Editorial Director Lou Anders has delivered the manuscript for his original anthology Fast Forward 2 to his own Pyr Books, which will be publishing it in trade paperback in October 2008.
“One of the highlights of the second volume,” he says, “will undoubtedly be a 32,000-word collaboration between Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow. ‘True Names’ is a tale of galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences that are competing to corner the universe’s supply of computation before the heat-death of the universe. The title is, of course, a homage to Vernor Vinge’s famous story of the same name.”
Rosenbaum says “This story came out of a conversation at the Hugo Losers’ party at Worldcon 2002—the part about ‘the second law of thermodynamics as the ultimate party-spoiler in a transhuman utopia of self-spawning consciousness’; it acquired shades of Jane Austen, Voltaire, megamillion year ideological warfare, gender theory, coming-of-age story, and musical theater along the way.”
Rosenbaum and Doctorow are podcasting “True Names” here.
The table of contents is:
Introduction: “The Age of Accelerating Returns” by Lou Anders
“Catherine Drewe” by Paul Cornell
“Cyto Couture” by Kay Kenyon
“The Sun Also Explodes” by Chris Nakashima-Brown
“The Kindness of Strangers” by Nancy Kress
“Alone With an Inconvenient Companion” by Jack Skillingstead
“True Names” by Cory Doctorow & Benjamin Rosenbaum
“Molly’s Kids” by Jack McDevitt
“Adventure” by Paul McAuley
“Not Quite Alone in the Dream Quarter” by Mike Resnick & Pat Cadigan
“An Eligible Boy” by Ian McDonald
“SeniorSource” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Migration” by Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Buckell
“Long Eyes” by Jeff Carlson
“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi