"G. David Nordley - After the Vikings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nordley G. David)

After the Vikingsis copyright© 2001 by G. David Nordley. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher.

Copyright information for individual stories can be found in thePublication Information section at the back
of this book.


ISBN: 1-931305-16-1


Scorpius Digital Publishing

PO Box 19423

Queen Anne Station

Seattle, WA 98109

www.scorpiusdigital.com


Cover Painting: "Mars," by Adrian Bourne




This book is dedicated to the memory of Willy Ley, G. Harry Stine, and Poul Anderson




PREFACE

T he first editors of this short collection were Stanley Schmidt and Gardner Dozois, who bought these
stories forAnalog Science Fiction/Science Fact , andAsimov’s Science Fiction respectively, and who
helped me make them better stories in the process. This simply repackages their judgment.

The original occasion for this collection was CONTACT XIV, the fourteenth annual interdisciplinary
conference on the possible evolution of and encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. CONTACT is not
concerned with ballistic crockery. It gathers engineers, writers, anthropologists, scientists, artists and
others who dream of the great out there and share our dreams of a spacegoing civilization to be.
Extraterrestrials are a focus and reason for being of the conference, but the participants also include in
that term people who will in the future live beyond the Earth.

Mars became a natural focus for that year’s conference. Fossils of what appear to be primitive life forms
had been found in meteors that unquestionably were chipped off Mars in one of its many encounters with
the nearby asteroids. It seemed a good occasion to recycle my Mars stories to have something to
contribute to the general Mars theme of the conference. My good friend, Wolf Read, offered to do the
artwork for an unspecified share or whatever profits would come from this.