Galactic Empires by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Short Stories
Published: 2008-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

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THE SEER AND THE SILVERMAN

Stephen Baxter

Taken from the Short Story Collection “Galactic Empires” (2008) edited by Gardner Dozois

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Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century, British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for more than a decade now with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the "hard-science" story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the cutting edge of science that bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.

Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then he has become one of that magazine's most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov's Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He's one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. In 2001, he appeared on the Final Hugo Ballot twice, and won both Asimov's Readers Award and Analog'5 Analytical Laboratory Award, one of the few writers ever to win both awards in the same year. Baxter's first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine-The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels, Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, Emperor, Resplendent, and two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days and Time's Eye, a Time Odyssey. His short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayflower II. Coming up are a flood of new novels, including Conqueror, Navagator, Firstborn, Weaver, Flood, and The H-bomb Girl.

Baxters Xeelee series is one of the most complex sequences in science fiction history, a tapestry of dozens of stories and many novels (Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring, Cilia-of-Gold) that spans millions of years of time as well as most of the galaxy, and brings humans into contact (usually hostile contact) with dozens of alien races, many of them initially more powerful and advanced than humanity itself. Here, in a scenario roughly halfway through the entire arc of the sequence, he pictures the attempt of two Galactic Empires formerly locked in conflict to uneasily coexist-with the stakes about as high as they can possibly get.

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