY

  Toy Planes

  TOBIAS S. BUCKELL

  A Concrete Example

  J. CASTI, J.-P. BOON, C. DJERASSI, J. JOHNSON, A. LOVETT, T. NORRETRANDERS, V. PATERA, C. SOMMERER, R. TAYLOR, AND S. THURNER

  The Aching of Dion Harper

  ARTHUR CHRENKOFF

  Improving the Neighborhood

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Omphalosphere: New York 2057

  JACK COHEN

  Picasso’s Cat

  RON COLLINS

  My Grandfather’s River

  BRENDA COOPER

  Sandcastles: A Dystopia

  KATHRYN CRAMER

  Adam’s Hot Dogs at the End of the World

  JEFF CROOK

  The Party’s Over

  PENELOPE KIM CROWTHER

  Transport of Delight

  ROLAND DENISON

  The Perfect Lover

  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  Printcrime

  CORY DOCTOROW

  A Brief History of Death Switches

  DAVID EAGLEMAN

  Only Connect

  GREG EGAN

  At the Zoo

  WARREN ELLIS

  The Liquidators

  MICHAEL GARRETT FARRELLY

  In the Days of the Comet

  JOHN M. FORD

  Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

  JAMES ALAN GARDNER

  Are We Not Men?

  HENRY GEE

  It Never Rains in VR

  JOHN GILBEY

  Gordy Gave Me Your Name

  JIM GILES

  Nostalgia

  HIROMI GOTO

  Spawn of Satan?

  NICOLA GRIFFITH

  Take Over

  JON COURTENAY GRIMWOOD

  Speak, Geek

  EILEEN GUNN

  Heartwired

  JOE HALDEMAN

  The Forever Kitten

  PETER F. HAMILTON

  The Road to the Year 3000

  HARRY HARRISON

  Operation Tesla

  JEFF HECHT

  Making the Sale

  FREDRIC HEEREN

  Subpoenaed in Syracuse

  TOM HOLT

  Total Internal Reflection

  GWYNETH JONES

  Ringing Up Baby

  ELLEN KLAGES

  Semi-autonomous

  JIM KLING

  Product Development

  NANCY KRESS

  I Love Liver: A Romance

  LARISSA LAI

  Avatars in Space

  GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

  COMP.BASILISK FAQ

  DAVID LANGFORD

  Gathering of the Clans

  REINALDO JOSÉ LOPES

  Taking Good Care of Myself

  IAN R. MACLEOD

  Undead Again

  KEN MACLEOD

  Words, Words, Words

  ELISABETH MALARTRE

  My Morning Glory

  DAVID MARUSEK

  Don’t Mention the “F” Word

  NEIL MATHUR

  Meat

  PAUL MCAULEY

  The Candidate

  JACK MCDEVITT

  A Modest Proposal for the Perfection of Nature

  VONDA N. MCINTYRE

  The Republic of George’s Island

  DONNA MCMAHON

  The Computiful Game

  PAUL STEVEN MILLER

  Oscar Night, 2054

  SYNE MITCHELL

  The Visible Men

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  The Albian Message

  OLIVER MORTON

  Photons Do Not Lie

  EUAN NISBET

  Stranger in the Night

  SALVADOR NOGUEIRA

  Tick-Tock Curly-Wurly

  GARETH OWENS

  Daddy’s Slight Miscalculation

  ASHLEY PELLEGRINO

  Brain Drain

  FREDERIK POHL

  Great Unreported Discoveries No. 163

  MIKE RESNICK

  Feeling Rejected

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  The Trial of Jeremy Owens

  PETER ROBERTS

  Prometheus Unbound, at Last

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  Dreadnought

  JUSTINA ROBSON

  Falling

  BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM

  Panpsychism Proved

  RUDY RUCKER

  The Abdication of Pope Mary III

  ROBERT J. SAWYER

  The Charge-up Man

  CATHERINE H. SHAFFER

  From the Desk of Jarrod Foster

  BIREN SHAH

  Pluto Story

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Madame Bovary, C’est Moi

  DAN SIMMONS

  Tuberculosis Bacteria Join UN

  JOAN SLONCZEWSKI

  For He on Honeydew Hath Fed …

  PAUL SMAGLIK

  A Man of the Theater

  NORMAN SPRINRAD

  Ivory Tower

  BRUCE STERLING

  Play It Again, Psam

  IAN STEWART

  MAXO Signals

  CHARLES STROSS

  Golden Year

  IGOR TEPER

  Paratext

  SCARLETT THOMAS

  Murphy’s Cat

  JOAN D. VINGE

  Win a Nobel Prize!

