Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future » (REV)

Gardner Dozois edits the Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies and Asimov's SF magazine from his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has won the Hugo Award for Best Editor many times.

Mind-expanding explorations of the future of the human form

Our bodies and minds are malleable, and only the imagination is the limit to the possible improvements. From genetics to artificial enhancements, humanity will alter the course of its own evolution. Included here are more than twenty stories from the most imaginative writers in the field, including:

Poul Anderson

• James Blish

• Eric Brown

• Ted Chiang

• Tony Daniel

• Samuel R. Delany

• Greg Egan

• Joe Haldeman

• Geoffrey A. Landis

• Paul McAuley

• Ian MacLeod

• David Marusek

• Tom Purdom

• Robert Reed

• Joanna Russ

• Robert Silverberg

• Brian Stableford

• Bruce Sterling

• Charles Stross

• Michael Swanwick

• Liz Williams

• Gene Wolfe

• Roger Zelazny

Kirkus Reviews

Another theme-centered SF anthology from the prolific Dozois: writers offer cautionary examinations of the dubious, horrific, and comic possibilities of human engineering. Though the scientifically tweaked human being goes at least as far back as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the bermenschen in these 26 previously published stories reflect the more modern science fictional concern of what James Blish, in his own story "Watershed," calls "pantropy": the ability to use technology to alter human beings so they can thrive in new environments. Avoiding two familiar genre classics, Daniel Keyes's weepy "Flowers for Algernon" and Philip Jose Farmer's salacious "The Golden Man," Dozois makes selections that are mostly about how pantropic wish-fulfillment brings ironic results: Roger Zelazny's half-man, half machine in "Halfjack" finds interfacing with a spaceship more fulfilling than sex with a woman, while drug-enhanced, dueling supergeniuses learn to kill with a single word in Ted Chiang's "Understand." Gene Wolfe posits a nightmare race of feral human cannibals preying on the few survivors of planet-wide bio-catastrophe in "Werewolf as Hero," while the pantropically pumped-up mass murderer in Bruce Sterling's "Spook" loves his job because being normal is no fun. But being super is not fun to the alienated spacemen of Samuel Delaney's "Aye, and Gomorrah" or to the burned-out, technologically obsolete cyber wizards in Charles Stross's hilarious "Toast: a Con Report." Dozois ends with a trio of short social satires culminating in Robert Charles Wilson's "The Great Goodbye," where the human condition is defined as being content with the way things are. Entertaining and thought-provoking companionto Worldmakers, Dozois's collection of terraforming stories (p. 1460).