W - Short Works
A group of intellectual political malcontents hire a brutal mercenary to get them off a planet where their dissent means death. Along the way, they learn a few things about life in the real world and the consequences of their choices.
Written for an anthology Harlan Ellison was editing (Ellison had been asking for it since 1975--see the Medea entry for more info), and also sold to Omni.
For a thousand years, humans have lived on the planet Medea, and for five hundred they've known that gravitational forces would cause massive earthquakes and devastate the planet. In the days approaching the time of destruction, all the humans abandon Medea except one, who finds himself unable to leave his home. He makes a last tour around his world, meeting the strange natives, coming to terms with the end of life as he knows it.
This is another story from the "Roma" alternate history. (Check out the Themes entry for details.) Lucius Aelius Antipater is the "Master of Greek Letters to Caesar," basically a translator for the Emperor Maximilianus VI. It is a troubled time for the Empire, with the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire gaining in strength as the Western fades after a series of disastrous campaigns in the New World. A secret message from the enemy has been intercepted, and Caesar is faced with a number of equally futile choices. Quite an enjoyable read, well thought out, with a satisfying ending and engaging characters. It is worth noting that this recent story, like The Alien Years, a recent novel, puts the protagonist in the position of facing an unbeatable foe, and that in neither case does the classic "struggle against impossible odds" result in a rousing but improbable triumph.
With this story, Silverberg broke into one of the most prestigious venues for science fiction, F&SF. It's a contemporary (late-fifties) story of a man with a talent for listening to people's problems, a real empathy for people and their situations. He comes to a small town, a tangled web of soap-opera proportions, and finds that being an empath isn't always safe.
Part two of To Open the Sky. By 2095, the Vorster religion has become a dominant force on Earth, offering people real hope for actual immortality, not a vision of a supernatural afterlife. And like many other successful religions, it's spawned its own kind of heresy.
Christopher Mondschein is an ambitious acolyte in the Vorster church who finds himself an unwitting pawn in the struggle between the establishment and a heretic splinter group calling themselves the Brotherhood of Transcendent Harmony.
Written into The World Inside.
This is a strange far-future tale set in Shining City, a vast technological wonder of a city inhabited by a small number of people whose every need is satisfied instantly by ever-present machines. The people are happy: they know who they are, and they know what they want to be. The city is surrounded by a great purple desert, and no one from the city ventures far into it. Then one day a woman walks out of the desert. She has come, she says, to see the Knowing Machine, which happens to the the one machine the people of the city never use. After all, they know who they are already. Or do they?
Later expanded into Invaders from Earth. |
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On Monday November 22, the residents of the subdivision called Redbud Crescent received the morning paper for Wednesday December 1. What would you do? Play the stock market? Make bets on basketball games? What if you saw your sister's obituary? Didn't I see this on Twilight Zone? Or maybe it would make a good TV series. You could call it something like Early Edition.
In a time of constant turmoil and disaster (rampant mutant viruses, terrorist bombings, pollution, and so on), a travel agency starts offering time-travel trips to see the end of the world. Among the keep-up-with-the-Joneses crowd, it's the fashionable thing to do. The odd part is, everybody who goes sees something different.
Part three of To Open the Sky. Since it is impossible for a human to survive on Venus without maintaining a pressurized environment, the colonists of Venus have altered themselves to suit the planet. The manipulations are genetic, so succeeding generations are born to live on the hostile world. The Jim Burns cover art gives you an idea: blue skin and pseudo-gills.
After decades of failure to convert the inhabitants of Earth's colonies on Mars and Venus, the Vorster church sends yet another missionary/martyr to Venus in 2135. He is surprised to find a thriving mission of the heretic sect of Transcendent Harmony, which is nearly dead on the home world. And the Venusians have other changes less obvious than those to their bodies.
Brock and Hammond are a team for the Administration of External Exploration. For eleven years, they've wandered the galaxy, examining new worlds and reporting their data back to Earth. After such a time, Brock starts getting restless, wondering why he should continue this rootless existence.
In the distant future, after humankind has spread across the galaxy, a team of technicians returns to the home world. Their mission: Try to make the old place habitable enough that tourists can visit it. After all the pollution that was foisted on the planet, it's pretty much a lifeless wasteland. One of the team, however, finds a strange kind of artistic beauty in the vastness and single-mindedness of the destruction.
Later expanded into The Seed of Earth.
The World of a Thousand Colors is a near-mythical place, where those lucky enough to be chosen travel for...well, for something wonderful, so wonderful they never leave, but so secret nobody knows what it is. But it's great enough that some people will do almost anything to get there. Trouble is, there's an entrance exam, and it's a doozy.
Written into The World Inside.
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Last updated October 21, 2002
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