PRESS START TO PLAY
Edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams
Daniel H. Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author and coeditor of the Press Start to Play anthology. He earned a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he also received master’s degrees in robotics and in machine learning. He has published more than a dozen scientific papers, holds four patents, and has written eight books. Wilson has written for Popular Science, Wired, and Discover, as well as online venues such as MSNBC.com, Gizmodo, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. In 2008, Wilson hosted The Works, a television series on the History Channel that uncovered the science behind everyday stuff. His books include How to Survive a Robot Uprising, A Boy and His Bot, Amped, and Robopocalypse (the film adaptation of which is slated to be directed by Steven Spielberg). He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Find him on Twitter @danielwilsonPDX.
www.danielhwilson.com
John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the editor of many other bestselling anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include Loosed Upon the World, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych, which consists of The End Is Nigh, The End Is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, Adams is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. Adams is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
www.johnjosephadams.com
OTHER BOOKS BY DANIEL H. WILSON
A Boy and His Bot
Amped
Bro-Jitsu
How to Build a Robot Army
How to Survive a Robot Uprising
The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame (with Anna C. Long)
Mayday! Deep Space (for iOS)
Robopocalypse
Robogenesis
Robot Uprisings (coeditor)
Where’s My Jetpack
ALSO EDITED BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
Armored
Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy
Brave New Worlds
By Blood We Live
Dead Man’s Hand
The End Is Nigh
The End Is Now
The End Has Come
Epic: Legends of Fantasy
Federations
HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Lightspeed Magazine
The Living Dead
The Living Dead 2
Loosed Upon the World
The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination
Nightmare Magazine
Operation Arcana
Other Worlds Than These
Oz Reimagined
Robot Uprisings
Seeds of Change
Under the Moons of Mars
Wastelands
Wastelands 2
The Way of the Wizard
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Ernest Cline
Introduction copyright © 2015 by John Joseph Adams
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC
Permissions acknowledgments can be found at the end of the book.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Press start to play / edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams.
pages cm
1. Video games—Fiction. 2. Video gamers—Fiction. 3. Virtual reality—Fiction. 4. Science fiction, American. I. Wilson, Daniel H. (Daniel Howard), 1978– editor. II. Adams, John Joseph, 1976– editor.
PS374.V54P74 2015 813'.010839—dc23 2015008526
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 9781101873304
eBook ISBN 9781101873311
Adams author photograph © Will Clark
Wilson author photograph © Ryan J. Anfuso
Cover Design by Mark Abrams
Pixel fireballs © derGriza/Shutterstock
www.vintagebooks.com
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
About the Editors
Other Books by Daniel H. Wilson
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
God Mode
Daniel H. Wilson
NPC
Charles Yu
Respawn
Hiroshi Sakurazaka
Desert Walk
S. R. Mastrantone
Rat Catcher’s Yellows
Charlie Jane Anders
1UP
Holly Black
Survival Horror
Seanan McGuire
Real
Django Wexler
Outliers
Nicole Feldringer
Chris Avellone
Save Me Plz
David Barr Kirtley
The Relive Box
T. C. Boyle
Roguelike
Marc Laidlaw
All of the People in Your Party Have Died
Robin Wasserman
Recoil!
Micky Neilson
Anda’s Game
Cory Doctorow
Coma Kings
Jessica Barber
Stats
Marguerite K. Bennett
Please Continue
Chris Kluwe
Creation Screen
Rhianna Pratchett
The Fresh Prince of Gamma World
Austin Grossman
Gamer’s End
Yoon Ha Lee
The Clockwork Soldier
Ken Liu
Killswitch
Catherynne M. Valente
Twarrior
Andy Weir
Select Character
Hugh Howey
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
Since their invention about half a century ago, video games have come to play a vital role in modern human civilization. I think this is because we modern humans were never designed to live like we do now—sitting in traffic, working in offices, shopping in stores. We are, by design, hunter-gatherers. Millions of years of evolution have wired our brains with an inherent need to hunt, gather, explore, solve puzzles, form teams, and conquer challenge after challenge in order to survive as we claw our way to the top of the food chain. For most people, day-to-day life no longer requires many of those experiences or challenges, and so those primal, instinctive needs inside us have no natural outlet. To keep our minds and bodies healthy, we have to simulate those old ways in the midst of our modern, technological lives, where everything on the planet has already been hunted and gathered. Thankfully, the technology that created this problem also gave rise to its solution—a way for us modern city dwellers to exorcise our inner evolutionary demons: video games.
