Vacuum Diagrams (Stephen Baxter) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

Foreword

Vacuum Diagrams is a novel based on the short stories which — together with my novels Raft (1991), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993), and Ring (1994) — comprise my “Xeelee Sequence” Future History.

The stories, written between 1987 and 1995, have been revised for this edition; a new timeline is appended; references to the novels are included as footnotes, and a new short story ("Eve") has been included as bridging material.

Of the twenty-two stories included here, four were first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, one in SF Age, one in a Writers Of The Future anthology, and eight in Interzone. Two ("Lieserl” and “Cilia-of-Gold") have been included in annual Legend Year’s Best SF collections, edited by Gardner Dozois. The other stories mostly appeared in small-press magazines and, while fans are aware of the pieces, they have been largely unavailable before this collection.