The Furthest Horizon by Gardner Dozois (ed)

Author:Gardner Dozois (ed)
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

Dinosaurs

Walter Jon Williams

Asimov's Science Fiction

June, 1987

Some millions of years ago, our ancestors were tiny, chittering, tree-dwelling insectivores. We've come a long way since then…but evolution is a process that never stops, as amply demonstrated by the story that follows, which takes us 6 million years into a very bizarre future for an unsettling look at some of our distant descendants…

Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Williams is a highly eclectic writer, and the fact is, one Walter Jon Williams story is rarely much like any other Walter Jon Williams story. He's written a wider range of different kinds of stuff than almost any other writer of his generation, ranging from some of the best Alternate History stories of the eighties (including the deeply moving Alternate Civil War novella, following Edgar Allan Poe's career as a Confederate general, "No Spot of Ground," and the compassionate and melancholy look at the alternate and alternately entangled lives that might have been led by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, "Wall, Stone, Craft") to stories featuring scenarios quirky enough to rank with the most off-the-wall Waldropian stuff (sending H.

G. Wells's invading Martians striding into the bizarre, ritualized, and mannered world of the Forbidden City in nineteenth-century China in "Foreign Devils" and presenting us with an Elvis Presley who grows up to become an inspirational Socialist leader whose influence changes the course of modern history in "Red Elvis"). He's written gritty Mean Streets hard-as-nails cyberpunk, in stories such as "Wolf Time," "Video Star," and "Flatline" and in novels such as Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind; he's written some of the most inventive wide-screen Space Opera of recent times, including the monumental novel Aristoi, one of the most successful of modern Space Operas. He's written with depth and real ingenuity about the interaction of humankind with aliens, in the brilliant "Surfacing," as well as in novels such as Angel Station.

He's written lighthearted, wryly amusing, socially satirical novels of manners, featuring the adventures of a Raffles-like thief in a future society, in The Crown Jewels and House of Shards; he's written dark, moody, intricate, involuted, Machiavellian studies of realpolitik in action, full of betrayals and counterbetrayals and counter-counterbetrayals, such as "Solip:System " and "Erogenoscape." Williams also mixes genres with audacity and daring, mixing classical Chinese mythology with the chop-sockey fantasy of Hong Kong martial arts movies in the droll "Broadway Johnny," mixing Sword and Sorcery with the Hornblower-like sea story in "Consequences,"

having costumed superheroes grilled by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the McCarthy-era America of the 1950s in "Witness," and mixing fantasy with technologically oriented "hard" science fiction in books such as Metropolitan and City on Fire successfully enough to be counted as one of the progenitors of an as-yet-nascent subgenre sometimes called Hard Fantasy.

His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov's Science Fiction, as well as in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils.

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