Playing video games has been a daily stress outlet for me since the age of five, when I received my Atari 2600 for Christmas. It seems like I spent the next few years of my childhood s
pot-welded to that Darth Vader–black heavy-sixer game console. Despite the crude, blocky graphics and primitive sound effects, it felt like having a virtual reality simulator in my living room. I could simulate battling space invaders or flying a jet or slaying a dragon inside the digital reality created by those old-school games. And this new interactive storytelling medium allowed me to be the hero of the story, instead of just a passive participant, and to influence the narrative’s outcome.
It was the dawn of a new era. I didn’t realize it back then, of course—probably because I was just a kid wearing Spider-Man Underoos. But the experience of growing up part of the very first generation of gamers would change the whole course of my life and set me on the path to becoming a storyteller myself.
Since video games have now become a major facet of the human experience, to me it seems only fitting that they also become a more prominent feature in our culture’s noninteractive fiction. My first two novels, Ready Player One and Armada, both explore humanity’s evolving relationship with video games, and how it informs and alters our reality, as well as our perception of it.
I love telling stories about video games almost as much as I love playing them. That’s why I’m honored to write the foreword for this anthology. I’m genuinely excited to see how each of the contributors approaches the same subject matter, and how each draws on their own adventures and experiences growing up on this new digital frontier to creative a narrative in a completely different medium.
I’m also anxious to find out if I’m the only one who missed their deadline because they spent way too much time doing “research” for their story…
MTFBWYA,
Ernest Cline
Austin, Texas
November 30, 2014
INTRODUCTION
John Joseph Adams
I’m an editor through and through; I eat, sleep, and breathe prose fiction and am a relentless consumer of narrative entertainment. But my earliest, most formative pop culture memories from my childhood are not from books.
They’re from video games.
Video games have been such a formative force, in fact, that you could say I owe my anthology-editing career to them. My first anthology, Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, was a reprint anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction, which I grew to love while playing the 1988 game Wasteland and then 1997’s Fallout, both created by the brilliant Brian Fargo. Immersing myself in Wasteland’s apocalyptic setting for hours on end (not to mention the many hours copying floppy disks each time I wanted to start a new game) instilled in me a love for that particular subgenre that I’ve never been able to shake—despite having read many hundreds of books and short stories on the subject, and even having now done five different anthologies centered on the theme. (Or seven if you count zombie fiction as part of the same genre. Or eight if you also count my previous anthology with Daniel H. Wilson, Robot Uprisings.)
But Wasteland was hardly my first gaming love; I can remember playing video games as early as five or six years old—playing Gorf on my Commodore VIC-20, or Space Invaders on my Atari 2600, or Zork on my sister’s TRS-80. When my mom got us an IBM with—get this—a whole megabyte of RAM, I played the hell out of King’s Quest in glorious CGA color. And even later, on my trusty Commodore 64—which would become my primary gaming device for many years—I lost many months of my life to the magnificent Ultima IV. Because of its focus on virtues and how the choices you make have consequences, surely I’m not the only one to think that that game made me grow up to be a better person than I might have otherwise?
And then of course came the Nintendo Entertainment System, which revolutionized gaming—and my brain—with games like Metroid, Final Fantasy, and The Legend of Zelda. (One of the bitterest traumas of my youth was that I lost my copy of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link when my house was robbed. I was only three-quarters of the way through. Oh, the despair I felt at having to start all over!) That was soon followed by the Sega Genesis, whose allure actually got me to truly care about school for the first time in my life after I made a deal with my mom that I’d get one for Christmas if I got straight As one semester. (Spoiler alert: I did it! My one and only time to meet that goal in any of my precollege schooling.)
In my teens, I took a detour where I mostly played games on an Amiga computer, including Carmageddon, Bard’s Tale, Populous, and two of my favorite games ever—Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Civilization. During that “Amiga summer,” a kid in my neighborhood was up on his roof with a .22 rifle shooting stuff for fun. He decided to shoot at the roof of my house, only he missed and shot at the walls of my house. Had I been sitting at the Amiga playing a game—as was pretty damn likely, as this was the middle of summer vacation—I very well could have been killed. Fortunately I was a teenager and slept till noon that day.
