Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,210

bookseller, which publishes the New York Review of Science Fiction. He is the author of Age of Wonders and the editor of many anthologies, including The Dark Descent, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, The World Treasury of Science Fiction, Northern Stars, The Ascent of Wonder (co-edited with Kathryn Cramer), and a number of Christmas anthologies. In addition to editing fifteen annual paperback volumes of Year’s Best SF, he has also co-edited five volumes of Year’s Best Fantasy. He has won the Eaton Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Poll, has been nominated for the Hugo Award thirty-one times to date, and has won the Hugo for Best Editor.

KATHRYN CRAMER is a writer, anthologist, and housewife. She has won a World Fantasy Award for best anthology for The Architecture of Fear, co-edited with Peter Pautz; she was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for her anthology Walls of Fear. She has co-edited several anthologies with David G. Hartwell and now does the annual Year’s Best SF with him. She is on the editorial board of the New York Review of Science Fiction and has been nominated for the Hugo Award twelve times. Her dark fantasy hypertext, In Small and Large Pieces, was published by Eastgate Systems, Inc.

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Praise for previous volumes

“An impressive roster of authors.”

Locus

“The finest modern science fiction writing.”

Pittsburgh Tribune

Edited by David G. Hartwell

YEAR’S BEST SF

YEAR’S BEST SF 2

YEAR’S BEST SF 3

YEAR’S BEST SF 4

YEAR’S BEST SF 5

YEAR’S BEST SF 6

Edited by David G. Hartwell

& Kathryn Cramer

YEAR’S BEST SF 7

YEAR’S BEST SF 8

YEAR’S BEST SF 9

YEAR’S BEST SF 10

YEAR’S BEST SF 11

YEAR’S BEST SF 12

YEAR’S BEST SF 13

YEAR’S BEST SF 14

YEAR’S BEST SF 15

YEAR’S BEST FANTASY

YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 2

YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 3

YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 4

YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 5

This book is a collection of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

YEAR’S BEST SF 15. Copyright © 2010 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First Eos paperback printing: June 2010

EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199553-8

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1 Line from a twentieth-century American novel, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, now largely dismissed as both racist and romanticized. The male protagonist, Rhett Butler, speaks the line to the abrasive heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, as he leaves their marriage.

1 “Frankly” means that the speaker is talking without subterfuge or lies. Since only liars emphasize their truthfulness—enlightened endolas, of course, represent truth with their very beings—the speaker is openly announcing that he is lying, signaling to the hearer that everything which follows is therefore untrue. In fact, the speaker does give a damn. This sort of convoluted speech was often necessary in pre-Collapse societies, in which “governments” were so politically oppressive that truth could not be openly spoken.

2 “My dear” is an honorific, similar in construction to the equally archaic, hierarchical “my lord” or “your excellency.” This suggests that in the original, the speaker was addressing some sort of lord or commander.

3 “Damn.” Rigorous scholarship by Kral BlackG3 reveals that this was a curse. Its presence in a coded message to a high official is intriguing. For centuries the folk saying has been associated with an extinct “servant class” that included ditch diggers, butlers, and dentists. It may be that in ancient times, when humans compelled other humans rather than robots to provide services, a folk saying was the only acceptable way to “curse” or condemn the owner class, even as the speaker obediently transmits whatever coded information followed. Unfortunately, the sentences following “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” in this political drama have been lost.

NOTE: The common variation, still occasionally seen even in scholarly forums, is scripted in the short-lived and silly “Reformed English”: “Franklee, my der, I dont giv a dam.”

1 Frank Lee—Unknown folk persona who seems to have represented “straight shooting,” either verbal or (as is to be expected in violent historical periods) the use of personal arms. See Frank and Jesse James.

2 endolas—religious scholars of the pre-Catastrophe EuroPolar Coalition. They conflated some solid learning with much mysticism. Organized into “groves,” “forests,” and “amazons,” in the eco-heavy nomenclature of that era.

3 This explanation is typical of the confused and ignorant thinking that prevailed in the Endola Age.

4 Collapse—one name given to the economic and social upheavals, circa 2190-2210. Exact dates have, of course, disappeared with much other history in the EMP Catastrophe. Other names: Crash, Cave-in, the Big Oops (etymology unknown).

5 governments—vernacular name for ruling bodies, some consensual and some not. All pre-date Electronic Fair Facilitation and Enforcement.

6 “so politically oppressive that truth could not be openly spoken.” Unable to say whether this analysis is or is not correct.

Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,210

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