The Future Boldly Imagined From Breathtaking New Perspectives

The world as we will know it is far different from the future once predicted in simpler times. For this newest collection of the finest short form SF to appear in print over the preceding year, acclaimed editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have gathered remarkable works that reflect a new sensibility. Courageous and diverse stories from some of the finest authors in the field grace this amazing volume -- adventures and discoveries, parables and warnings, carrying those eager to fly to far ends of a vast, ever-shifting universe of alien worlds, strange cultures, and mind-bending technologies. Tomorrow has never been as spellbinding, terrifying, or transforming as it is here, today, in these extraordinary pages. Hang on!

New tales from:

• Kage Baker
• Gregory Benford
• Terry Bisson
• Rick Moody
• Michael Swanwick
• John Varley
• and many more

Octavia E. Butler lives in the Seattle, Washington area. She grew up in California and attended courses in SF writing taught by Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon, and the Clarion SF Writing workshop. After years of work, culminating in the early 1980s with two exceptional novels, Kindred and Wild Seed, her career began to peak. She won the 1984 Hugo Award for the short story "Speech Sounds." Her story "Bloodchild," about human male slaves who incubate their alien masters' eggs, won the 1985 Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and both are collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995). Then, in 1995, she was awarded a McArthur Grant, a large cash prize often called the "genius grant," given annually in the arts and sciences, which brought her worldwide notice. She also entered a new, strong phase of her career with the novel Parable of the Sower. Her early stories are collected in Bloodchild. She is now certainly one of the notable figures in the SF field and one of our leading writers.

"Amnesty" was published electronically at SciFiction, the SCIFI.com website, which is now the highest paying market for SF and fantasy and so had some of the very best short fiction in 2003. It is a return to the powerful themes of her fine novella, "Bloodchild," a story about finding the courage and strength to compromise and transcend in the face of an oppressive and horrible situation.

The stranger-Community, globular, easily twelve feet high and wide glided down into the vast, dimly lit food production hall of Translator Noah Cannon's employer. The stranger was incongruously quick and graceful, keeping to the paths, never once brushing against the raised beds of fragile, edible fungi. It looked, Noah thought, a little like a great, black, moss-enshrouded bush with such a canopy of irregularly-shaped leaves, shaggy mosses, and twisted vines that no light showed through it. It had a few thick, naked branches growing out, away from the main body, breaking the symmetry and making the Community look in serious need of pruning.

The moment Noah saw it and saw her employer, a somewhat smaller, better-maintained-looking dense, black bush, back away from her, she knew she would be offered the new job assignment she had been asking for.

The stranger-Community settled, flattening itself at bottom, allowing its organisms of mobility to migrate upward and take their rest. The stranger-Community focused its attention on Noah, electricity flaring and zigzagging, making a visible display within the dark vastness of its body. She knew that the electrical display was speech, although she could not read what was said. The Communities spoke in this way between themselves and within themselves, but the light they produced moved far too quickly for her to even begin to learn the language. The fact that she saw the display, though, meant that the communications entities of the stranger-Community were addressing her. Communities used their momentarily inactive organisms to shield communication from anyone outside themselves who was not being addressed.

She glanced at her employer and saw that its attention was focused away from her. It had no noticeable eyes, but its entities of vision served it very well whether she could see them or not. It had drawn itself together, made itself look more like a spiny stone than a bush. Communities did this when they wished to offer others privacy or simply disassociate themselves from the business being transacted. Her employer had warned her that the job that would be offered to her would be unpleasant not only because of the usual hostility of the human beings she would face, but because the subcontractor for whom she would be working would be difficult.