Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Author:Bryan Thomas Schmidt [Schmidt, Bryan Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789092929
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2019-11-04T21:00:00+00:00

Though rightly known as one of the editing greats of science fiction for the past four decades (he died in 2018, but not before winning fifteen Hugos as Best Short Form Editor), Gardner Dozois started out as a writer. His numerous short fiction pieces and few novels have been widely praised and among them is this space opera—almost, but not quite, military science fiction—gem from 1971, which was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novella, Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and Locus Award for Best Short Story. He was a fan of core science fiction, and it gives me special pleasure to include Dozois’ work in an anthology I know would be right up his alley.

As friend and fellow science fiction author Michael Swanwick wrote of Dozois and this story’s beginning, “with their sudden irruption into wit and color, ‘social pith’ and vinegar… the opening lines to ‘A Special Kind of Morning,’ in which Gardner squanders enough ideas to fuel a standard trilogy of SF novels on one fast story-within-a-story that’s ostensibly about a rebellion against a tyranny so absolute that no price is too great for liberty and a war so terrible that by its end those fighting it no longer care for victory. But really it’s about life and love, valor and compassion and freedom and all those things that really matter.”

The story’s two central events, in fact, take place just before and after the story itself—the lordling’s first taste of lovemaking and the death of the old soldier telling him the story. As Swanwick puts it, “it is always a special kind of morning, even on the day you die.”

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