Search Worlds Without End

Introducing The Anderson Project

This group of stories is the second in a series of story groupings based upon a pre-existing work of art, in this case a Richard Anderson painting. The first such group, The Palencar Project, was published by Tor.com a year ago, and I refer you to my short essay, Introducing the Palencar Project, for an explanation of the rationale for doing stories based on paintings, a long tradition in popular fiction that has apparently fallen out of fashion in recent decades.

I find it intriguing that in two of the stories, the painting itself is part of the setting and plays a role. The relation of illustration to the written word is complex and deep, and is centuries old. Perhaps a lot older. In my imagination there were words in some oral tradition associated with the astonishing cave paintings of the Neanderthals in Europe.

There are a number of ways one can interpret a painting, and I asked the writers in this case to interpret this in the direction of science fiction. As you can tell in particular from the Judith Moffett story, a consideration of the image can evoke a variety of responses. But whatever the image, it becomes a repository of things the writer wishes to express, and becomes embedded in the prose fiction, uniquely in each story.

There were other writers invited to submit work and I anticipate at least a couple of stories appearing in a year or two in other venues that began as drafts for this project, but could not be completed now. The three stories here, though, are finished and accomplished and make a set. They are in my opinion of high quality and it is my hope that you enjoy them.

Those writers and stories are:

• "Reborn" by Ken Liu
• "Space Ballet" by Judith Moffett
• "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" by Kathleen Ann Goonan

One of three stories inspired by the same painting by Richard Anderson. Anthologized in The Anderson Project.

Ken Liu is among the most prominent new award-winning SF writers of the last decade, and this vision of a really uncanny alien invasion set in Boston, MA, is a stunner, with echoing reverberations, of love, identity, resistance and revolution.

This story can also be found in the anthology Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo, and Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

One of three stories inspired by the same painting by Richard Anderson. Anthologized in The Anderson Project.

Give a poet a painting to write a story about and you get "Space Ballet", in which students at the Center for Dream Research struggle to interpret a cryptic precognitive dream, a group effort that may avert a disaster.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

One of three stories inspired by the same painting by Richard Anderson. Anthologized in The Anderson Project.

Kathleen Ann Goonan's stories and novels often evoke a deep desire for some form of utopian future, both better and somehow wilder that the present. This is a story about an animal rights activist and a genius parrot, inter-species communication, and the dream of space, a great leap forward in several ways.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.