‘The Liberation of Earth’ by William Tenn

Children’s schooldays were requested, too, in such collecting drives as “Platinum Scrap for Procyon” and “Radioactive Debris for Deneb.” Housewives also were implored to save on salt whenever possible—this substance being useful to the Troxxt in literally dozens of incomprehensible ways—and colorful posters reminded: “Don’t salinate—sugarfy!”

Another story of cosmic horror, and a story about war. It’s also very funny, as I hope the quotation illustrates. After contact with ineffably powerful aliens, humans find their planet a battleground for cosmic conflict. Cosmic horror is characterized by powerlessness in the face of unknowable power; Tenn’s story foregrounds how a human society might cope with that powerlessness, while futility plays out in the background.

First published in Future Science Fiction in 1953. Collected in Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume 1, 2001

‘The Lucky Strike’ by Kim Stanley Robinson

This is another story about war, and a story about morality. Alternate history is usually an intellectual exercise in what would follow from a different event. ‘The Lucky Strike’ instead looks at the immediate aftermath of the different event, asking how different what follows might be. As readers, we know what happened historically in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what if a different pilot is flying the plane? We might hope that Captain January will break the straitjacket of history as we know it to be, but can he?

First published in Universe 14 in 1984. Collected in The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, 2010

‘When I Was Ming the Merciless’ by Gene Wolfe

Another story about morality, and a story about the will to live. Wolfe’s short stories are rarely this straightforward, even on their surface. An imagining of a social-psychological study along the lines of the Stanford prison experiment, this story takes the form of an exit interview from one of the participants. We don’t hear the interviewer’s questions, only the horrifyingly matter-of-fact responses. A very disquieting story.

First published in The Ides of Tomorrow: Original Science Fiction Tales of Horror, Little, Brown, 1976. Collected in Endangered Species, Tor, 1989

‘Rockabye Baby’ by S. C. Sykes

He could remember hearing his neck snap. In fact, Cody could remember every long minute after the accident, crumpled in a limp ball against the van’s roof. He remembered the immediate numbing sensation, as if everything from his Adam’s apple down had gone to sleep. He wondered if this was what death was like and felt cheated.

Another story about the will to live, and a story about memory and identity. We see Cody adjust to life with tetraplegia over seven years or so, and we see a fully fleshed-out and specific life, one that’s his. When Cody has a hope of a chance to give up this life to get his body back, it’s a relief to remember that it’s his choice, not ours.

First published in Analog in Mid-December 1985. Collected in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection, Bluejay, 1986

‘Mother Tongues’ by S. Qiouyi Lu

You expect your mother to scold you, to tell you about the importance of your heritage and language—she’s always been proud of who she is, where she’s from; she’s always been the first to teach you about your own culture—but instead her expression softens, and she puts a hand over yours, her wrinkled skin warm against your skin.

“哎，嘉嘉，没有别的办法吗?”

Another story about memory and identity, and a story about immigrants and culture. I teach a university course on language in science fiction, and this is one of the stories I teach. Jiawen Liu is considering selling her entire linguistic competence in her native language of Mandarin, in order to raise the money to send her daughter to college. Linguistic identity can form an important component of a person’s total identity, and this story beautifully and sympathetically asks how to value that contribution, and how to put it into words.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2018. Collected in The New Voices of Science Fiction, 2019. Read online here at Clarkesworld Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine

‘The Slovo Stove’ by Avram Davidson

The rent was seventy-five dollars a month, the painters would come right in, and Mrs. Keeley was very glad to have Nice People living there. Which was very interesting, because the last time Silberman had entered the house (Peter Touey, who used to live upstairs, had said, “Come on over after school; I got a book with war pictures in it”) Mrs. Keeley had barred the way: “You don’t live here,” said she. Well. Times had changed. Had times changed? Something had certainly changed.

Another story about immigrants and culture, and a story about society’s relationship to technology. Where ‘Mother Tongues’ takes a personal view of what migrants give up—and why—even after immigrating, ‘The Slovo Stove’ takes a societal view. Fred Silberman’s quest to find an example of the eponymous stove, a thermodynamically impossible appliance brought to the United States by Eastern European immigrants, is unsuccessful, for frustrating, pitiable reasons. I love Davidson’s voice, and an easy half-dozen of his stories would make it into any real anthology I may compile, but this disheartening portrayal of unappreciated glory is my favorite.

First published in Universe 15 in 1985. Collected in The Avram Davidson Treasury, Tor, 1988

‘Pretty Boy Crossover’ by Pat Cadigan

He forgets everything, the girl, the Rude Boy, the Mohawk, them on the stairs, and plunges through the crowd toward the screen. People fall away from him as though they were re-enacting the Red Sea. He dives for the screen, for Bobby, not caring how it must look to anyone. What would they know about it, any of them. He can’t remember in his whole sixteen years ever hearing one person say, I love my friend. Not Bobby, not even himself.

Another story about society’s relationship to technology, and a story about what it means to be human. The unnamed viewpoint character is offered the opportunity to become immortal through digitization, and he refuses. I’m fairly sure I would also refuse, but not for the same reasons. Would sixteen-year-old me have refused?

First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1986. Collected in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, 2010; and The Big Book of Cyberpunk, Vintage, 2023

‘Learning to Be Me’ by Greg Egan

“My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing special. I hated them.”

