Introduction to New Voices in Science Fiction

People always worry about where the next generation is coming from.

Babe Ruth retired, and suddenly baseball was blessed with Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams and Stan Musial. Secretariat retired, and we got Seattle Slew, Affirmed, and Ruffian. Richard Rodgers passed away, and suddenly we had Stephen Sondheim, Harvey Schmidt and Cy Coleman.

It’s the same in fantasy and science fiction. Stanley G. Weinbaum and Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft all died within a couple of years, and suddenly we had Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Theodore Sturgeon. Another slight dip, and we were visited by Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and Brian Aldiss. Another lull, and it was Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin to the rescue.

It never fails. There is always a next generation, and it is always filled with talent. The most satisfying thing is to spot it early on and watch it grow and mature. So when SFWA (the Science Fiction Writers of America) asked me to edit an original anthology of stories by our newest faces, our coming stars, I was only too happy to oblige. It’s pretty easy to look at the field today and say that Joe Haldeman and Connie Willis and Nancy Kress are wonderful writers; the trick was to spot that talent after they’d only been writing a year or two, and the satisfaction was to watch that talent grow and develop.

So how (I hear you ask) do you find these future superstars before anyone knows they’re going to be superstars?

Well, a safe place to start looking is with the Campbell Award, which goes to the Best New Writer every year, and which has a shortlist of five or six nominees per year. That’s where I found Michael A. Burstein, Susan R. Matthews, Kage Baker, James Van Pelt, Julie E. Czernada, Cory Doctorow, Shane Tourtelette, and Tobias S. Buckell.

Even better places are the Nebula and Hugo Awards, where Kage Baker and Michael A. Burstein had been nominated.

Then there are the bookstores, where Kay Kenyon, Susan R. Matthews, and Kage Baker have each produced multiple novels and have a growing following of devoted readers.

There’s Clarion, that special school for embryonic science fiction writers. The year I taught I encountered the stories of Tom Gerencer, Hillary Moon Murphy, Tobias S. Buckell, David Kirtley, and Mark Stafford. (In fact, I workshopped the Kirtley and Stafford stories at Clarion.)

Since I’ve edited many other anthologies, sometimes the writer is one who has sold to me before, like Adrienne Gormley, Barbara J. Galler-Smith, Robyn Herrington, or superstar singer Janis Ian.

Sometimes it’s a newcomer that established writers have recommended to me, like Lisa Mantchev or Charlie Stross.

Sometimes it’s just a confluence of fortuitous circumstances, as when I judged the James White Memorial Story Contest, found that winner David D. Levine was a newcomer, and bought the story after it was the unanimous choice of the judging panel. (When I bought it it hadn’t appeared in America or in any professional publication, but then Dave Hartwell asked permission to run it in his Best of the Year anthology…and how could I tell a new writer that I wouldn’t permit his story to appear there? So, after the fact, it has become the one unoriginal story in this original anthology.)

And sometimes it’s just a newcomer who has heard of the book and asked to be considered for it, like Paul Crilley of South Africa.

Will they all be successful? Of course not. But my guess is that, fifteen or twenty years from now, when the historians of the field name the ten best writers to break in within three years, either direction, of the millennium, you’ll find at least half of them in this book.