When I started work on The Starry Rift I had what I thought was a good idea, and very little notion of how long or difficult the road to get it published might be.
I started with the idea that when people talked about science fiction for young adult readers they kept talking about the classic juveniles of the 1950s. Those books, novels like Robert Heinlein’s A Door into Summer, are wonderful, but they were written by people born before the First World War and were published not that long after the Second. However great those books might be, I wondered if they could possibly be meaningful to someone who’d been born in 1995.
It seemed to me that it would be worth asking today’s best SF writers to write new stories that hopefully would resonate with readers today. And writers responded. They were kind and generous, and extraordinarily patient. I’d thought this book might have seen the light of day in June of 2006, and now we’re moving towards February of 2008. Still, even allowing for that, I think the book’s terrific and that readers will love it.
As a first taste of The Starry Rift, I’ve posted the cover here and the table of contents below. Expect to hear a lot more about it over the coming months.
1. Repair Kit, Stephen Baxter
2. Anda’s Game, Cory Doctorow
3. Lost Continent, Greg Egan
4. The Dismantled Invention of Fate, Jeffrey Ford
5. Orange, Neil Gaiman
6. Sundiver Day, Kathleen Ann Goonan
7. Cheats, Gwyneth Jones
8. An Honest Day’s Work, Margo Lanagan
9. The Surfer, Kelly Link
10. Incomers, Paul McAuley
11. The Dust Assassin, Ian McDonald
12. Infestation, Garth Nix
13. The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice, Alastair Reynolds.
14. Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome, Tricia Sullivan
15. Ass-Hat Magic Spider, Scott Westerfeld
16. Pinocchio, Walter Jon Williams.