Since staying up late gaming the night before possibly saved me from being shot, it seemed only reasonable that I should devote the extra life (get it?) I’d been given to gaming even more. So I progressed to a PlayStation 1, then PS2, then to an Xbox 360 and PS3. Along the way I became a wizard at playing fake plastic guitar and can pick a Skyrim or Fallout 3 lock like nobody’s business; sometimes I’ll pick locks for my wife, and she’s astonished each time, as if I’m performing a magic trick. Just last year, video games caused me to do perhaps the geekiest thing I’ve ever done—and as someone who is essentially a professional geek, I don’t say that lightly. I created a custom football team in Madden and named all of the players after characters from science fiction and fantasy. There’s something so appropriate about watching a player named “the Nazgûl” relentlessly pursuing a quarterback.
That brings us more or less to the present. This has been by no means a comprehensive overview of my life as a gamer, but merely some highlights that stick out in my mind. Alas, at this point in my life, because I work from home and have only myself to keep me on task, I have to actually consciously avoid video games (though that doesn’t always work). If I even start one, before I know it I’m sucked in and want to do nothing but play.
The truth is: I love them too much.
And I’m not alone.
Video games have become a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry that has outpaced movies and books combined. The humble, pixelated games of the ’70s and ’80s have evolved into the vivid, realistic, and immersive form of entertainment that now rivals all other forms of media for dominance in the consumer marketplace. For many, video games have become the cultural icons around which the entire entertainment industry revolves.
So if exploring video games has become one of the primary ways we create and experience narratives, I thought: Why not create some narratives that explore the way we create and experience video games?
In this book you will find twenty-six stories that re-create the feel of a video game in prose form, stories that play with the core concepts of video games, and stories about the creation or playing of video games themselves.
We asked a wide array of writers to participate, several of whom work in the video game industry—such as Marc Laidlaw (Half-Life), Austin Grossman (Dishonored), Micky Neilson (World of Warcraft), Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider), and Chris Avellone (Fallout: New Vegas)—as well as new and notable writers of science fiction and fantasy, including original stories by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (All You Need Is Kill, basis for the film Edge of Tomorrow), Seanan McGuire (Half-Off Ragnarok), Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe), Robin Wasserman (The Waking Dark), Andy Weir (The Martian), and Hugh Howey (Wool), and reprints by T. C. Boyle (World’s End), Catherynne M. Valente (Deathless), Ken Liu (The Grace of Kings), Cory Doctorow (Little Brother), and others.
Admittedly I can’t really be impartial about any of my books, but, to quote GLaDOS: it’s hard to overstate my satisfaction with how the anthology turned out. I might even go so far as to say this was a triumph. And if I had to make a note here, it would say huge success.
GOD MODE
Daniel H. Wilson
Mem
ories. Nauseous snatches of infinity trickling in, thumbing into my forehead, pinning me to this flower-smelling bed. My fractured thoughts are bursting away with the cannon-shot split of glaciers, broken towers that knife into a sea of amnesia.
In all of the forgetting, there is this one constant thing.
Her name is Sarah. I will always remember that.
She is holding my right hand with her left. Our fingers are interlaced, familiar. The two of us have held hands this way before. The memory of it is there, in our grasp.
Her hand in mine. This is all that matters to me now. Here in the aftermath of the great forgetting.
—
I’m twenty. Studying abroad at the University of Melbourne in Australia, learning how to make video games. Today I’m riding on a crowded tram, south to St. Kilda Beach.
Sarah.
Another American mixed in among dozens of Aussie college kids in board shorts and bikinis, all of us packed into the heaving car, bare shoulders kissing as the heat rolls off sticky black plastic floorboards. We are headed to the beach on Christmas holiday.
Her hair is brown streaked with blonde. Her lips are red. Teeth white.
The tram pulls to a stop. Double doors open accordion-style and a cool salty breeze floods in. I’m watching her when she faints. Her eyes roll up and she falls and I try to catch her. But my grip isn’t strong enough. She’s beautiful and lean and tan under a sheen of sweat. She slips through my grasp and instead of saving her, I leave four bright-red scratch marks across her shoulder blades.
Her sun-kissed hair swirls as her head hits the floor.