Another story about what it means to be human, and a story about narrators and viewpoints. (Also a story about society’s relationship to technology, and memory and identity, and the will to live, and morality.) Everyone has a backup implanted in their brain, which is trained to mimic the brain’s behavior by being reset whenever it thinks something different. But how can you tell whether you’re the backup? Like “Hell Is the Absence of God”, this story is an elegant dialectic proceeding from its starting assumption. But where Chiang’s story encompasses multiple points of view in a detached, ironic way, “Learning to Be Me” is wholly personal.

First published in Interzone #37 in 1990. Collected in The Best of Greg Egan, Gollancz, 2021

Introduction


I write this sitting in the gardens of Newnham College. Bathed in the buttercup blaze of May, the world in its present form looks especially unrealistic, even by Cambridge standards. In a minute or two I will stand up and I will walk through the white doors of the Sidgwick building (“curved like ships’ windows among generous waves of red brick”, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s description) and through the courtyard past Sylvia Plath’s Stone Boy with Dolphin, to seek the cool of Newnham Library, and a corner to type the last words of my PhD thesis. I have been a graduate student at Newnham for the better part of the last six years. Lately, I have been imagining the day I’ll step into the Porters’ Lodge, or through the Pfeiffer Arch, and I’ll look around, a mere memory; I, of course, will be the memory; I won’t belong here anymore. So I write this personal anthology for myself, for that day: a breadcrumb trail of stories, all somehow linked to this place, to magic myself back to myself: to the time I called Newnham home.

‘Home’ by Shirley Jackson

There is a little hut in Newnham gardens, between the college and the Old Labs, sheltered by trees and shrubs, where one can, if so inclined, disappear. I used to sit there, on rainy days when it wasn’t too cold, to read stories; Shirley Jackson’s were my favourite. They went well with the gloomy atmosphere. It never stops raining in her short story ‘Home’, in which a young couple move into an old house in the country. The house itself isn’t haunted, but the road that leads to it might be, by a little child and an old woman, standing in the rain, demanding to go back, to go back, to go back…

First published in The Ladies Home Journal, August 1965. Collected in Just an Ordinary Day, Bantam Books 1997)

‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf

But, you may say, we asked you to put together an anthology of short stories — what has that got to do with ‘A Room of One’s Own’? When I was thirteen and I first picked ‘Una Stanza Tutta Per Sé’ (as it’s translated in Italian, in which I read it), Woolf’s seminal essay did not read as an essay, it read as a story. Alive with details, despite the static promise of its title, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ follows the journey of the “I” (“a convenient term for somebody who has no real being”) wherever she is allowed, and beyond. It’s not a paper about women and fiction; it’s the epic tale of women and fiction. As such I remembered it, years later, when I first set foot in Woolf’s imaginary “Oxbridge”. Like her “I”, I quickly found all the places I could not go, the grass I could not walk on, the books I could not read; granted, because I was a 16-year-old Italian tourist with hardly any English, and not because — like Woolf’s “I” — “ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction”; still, a closed door is a closed door, and it feels like one.

Based on two lectures delivered by Woolf at Newnham and Girton colleges, first published in 1929 by the Hogarth Press. Now widely available, including as a Penguin Modern Classic and a Vintage Feminism Short Edition

‘Stone boy with Dolphin’ by Sylvia Plath

‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ is about the rather ugly statue of a winged little boy holding (or strangling, depending on your perspective) a big fish, supposedly a dolphin. The statue is currently in a corner of a square internal garden in Newnham, leading through the Sidgwick building to the new Library. Invisible in spring, hidden away by the thick foliage of the surrounding bushes, in the winter the boy stands out as the sole inhabitants of the stark, cold, empty garden. It is winter in Plath’s story; “the February air burned blue and cold”. As it follows its protagonist Dody through her day, ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ cracks through the shiny, icy surface of a student’s social life and reaches for her loneliness, one of Cambridge’s more ephemeral ghosts. I have a memory of looking for the statue in the main college garden (as per Plath’s instructions), then of finding it in its present location. I wished, like Dody, to develop a habit of “brushing the snow from the face of the winged, dolphin-carrying boy”, but it doesn’t snow in Cambridge like it used to in 1957. Anyway, as I said, the statue had been moved.

First published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Faber 1977

‘Nostalgie’ by Wendy Erskine

Decades before the beginning of ‘Nostalgie’, Drew was with a woman named Delphine, whom he hasn’t seen since, but he keeps thinking about: “The time spent recollecting being with her adds up to more than the actual duration.” Throughout the story, titled after a song Drew released when he was young, ‘Nostalgie de la Boue’, the present is translucent, skin-thin; you can see the past, personal and collective, slide snake-like underneath it, threatening to break through. I read ‘Nostalgie’ on my laptop, one afternoon in Newnham Library, to the sound of other people typing.

First published in The Irish Times and available to read online here. Collected in Dance Move, The Singing Fly 2022

‘Morpho Eugenia’ by A. S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt is a Newnham alumna; there aren’t many corners of the college in which I haven’t read her work. One night, killing time in a friend’s room while he finished his work, I remember casually picking up Byatt’s introduction to ‘Memory: An Anthology’, and being moved almost to tears by her description of remembering her grandmother remembering her girlhood. Like all of Byatt’s prose, it made words into something exceptionally physical, a seamless translation of matter into memory; the novella ‘Morpho Eugenia’ shares this magic touch, whereby flesh is made word. It follows the story of young entomologist William Adamson, shipwrecked out of his life as a researcher in the Amazon into the far more slippery territory of an upperclass Victorian family. Placing ants warfare beside William’s reluctant attempts at loving and being loved, wrapping in clouds of butterflies arguments on the existence of a divine creator, the story perfectly captures the tension between body and mind which animates all of Byatt’s work.

Published in Angels and Insects, Chatto & Windus 1992