There was a famous science fiction writer, Jack Williamson, who lived in New Mexico. When he was a boy, he and his family traveled from western Texas to what would become their new homestead in a covered wagon. It was less than ten years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, commercial radio broadcasts in the United States were still five years away, women were still denied the right to vote by the US House of Representatives, and German zeppelins were bombing England. The American Century, driven by a love for technology, a booming economy, and a not always unfortunate involvement in armed conflicts was hardly begun, and yet in less then twenty years Williamson would be an active participant in the evolution of modern science fiction, spinning tales of interstellar adventure, where galaxies collided, worlds exploded, brave heroes won out against incredible odds, and beautiful damsels were rescued from the clutches of terrible aliens: tales of pioneers and far frontiers from a man who had been a pioneer and traveled to at least one frontier himself.

For all that people think that science fiction is about the future, it’s not. Like all fiction, it’s about today. It’s about the world we live in — what we think and feel about it, and how we think or fear it might change in the coming years. The stories that Williamson and other writers like him (EE “Doc” Smith, A.E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp) wrote before 1945 were published in cheap magazines — pulps — that were garish and brash, but were very much of their time. Golden Age science fiction, as it is known, reflected the first half of the American Century well. Brash and confident, it was ultimately optimistic fiction that put its faith in technology and the abilities of practical men to solve problems. That changed when the Enola Gay completed her mission in August of 1945. After the first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Second World War ended, we moved into the Cold War era. Technology and the people who created it became something to be feared, something more likely to destroy our world than save it. For all that a movie like Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was a comedy, it was painfully close to how the world viewed scientists. By the time the Cold War was in full flight science fiction writers were still producing fiction that could have appeared during the Golden Age, but darker, more pessimistic work like John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up or J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World was also being published. And when, during the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister of England and Ronald Reagan was elected as the American President, science fiction writers seemed to become much more overtly politically aware. It was around this time that British science fiction writers like M. John Harrison, Iain M. Banks, and others began to retool the classic stuff of science fiction, retaining the bright, shiny surface, but adding depth, complexity, and a sympathy for the political Left to the mix. In the United States, writers were taking a different tack, looking to the dark, gritty urban streets of cyberpunk, where technology was hijacked by the street and the first glimmerings of the Internet were imagined.

All of which happened a long time ago. What does it all have to do with The Starry Rift, the book you’re now holding? Well, if science fiction is one of the ways we discuss what’s happening in the world we live in and how it might affect us, one of the stories that we tell ourselves about what tomorrow might be like, then it’s important that we hear those stories now. At a time when a major American city was only recently almost destroyed by an enormous hurricane, when international political and religious unrest seems to be spiraling ever out of control, and when technology is getting stranger and more abstract, we need to hear tales written today to explain the world we are living in and the world we might face.

And so, I turned to a handful of the best writers in the field, asking them to start with the world we’re living in and imagine new tomorrows that we might face: to write science fiction stories that would entertain, offer readers in 2008 the kind of thrill that readers in 1940 found in the pages of dusty magazines, but would not read like they were written half a hundred years ago. Stories filled with wonder, adventure, and a sense of fearlessly coming to grips with tomorrow. Some of the stories here are the sons and daughters of the kind of space adventure that made up much of science fiction for the longest time, but there are others that imagine entirely new and strange ways of living. These stories are not manifestoes, they are entertainments, but they also are the sound of us talking to tomorrow. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did, and that they perhaps offer more than just a little distraction.