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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAMELA SARGENT

  “Sargent is a sensitive writer of characterization rather than cosmic gimmickry.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “One of the genre’s greatest writers.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Pamela Sargent is an explorer, an innovator. She’s always a few years ahead of the pack.”

  —David Brin, award-winning author of the Uplift Saga

  “Over the years, I’ve come to expect a great deal from Pamela Sargent. Her worlds are deeply and thoroughly imagined.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “Pamela Sargent’s cool, incisive eye is as sharp at long range, visionary tales as it is when inspecting our foreground future. She’s one of our best.”

  —Gregory Benford, astrophysicist and author of Foundation’s Fear

  “If you have not read Pamela Sargent, then you should make it your business to do so at once. She is in many ways a pioneer, both as a novelist and as a short story writer. … She is one of the best.”

  —Michael Moorcock, author of Elric of Melniboné

  “[Sargent is] a consummate professional [who] exhibits an unswerving consistency of craft.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  Alien Child

  “An excellent piece of work—the development of the mystery … is well done. Ms. Sargent’s work … is always of interest and this book adds to her stature as a writer.”

  —Andre Norton, author of the Solar Queen series

  “Count on Pamela Sargent to write a science fiction novel that is both entertaining and true to human emotion. I wish I had had this book when I was a teen because all the loneliness, all the alienation, all the apartness I felt from my family would have made more sense.”

  —Jane Yolen, author of The Devil’s Arithmetic and Cards of Grief

  “This story of Nita, a girl growing up in an insulated environment where she gradually comes to realize that she might be the last person left on Earth, has conflict and suspense from the beginning. … Vividly depicted.”

  —School Library Journal

  “This finely crafted work never falters with false resolution. … An honest and compelling examination of ‘What if …?’”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An engaging narrative in Sargent’s capable hands. An essence of otherworldliness is present in the gentle guardians, and since Sven and Nita are raised solely by the two aliens, there is a freshness in their perceptions of their own species. … Clearly and simply presented—thoughtful—a worthy addition to any SF collection.”

  —Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA)

  “Sargent does not lower her standards when she writes young adult fiction. Like the best of young adult writers, her artistic standards remain as high as ever, while her standards of clarity and concision actually rise. … The intelligence and resourcefulness she showed in The Shore of Women are undiminished in Alien Child.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “Thoughtful, serious, and written without condescension, the novel contains all of the qualities we have come to expect from this author.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  The Golden Space

  “Pamela Sargent deals with big themes—genetic engineering, immortality, the ultimate fate of humanity—but she deals with them in the context of individual human lives. The Golden Space reminds me of Olaf Stapledon in the breadth of its vision, and of Kate Wilhelm in its ability to make characters, even humans in the strangest forms, seem like real people.”

  —James Gunn, writer and director of the film Guardians of the Galaxy

  “Clearly, The Golden Space is a major intellectual achievement of SF literature. It will not be possible for any honest story of immortality hereafter to ignore it; it is a landmark.”

  —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Brilliantly handled—all of us have got to hand an accolade to the author.”

  —A. E. van Vogt, author of The World of Null-A

  “Sargent writes well, the many ideas are fresh, and their handling is intelligent to the extreme.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “What next, after universal immortality becomes a fact of life? Pamela Sargent’s brilliant book, The Golden Space, shatters the imaginative barrier that has held stories about immortality to a simplistic pasticcio of boredom, degeneration, and suicide.”

  —The Seattle Times

  The Mountain Cage

  “[Sargent] is one of our field’s true virtuosos, and in The Mountain Cage: and Other Stories she gives us thirteen stunning performances, a valuable addition to a repertoire that I hope will keep on growing.”

  —James Morrow, author of Only Begotten Daughter

  The Shore of Women

  “That rare creature, a perfect book.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “A cautionary tale, well-written, with excellent characterization, a fine love story, as well as much food for thought … An elegant science fiction novel.”

  —Anne McCaffrey, author of the Pern series

  “Pamela Sargent gives meticulous attention to a believable scenario. … A captivating tale both from the aspect of the lessons that the author tries to impart and from the skills she has used to tell it.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “How many perfect science fiction novels have I read? Not many. There are at most three or four such works in a decade. Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women is one of the few perfect novels of the 1980s. … Her story of a woman exiled from a safe high-tech city of women, the man ordered by the gods to kill her, and their search for a place of safety, is powerful, beautiful, and true.”

  —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “A compelling and emotionally involving novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “I applaud Ms. Sargent’s ambition and admire the way she has unflinchingly pursued the logic of her vision.”

  —The New York Times

  Ruler of the Sky

  “This formidably researched and exquisitely written novel is surely destined to be known hereafter as the definitive history of the life and times and conquests of Genghis, mightiest of Khans.”