  VERNOR VINGE

  A Leap of Faith

  THEO VON HOHENHEIM

  Nadia’s Nectar

  IAN WATSON

  Statler Pulchrifex

  MATT WEBER

  All Is Not Lost

  SCOTT WESTERFELD

  The Key

  IAN WHATES

  The Godmother Protocols

  HEATHER M. WHITNEY

  The Great Good-bye

  ROBERT CHARLES WILSON

  Pigs on the Wing

  K. ERIK ZIEMELIS

  Nostalgia for the Future

  HENRY GEE

  I

  “I just knew I’d find you up here!”

  Estragon said nothing, but shuffled a little westward on the rooftop bench (“Away from Mecca,” as he always put it) to allow his old friend Vladimir a perch. Without speaking, he nodded toward the unused mouthpiece of the hubble-bubble. Only the tip of his long, cratered nose was visible beneath his cowl. The cowl of a scientific editor, one of the only two left in existence. Vla
dimir wore the other, but his was thrown back, his wild white hair blowing in the breeze. Hair across his fat and jowly face, Vladimir took up the mouthpiece and took a long toke.

  “This is good stuff, my old friend.”

  “It’s called ‘Revolutionary Guard.’ Camden suq. Better than the usual, anyway.”

  The two old colleagues continued to puff away in silence. There was little to say, or so it seemed, and apparently little to do. The machines pretty much did everything at Nature—selecting the manuscripts for publication, writing the opinion pieces, editing, pruning, and—as dispassionately as it was frequently—sending the messages of regretful disappointment to the machines that did the research and sent in the manuscripts for publication.

  The slow exfoliation of Nature’s human staff had been so gradual as to have been almost imperceptible, until the two aged sages were all that was left, an ineradicable remnant thanks to stipulated pension provisions common in an earlier age but now otherwise extinct, and impossible to revoke. With little for them to do, the thinning staff took ever-longer cigarette breaks until these pauses became more or less continuous. Vladimir and Estragon’s hubble-bubble was constantly on the go.

  But Estragon sensed that his colleague, ever the more excitable of the pair, was bubbling with suppressed agitation.

  “Oh, spit it out—whatever it is.”

  “Well, it’s … it’s …”

  Estragon pulled away from the pipe and turned to his friend of fifty years with a piercing blue-eyed stare, putting Vladimir on the spot.

  “I was looking through some of the old archives, you know, and … well, I found something … interesting.”

  Estragon turned back to his pipe. “Everything’s interesting to you,“ he growled through clenched teeth.

  Vladimir pretended to be outraged. “Yes, interesting.”

  “What—more than our old papers on Quantum Tumescence? Histrionic Chromosomal Nano-Engineering? And what was it you came up with last week—Transneptunian Applied Astrology?” Estragon spat out the capitals to punctuate his bitter sarcasm. Vladimir was unperturbed.

  “More—my old friend—more interesting even than that!”

  “Well, I never.”

  The two returned to their shared, comradely pursuit of epithelial narcotic ingestion, allowing Vladimir sufficient pause to make his announcement all the more dramatic. Like the shrinking of the tide before a tsunami.

  “Fiction!”

  “Fiction?”

  “That’s what I said, Estragon—Fiction.”

  “You mean—fiction as in made-up stories? Suspension-of-disbelief and all that?” Estragon’s studied nonchalance fell away before frank astonishment, the hubble-bubble quite forgotten—his mouth open, his mouthpiece inert in his hand, like a dead earthworm. The stage, such as it was, belonged to Vladimir, unopposed.

  “Yes, I know. I was amazed myself. But it seems that Nature strayed into those forbidden realms, once. I came across a series of papers we published a century or so back, at the turn of the old-style millennium, before we recalibrated to the calendar of the Prophet, Blessings Be Upon Him.”

