Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future by Gardner Dozois Read Free Book Online

no one to remind him. When he died, there would be no one to hold his hands; no one to close his eyes and lay him in the earth— and the forests would grow in over the land and wild beasts would nuzzle his bones.

    But I knew what. What of it? I'm tough enough to take it.

    The stars flashed and flashed above him. Looking up, against his own will, Kormt saw how bright they were, how bright and quiet. And how very far away! He was seeing light that had left its home before he was born.

    He stopped, sucking in his breath between his teeth. "No," he whispered.

    This was his land. This was Earth, the home of man; it was his and he was its. This was the land , and not a single dust mote, crazily reeling and spinning through an endlessness of dark and silence, cold and immensity. Earth could not be so alone!

    The last man alive. The last man in all the world!

    He screamed, then, and began to run. His feet clattered loud on the road; the small sound was quickly swallowed by silence, and he covered his face against the relentless blaze of the stars. But there was no place to run to, no place at all.

Watershed

    JAMES BLISH

    The late James Blish was one of the most prominent science-fiction writers of the fifties and sixties, and one of the first to concentrate on the use of biological science and technology in SF (he was himself a microbiologist). His "pantropy" (a word coined by Blish himself) stories, including his most famous one, "Surface Tension," and the other stories (including this one) later collected in The Seedling Stars, are among the first science-fiction stories to investigate the idea that humans could be redesigned and reengineered so that they would be able to survive on alien planets under alien conditions… thus opening the door for later investigations of posthumanity, and thus ancestral to all such stories. And even right here, near the beginning of SF's examination of the theme, we can see that Blish was well aware that crossing the threshold into posthumanity was a one-way journey. Once you went through that doorway, you could not go back again. Nor would you necessarily want to…

    Blish's best-known novel was probably A Case of Conscience, still one of SF's most subtle and profound explorations of the theme of religious faith, for which he won a well-deserved Hugo Award in 1959. Also well known at the time— and quite probably an influence on the work of Robert Reed, Ian McDonald, Alastair Reynolds, and other modern practitioners of the vast-scope-and-scale Space Opera— was his "Okie" series, widescreen adventure novels that featured whole Terran cities taking off for the stars, powered by antigravity devices, and which culminates with the death and rebirth of the entire universe; the individual Okie novels — Earthman, Come Home; They Shall Have Stars; The Triumph of Time; and A Life for the Stars— were collected in the omnibus volume Cities in Flight. Blish's other novels include Black Easter, The Day After Judgement, Doctor Mirabilis, The Night Shapes, The Frozen Years, and Jack of Eagles. The best of Blish's short fiction— stories such as "A Work of Art," "Common Time," "The Box," and "Midsummer Century" —holds up well even today, and has been gathered in collections such as Galactic Cluster, Anywhen, Midsummer Century, and The Best Science Fiction Stories of James Blish. Under the name of William Atheling, Blish was also one of the most important early SF critics, rivaled only by his friend and sometime-collaborator, Damon Knight; "Atheling's" reviews were gathered in The Issue At Hand and More Issues At Hand. Blish died in 1975.

    *
    The murmurs of discontent— Captain Gorbel, being a military man, thought of it as "disaffection" —among the crew of the R.S.S. Indefeasible had reached the point where they could no longer be ignored, well before the ship had come within fifty light-years of its objective.

    Sooner or later, Gorbel thought, sooner or later this idiotic seal-creature is