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in 1990. Traces has some elements in common with my Xeelee Sequence tales the GUT drive, for
instance but it isn't part of that universe.
Many reviewers have commented on similarities between Traces and Arthur C. Clarke's great story The
Star. This was unconscious, but The Star is one of my favourite stories, by my favourite author, and
Traces is one of my own favourite pieces.
Lord Byron's poem Darkness reads like an apocalyptic vision of the future, but I wondered if it could
have some more intriguing explanation. I was inspired to work on this idea, incidentally, by a holiday near
Wordsworth's home in the Lake District.
My good friends Rob Holdstock and Christopher Evans, who bought The Droplet, had me change the
ending to spare George in the first draft he was killed. I think they were right.
No Longer Touch the Earth was inspired by the notion that if Aristotle had been right about all those
crystal spheres in the sky, it would have made no difference to anyone save a few dusty
astronomers until Scott reached the South Pole. Hermann Göring, star of No Longer, shows up again,
as a bit-part player in Mittelwelt.
A Journey to the King Planet grew out of some speculation I read about anti-matter comets. My first
notion was to give anti-ice to those great explorers the Carthaginians, but I couldn't make the ancillary
technology plausible. So Planet became a proto-steampunk romp, and as such was an important story
for me: my first try-out of a mode of writing which would lead to my novels Anti-Ice and The Time
Ships. Planet has some elements in common with Anti-Ice, but is not part of the same universe. I always
liked the spaceship in this story. As a child, I used to draw diagrams and maps of the wonderful ships in
the stories I read. You can map space liner Australia.
The Jonah Man is a lifeboat story inspired by some speculation about life in a T Tauri star system. For
some reason, whale-like creatures gigantic, placidly feeding have turned out to be a trope for me
(see Raft (1991)).
Many commentators have noticed the influence on me of James Blish's great tale Surface Tension. I do
seem to come up with a lot of scenarios in which humans, miniaturized or otherwise, subsist in a
fluid-filled environment. Downstream is an example. I get little story inspiration from TV; the information
density is just too low. But documentary images of creatures who spend their lives struggling to survive in
a fast-moving river sparked off this story.
The Blood of Angels, inspired by an account of Antarctic survival strategies, is another Surface Tension
story, if a fairly grim example.
Columbiad is a collision between my meditations on the fate of the modern space programme, during my
research for Voyage, and my work on Wells and Verne.
Brigantia's Angels is only barely alternate history: Bill Frost was real, and you can look up his patented
Flying Machine, which was just as I describe it. My wife and I took a holiday in South Wales to research
this story. Angels won the 1995 Sidewise Award for short-form alternate history.
My father was a big Glenn Miller fan. Weep for the Moon reminds me of him.
Good News is my only small-press publication in this anthology. It came out of my disappointment, as a
comics dilettante, at the unimaginative way the death of a certain superhero was handled. I adapted this
story for online publication.
Something for Nothing is the oldest story in this collection, and it probably shows. It was my second
professional sale. I still like it: it's a gadget story, but with a nice opening-out of scales.
The seed for In the Manner of Trees was a fragment I came across about the lifecycles of bacteria. I
always loved this type of story: the seductive planet, the suspicious hard-nosed Captain. But nobody
writes them any more.
Pilgrim 7 grew out of some reading about the Cuban missile crisis: Kennedy breaking off from crisis
management to shake hands with a Mercury astronaut. This turned out to be an important story for me; I
found I enjoyed researching and writing about the real space programme, and novels and short stories
would follow.
Zemlya is my tribute to the Soviet space programme, particularly their heroic exploration of Venus.
The seeds for Moon Six were a fragment of speculation about what kind of world we'd have if sf had
never existed, and a NASA puff about the spin-off possibilities of an Apollo space suit.
Two visions of the far future: I worked up George and the Comet by using an old sf writer's trick put
together two unrelated ideas (in this case, the fate of comets and speculations about early primates) and
see what comes out of the collision. Anyone familiar with the creatures of the Burgess Shale will
recognize some of the inspiration for Inherit The Earth. The rest of it is my Liverpool childhood.
In the MSOB came out of nowhere, while I was working on drafts of Voyage. It took two hours to
write; the first draft was almost perfect. This is unusual, to say the least, and MSOB is one of my favourite
pieces.
Acknowledgements
Traces, first published in Interzone, 1991.
Darkness, first published in Interzone, 1995.
The Droplet, first published in Other Edens III, ed Christopher Evans and Rob Holdstock, Unwin
Hyman 1989.
No Longer Touch the Earth, first published in Interzone, 1993. Mittelwelt, first published in
Interzone, 1993.
Journey to the King Planet, first published in Zenith 2, ed David S Garnett, Sphere, 1990.
The Jonah Man, first published in Interzone, 1989.
Downstream, first published in Interzone, 1993.
The Blood of Angels, first published in Isaac Asitnov's Science Fiction Magazine, 1994.
Columbiad, first published in Science Fiction Age, 1996.
Brigantia's Angels, first published in Interzone, 1995.
Weep for the Moon, first published in In Dreams, ed. Paul McAuley and Kim Newman, Gollancz 1992.
Good News, first published in Substance, 1994.
Something for Nothing, first published in Interzone, 1988.
In the Manner of Trees, first published in Interzone, 1992.
Pilgrim 7, first published in Interzone, 1993.
Zemlya, first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 1996.
Moon Six, first published in Science Fiction Age, 1997.
George and the Comet, first published in Interzone, 1991.
Inherit the Earth, first published in New Worlds 2, ed D. Garnett, Gollancz 1992.
In the MSOB, first published in Interzone, 1996.
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1998
ISBN: 0-00-649814-0
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