  Estragon made a hint—just a hint, mind—of the ritual obeisances.

  “These papers were all gathered together under the title of ‘Futures.’ At first I thought that they were proper papers, you know, but they were suspiciously thin on recognizably citable objects. Then, after I had read a few, it dawned on me—they were speculations about how things might become, were one to pursue certain scientific trends much in discussion at the time.”

  “What—like Nanoparticulate Posthumanity, First Contact, and such?”

  “Yes—well, I think so. But they were all in English, so it was sometimes hard to tell. Not even Farsi, let alone Arabic.”

  “Sounds blasphemous—and double blasphemous! Jolly good they were in English. You wouldn’t want that kind of thing to get around, really.”

  “No—I should think not!” Vladimir flushed, as if he’d been caught looking at pictures of women’s ankles. He fell silent.

  “Oh, come on!” his friend urged. “I’m all agog, and you can’t stop now. Discretion is my middle name. Besides, who can we tell?”

  Another silence fell. The two stared across the rooftops of London, all quiet but for the all-pervasive hum and tick-tick-tick of machines, machines, machines. Vladimir composed himself.

  “It started with one of our predecessors, a man called Gee …”

  “Gee what?”

  “Just ‘Gee.’”

  “Odd name …”

  “Well, this Gee person, with the encouragement of his colleagues, especially his supervisor, Editor Philip Campbell, and his other editor friends—yes, there were quite a few at the time!—commissioned a series of speculations from people who wrote this stuff as a hobby. Or even—if can you credit it—for a living.”

  “Unbelievable!”

  “Nature carried this material, every week, for more than a year …”

  “Amazing!”

  “But wait, there’s more … after a gap of five years they ran an even more extensive series. All told, Nature published more than a hundred and fifty examples.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Well, I think this Editor Gee put some of them in a book with another man called Hartwell in a place called Tor.”

  “Hartwell? Not as outlandish as ‘Gee,’ at any rate. But what then?”

  “Then nothing. They never tried it again. Things … changed.” A longer silence fell, but this time it was Estragon who fractured it.

  “Fiction. Haven’t read any of that for years.”

  “You mean …?”

  “I confess that I did indulge, once upon a time. In my youth. I don’t mind admitting it.” He sighed. “After all, as I said, who can we tell?”

  Vladimir was aghast. Estragon continued.

  “Certainly. I was particularly fond of a writer called Dan Simmons. And Neal Asher. And Greg Bear. And especially Moorcock.”

  “I recognize those names—they were all in this Futures series.”

  Estragon perked up, a glint of mischief soon almost swamped by a haze of what looked like longing and regret for a lost past, and more still, a lost future. But his eyes narrowed.

  “Look, Vlad—are you sure it was fiction? We’ve published some crazy stuff over the centuries. Some of it was literally unbelievable at the time. Much of it was even wrong, I dare say. But all of it at least pretended to be getting at the Holy Truth. You’ve never read fiction …”

  “No, that’s true: I have been both blessed and cursed with piety.”

  “In which case, how would you know the difference? The difference between Truth and Illusion? Or anything in between? Or even something that was really the one, but masquerading as the other?”

  Vladimir sighed. “You’re right. Perhaps one never really knows.”

  Estragon patted his friend’s brown-spotted, wrinkled hand and turned back to the task of cannabinoid inhalation.

  “Stick to the Transneptunian Applied Astrology. I would.”

  Vladimir’s thoughts, ever butterflies over the incredible depths of accumulated human achievement, switched track as if the discussion had never happened.

  “Did you know that if the Cusp of Quaoar strays into the Seventh House of Sedna …?”

  But Estragon was, once again, lost in worlds of his own.

  II

  Whatever the future may hold for Nature, its past—indeed, its very existence—owes much to religious and political discontent. In the nineteenth century, academics at the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge were required to belong to the conventional Church of England. Those barred from these institutions for reasons of religion or politics—Catholics, Jews, atheists, and dissenters of every stripe—washed up, perhaps inevitably, in London, where, in 1828, University College was founded.