  —Gary Jennings, bestselling author of Aztec

  “Scholarly without ever seeming pedantic, the book is fascinating from cover to cover and does admirable justice to a man who might very well be called history’s single most important character.”

  —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, anthropologist and author of Reindeer Moon

  Child of Venus

  “Masterful … as in previous books, Sargent brings her world to life with sympathetic characters and crisp concise language.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Behind the Eyes of Dreamers

  and Other Short Novels

  Pamela Sargent

  To Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, riders to the rescue more than once

  Introduction by George Zebrowski

  The time is now long past when I have to worry about repeating the vast praise given to Pamela Sargent for her work from critics and reviewers, and from sources as diverse as Michael Bishop, Gahan Wilson, Gregory Benford, James Morrow, Harlan Ellison, and George Alec Effinger. If I extended this list, I would have no room in this introduction for anything else. They all say what I have always known—that Pamela Sargent is one of the b
est living writers of any kind.

  Although for many years she was not even nominated for a single award, and has been the subject of laughably misguided reviews, it was a continued sign of her influence and acceptance that she was long believed to have been nominated for and won awards. I had listened to writers complain in her company that they had never won an award, despite having been nominated often, and watched their jaws drop when she calmly told them that she had never been on a final ballot. This, of course, kept her out of membership in “the Nebula Award losers club,” which she cannot join even today, because she won when she was nominated for the first time.

  She was nominated for and won other awards in the 1990s, and the praise continues at a high level; but Pamela Sargent does not promote herself and belongs to no clique. She finds asking another writer for a jacket comment distasteful. She has never attended a writing workshop. At one time this was thought to be shyness on her part, but the shyness was only the superficial sign of something deeper and stronger—an individualism that has always known that in matters of achievement we must all stand alone. No one can write the story or novel for you; no one can see, feel, and think as you do; and this individuality is all that an artist has to offer. Dilute it with too many other voices and that uniqueness is destroyed. Too many human activities are imitative and unnecessary in their repetitiveness. Likewise, activities that make the garnering of praise an overly collective, political skill, risk the reward of overpraise, even of lies.

  Sargent’s prose style reflects her sturdy individualism. Electric currents of feeling and thought flow through her stories, sometimes overwhelming readers who expect something more amiable; but whether they like the work or not, they are not likely to forget it. Sargent opens up human hearts as few writers of science fiction have ever done, and she does so with a spare, flinty, gritty, sometimes nervous prose that does not tolerate the lazy reader.

  She is one of the few writers who has the arrayed strengths of thought, feeling, and technical skill to do justice to genuine, knowledge-based science fictional themes, to what some people call hard science fiction. This is a great rarity, since the ability to think through subtle ideas, to always be able to ask the next question, does not work well with the skills of characterization and writerly prose. The sheer dazzle of ideas is diminished without the equally intriguing human impact of future possibilities. A writer who can march through a reader’s mind on all these fronts at once is at least knocking at the doors of greatness.

  Sargent, with her counter-melodramatic, Greek tragedian’s restraint, confronts the reader with the human consequences of future changes. She is neither technophobe nor technophile, or ideologue. There is wonder in her stories, but no easy fantasy or wish-fulfillment. To know her characters is to suffer with them and to exult over their victories (when a victory is possible). It is difficult to guess how a Sargent story or novel will grow, and that is part of how she generates suspense. Readers have reported that reading her is always an experience so convincing, rich and nourishing of thought and understanding, that they believe the author had somehow managed to experience the events in her story.

  Many of Sargent’s earlier novels demand to be rediscovered, especially The Golden Space, the technical adroitness of which is surprisingly illustrated by its opening section, “The Renewal,” written and published as a separate piece long before the novel, and included in this collection in its original form.

  Her Venus trilogy, recently completed, is essential to an appreciation of modern science fiction. Gregory Benford wrote about the opening volume, Venus of Dreams, that it is “a sensitive portrait of people caught up in a vast project. It tells us about how people react to technology’s relentless hand, and does so deftly. A new high point in humanistic science fiction.” And about the second volume, Venus of Shadows, he wrote that “the sway of worlds and human masses does not cloak the personal tales that Sargent follows with a patient, insightful eye. Here humanity is aware that science has given it stewardship over all life, bringing a subtle, somber weight to even coffee-klatch gossip.”

  Child of Venus, Sargent’s most recent novel and the completion of her Venus trilogy, elicited varied favorable reactions. Donald M. Hassler wrote in The New York Review of Science Fiction that for some writers “the stylistic and narrative experiments of the great modernist James Joyce have been an inspiration; and now we might include Pamela Sargent in that group, although she satisfies our genre expectations as well … Sargent’s accomplishment here is superb.” And Kilian Melloy, of wigglefish.com, sums it up by saying that “Sargent transcends genre and achieves something rare in the world of letters: a genuine contemplation of truth, in all its nasty, brilliant glory.”

  Reviewers also pointed out the uniform high quality and dedicated purpose of the trilogy. We see this inability to fall below high ambition in all of Sargent’s work.

  An earlier novel, The Shore of Women, was praised for its “luminous prose and vivid characters” in a “compelling and emotionally involving novel.” It has been given the sincerest form of flattery: swift imitation.

  Sargent’s historical novel about the life of Genghis Khan, Ruler of the Sky, has revealed her as an historical novelist of the first rank. It received the kind of praise that most writers can only dream about. The late great Gary Jennings, author of Aztec and many other historical novels, wrote that “This formidably researched and exquisitely written novel is surely destined to be known hereafter as the definitive history of the life and times and conquests of Genghis, mightiest of Khans.” And Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the anthropologist and author of Reindeer Moon, declared, “I love it … the book is fascinating from cover to cover.”

  Sargent’s alternative historical companion novel to Ruler of the Sky, Climb The Wind, was described by Gahan Wilson as bringing “a new dimension to the form,” and by other reviewers as “a triumph,” and as a “complex and masterful” animation of characters “who demand our sympathy and affection.”

  I could go on for a hundred pages. Despite the failure of publishers, the overwhelmingly favorable reaction of readers, critics, and reviewers of every stripe, is unavoidable.

  I’ve described Pamela Sargent’s work from a reader’s point of view; but I’ve also observed her editorially, and as a fellow writer. And what I have seen happen over the years is the growth of a vehement talent finding its own way, as I’ve had to find mine. Something awesome has come to life within my beloved companion. To see this happen in a human being in whom I have also known frailties and faults is doubly impressive.

  The other two short novels included with “The Renewal” in this collection, the Conradian “Behind the Eyes of Dreamers,” and the Terry Carr-encouraged “Shadows,” are both rarities, difficult to find in their original incarnations. I am glad to see them all in one volume, and I envy the new readers who will see these novellas for the first time.

  When I read a new story or novel by Pamela Sargent, I forget that I write. She sometimes comes into the room and distracts me. Then I tell the intruding mortal to leave, so I can read the writer.

  George Zebrowski

  October 1, 2001

  George Zebrowski is the author of some 35 books and hundreds of stories and essays, as well as the editor of many anthologies. His novel Brute Orbits won the John W. Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of the year.

  Shadows

  The sun hid its face behind the clouds, a gray layered curtain which hung close to the Earth. Defeated, the city’s inhabitants trudged along the highway, crowding the four lanes. Suzanne Molitieri could hear the droning of murmurs punctuated by an occasional wail. Don’t look back. She kept her eyes resolutely focused on the asphalt at her feet as she walked. Her hand clutched Joel’s, both palms dry. Around her, people twisted their necks as they glanced back at the empty city.

  Above them silver insects hovered, humming softly and casting faint shadows over the people below. They were passing the suburbs now and more people joined
the stream, trickling down the highway entrances, creating small eddies before becoming part of the river. Herded like animals. Suzanne glanced at Joel, saw his brown eyes focused on her, and grasped his hand more tightly.

  Resistance had been futile. A few invaders had been slaughtered by gunfire in Buenos Aires as they left their ship, and Buenos Aires had vanished, people and all. When the same thing happened in Canton and Washington, the will to resist had subsided. Suzanne doubted that it had completely vanished.

  The Earth was an anthill to the Aadae. They had descended on it from the skies, stepping on it here and there when it was necessary. Yet Suzanne had seen an Aada in the city streets weeping over the dead burned bodies of some who had resisted. Then she and the others had been herded from the city, allowed to take nothing with them but the clothes they wore and a few personal possessions. Suzanne carried more clothes in a knapsack. She had left everything else behind; the past would be of no use to her now. Joel carried a pound of marijuana and some bottles of liquor in his knapsack; he was already planning for the future.

  Suzanne adjusted the burden on her back. Around her the murmuring died and she heard only the sound of feet marching, treading the pavement with soft thuds. The conquered people moved past the rows of suburban houses which were silent witnesses to the procession.

  Suzanne thought of empty turtle shells. The gunmetal gray domes surrounded her, covering the countryside in uneven rows. Groups of people huddled in front of each dome, waiting passively. She thought of burial mounds.

  “How they get them up so fast?” A stocky black man standing near her was looking at a dome. He began to rub his hand across its gray surface. Suzanne could hear the sound of weeping. A plump pale woman next to Joel was whimpering, clinging to a barrel-chested man who was probably her husband.