Empress of Eternity—Science Fiction Yet?

By L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

My “original” title for Empress of Eternity was Artifice of Eternity, a direct crib from the poet William Butler Yeats, but that title didn’t last long once the sales department pointed out that my title was far too similar to an earlier title of mine—The Eternity Artifact. While I like the “new” title, it didn’t occur to me immediately that Empress of Eternity carried with it the implication that the book was fantasy.  I later did a quick search and discovered that while there have been a handful of science fiction books published with empress in the title [including Kage Baker’s recent The Empress of Mars], the vast majority of “empress” books are either fantasy, romance, or historical novels, or non-fiction history  books, and it appears that I may be the only male author writing a science fiction novel with a title featuring an empress, a rather dubious distinction.

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To Read, or Not to Read, that is the Question

By Melissa Ann Singer, Senior Editor

Okay, confession time: I’ve never read The Wheel of Time. Other than the story in Legends, that is.

I can hear the gasps of shock and horror now.

And my reason for not reading WOT is stupidly pedestrian. It’s no more or less than “I’ve been busy.” Seriously. When The Eye of the World was first published, I was editing a huge number of books and barely had time to keep up on developments in the genres I was working in (which did not include epic fantasy at the time). I figured, I’ll have plenty of opportunities to read Eye later.

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“Keep Away from the Keep”*

By F. Paul Wilson

Damn. I just realized that if we’d waited one more month we could have called it the “Thirtieth Anniversary Edition.”

That’s right. Wm. Morrow first published The Keep in 1981. Yours truly finds that very scary.

Even though I spent the 70s writing SF for John Campbell’s Analog and Doubleday’s science fiction line, I really wanted to write horror. You could sense that from the grisly touches in my SF. In “Ratman,” my first sale to Campbell—my first sale ever—the finale involved the bad guy being eaten alive by semi-intelligent space rats. While discussing possible additions to “The Tery” for Dell’s Binary Stars #2, I remember editor Jim Frenkel telling me, “It’s already got enough horror.”

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My AI and Miss Jean Brodie

By Pamela Sargent

Ship, the artificial intelligence that unites the three volumes of my Seed trilogy—Earthseed, Farseed, and the just-published Seed Seeker—is the mind inside the space-faring vessel sent out by a far-future Earth to seed other worlds with human life. In Earthseed, Ship is the only parent the young people growing up inside it have ever known. In Farseed, Ship is absent until the last chapter of the book, although still remembered by its children, who have settled the planet they call Home but are still caught in the conflict among them than began aboard Ship. In Seed Seeker, Ship returns to find out what has become of the descendants of its earthseed, who now recall it only as a legendary part of their distant past.

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The Green Bird

By Kage Baker

To honor the magnificent career of Jack Vance, one unparalleled in acheivement and impact on the fantasy genre, George R.R. Martin and Garner Dozois, with the full cooperation of Jack Vance, his family, and his agents, created the tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth. The best of today’s fantasy writers were invited to work in the unique and evocative millieu of the Dying Earth, from which they and so many others have drawn so much inspiration, to create their own brand-new adventures in the world of Jack Vance’s latest creation.

We hope you enjoy this complete story from Songs of the Dying Earth, about, in author Kage Baker’s words, “a liar and thief in a doomed world of liars and thieves.”

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