Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

© 2007

“The Prize of Peril,” by Robert Sheckley. Copyright © 1958 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1958. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“Anda’s Game,” by Cory Doctorow. Copyright © 2004 by Cory Doctorow. First published electronically in Salon, November 15, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis!,” by Kate Wilhelm. Copyright © 1976 by Damon Knight. First published in Orbit 18 (Putnam), edited by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Stroboscopic,” by Alastair Reynolds. Copyright © 1998 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, August 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Synthetic Serendipity,” by Vernor Vinge. Copyright © 2004 by Vernor Vinge. First published electronically on IEEESpectrumonline, July 31, 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“How We Got in Town and Out Again,” by Jonathan Lethem. Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland,” by Gwyneth Jones. Copyright © 1996 by Gwyneth Jones. First published in Off Limits (St. Martin ’s Press), edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness,” by William Browning Spencer. Copyright © 1998 by William Browning Spencer. First published in Lord of the Fantastic (Avon Eos), edited by Martin H. Greenberg. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Her Own Private Sitcom,” by Allen Steele. Copyright © 1999 by Dell Magazines. First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Ichneumon and the Dormeuse,” by Terry Dowling. Copyright © 1996 by Interzone . First published in Interzone, April 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Winning Mars,” by Jason Stoddard. Copyright © 2005 by Interzone . First published in Interzone, January/February 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Playing games is one of the things that makes us human, and goes back thousands of thousands of years into the blurry depths of prehistory; games resembling chess and checkers and Go or “Chinese checkers” have been found in the ruins of vanished civilizations from Egypt to China to Sumer, and crude dice made from animal bones have been found in caves lived in by Ice Age hunters. Who knows what games were played that left no trace behind in the archeological record? My guess is that some sort of chase-and-catch games, the ancestors of soccer and football, were played wherever there were the combination of good summer weather, an empty meadow, and restless hunters still charged up from the hunt, and those long nights huddled around an Ice Age fire had to be filled somehow, if not with dice, then with cards (which probably would leave no trace behind, but which likely have a heritage almost as old as dice), or word-games, or the kinds of finger-games such as “Paper, Scissors, Stone” or “Thumb War” that may well go back to a time before there were such things as paper or scissors (“Mammoth, Spear, Stone,” perhaps?).

All games are competitions, though, which implies a winner and a loser. And the best games are those that have an element of risk involved in them. The more dangerous they are, in fact, the more the loser has at stake, the better we like them. And the ultimate stake is life itself.

Even today, in spite of living in a safety-obsessed culture where every jar and bottle has a warning label on it and every car comes equipped with air-bags and seat-belts-or maybe because we live in such a culture-people like dangerous games, as witness the development and sudden popularity of “Extreme Sports,” and the more dangerous they are, the more popular they are as well. It only takes a slight heightening of conditions to imagine a game where there’s not just risk, but a certainty of death for one competitor or another, like the Roman gladiatorial games, and science fiction writers have been coming up with just such scenarios, like Frederic Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s Gladiator-At-Law, for decades now.

Another parallel social development predicted long ago by SF writers is the “Reality Show,” and stories such as Robert Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril” and “The Seventh Victim” and Kate Wilhelm’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis!” that strongly resemble shows such as Survivor , were around long before “reality television” was even a gleam in a TV producer’s eye. As was the idea that every moment of your life would not only be observed but would become fodder for entertainment television. This is a version of 1984 that never occurred to Orwell-that people would not only want Big Brother to watch them, but that other people would find it fascinating to watch too, so that today you not only are watched by security cameras every time you go into a bank or a store or a gas station or even walk down the street-with nobody objecting to this-but people willingly take web-cams into their bedrooms as well and record themselves having sex to broadcast to wide audiences on the internet. Some of the most popular shows on television involve “ordinary people” under 24-hour-a-day scrutiny by the cameras.

All this seems weird enough to old dinosaurs like your editors who grew up in the ’50s, but where is it going to go and what’s going to happen next , in the future? Our intuition is that you ain’t seen nothing yet.

So open up this book and let some of SF’s most expert dreamers show you eleven extreme and radical games that people in the future will play. Dangerous games. Games more addictive than heroin, and just as deadly. Games that will take you completely out of this world and into fantastical and fabulous realms of your own creation, where the dangers are still as real as a knife in the dark. Games that will become the hit TV shows of the future and will boil couch potatoes everywhere in their skins. Games that affect reality itself, where your success or failure in life depends on your gaming skills. Games that will take you to Mars and to the icy darkness of the outer Solar System. Games that you can’t stop playing, even if you want to.

Dangerous games. Games to die for-quite literally.

Enjoy! The game is afoot!

The late Robert Sheckley was one of science fiction’s premiere satirists and humorists, rivaled for that title only by Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams (who was himself clearly influenced by Sheckley), and he was more prolific than either of them, particularly at shorter lengths, turning out hundreds of short stories over the course of his fifty-three year career. Sheckley sold his first novel, Immortality, Inc., in 1958, and followed it up over the years with other novels such as Dimension of Miracles, Mindswap, The Status Civilization, Journey Beyond Tomorrow, Watchbird, Journey of Joenes, The 10th Victim, Hunter/Victim, Victim Prime, and Godshome. He has also written five mystery novels as Stephen Dain, three “Hob Draconian” mysteries under his own name, a Babylon 5 novel, and three novels in collaboration with Roger Zelazny, Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, A Farce to Be Reckoned With, and If at Faust You Don’t Succeed. His many short stories have been collected in Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?, Citizen in Space, Notions: Unlimited, The People Trap and Other Pitfalls, Pilgrimage to Earth, Shards of Space, The Robot Who Looked Like Me, Untouched by Human Hands, and others. His last book was a massive retrospective collection, The Masque of Manana. He was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2001. He died in 2005.