In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

George R.R. Martin

Pets can enrich a person’s life, but this person, and his life, needed more enriching than any pet should be expected to accomplish. And the sort of pets he kept weren’t the warm and fuzzy kind, but then neither was he. His new acquisition was a very exotic type of creature from another planet, with high entertainment value. Maybe he should have considered the possibility that the entertainment might become mutual . . .

If the name of George R.R. Martin is unfamiliar to you, I’ll assume that you’ve spent the last decade or longer in the Foreign Legion, doing research in Antarctica, or were abducted as a child by aliens who just now dropped you off at the corner of Main Street and Loopy Lane. Time magazine selected him in 2011 as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” His award-winning high fantasy series, collectively titled A Song of Fire and Ice, which began with A Game of Thrones and has continued through four more novels, with two more planned, owns the New York Times best seller list, and has spun off art books, board games, video games, and a popular HBO TV series. He has won five Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, five Locus Awards, a Quill Award, a Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Convention’s Life Achievement Award. He created (and frequently contributed to) the long-running and popular Wild Cards series, presently totaling 23 volumes. Martin has long had an interest in horror—his early Hugo-winner, “A Song for Lya,” can be read as an ambiguous horror story—and wrote the novels Fevre Dream (described as Bram Stoker meets Mark Twain) and The Armageddon Rag, a horror story set in the rock music culture of the sixties and eighties. And of course, there’s the story you’re about to read, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. But first make sure your skimmer is in working order . . .