INTRODUCTION
Like most children, I was a long time learning to distinguish fiction from reality. (Indeed, some never outgrow the condition—which is one of those amusing thoughts that will hit differently for each individual reader.) I distinctly remember believing that Sherlock Holmes was a historical figure—never having heard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—and that Camelot could be found on a map. Leaving aside the matter that there was a Camulodunum and was probably some kind of Arthur, one of the more interesting ways this inability to distinguish fact from fiction manifested was in a childhood obsession with the lost continent of Atlantis. By the age of twelve or thirteen, I found myself the owner of several volumes of conspiracy-theory-rich pseudohistory on the subject. My parents, delighted that I was so interested in reading—and in “serious” reading, no less—were happy to encourage me. And so I learned all about the ringed city and crystal skulls and—more usefully—about Knossos and the Minoans, and about the way the Greeks of the misnamed “Golden Age” believed the Minoan sites were built by cyclopses (whence cometh the word “cyclopean,” so beloved of H.P. Lovecraft).
In time, I came to learn that Atlantis was only ever a thought experiment of Plato’s, and not something widely believed in by the Greek world. Unlike Camelot, there wasn’t even a kernel of true history at the bottom. It was an ancient fiction, and regarded as fiction even in antiquity. I was crushed. This discovery was far worse than the discovery that my parents were acting in the role of Santa Claus at age nine, because my parents at least were creating magic for the benefit of my brothers and me. I think about how many people throughout history took the Atlantis myth seriously, about how many people went looking for it, or used the myth as the basis for their insane eugenic ideologies.
Overnight, the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens show went from a deeply interesting and meaningful exploration of humanity’s entanglement with extraterrestrial forces to a waste of time. If I wanted to watch hours of fiction devoted to ancient aliens, I was just going to watch Stargate, and boy, do I love Stargate.
Which brings us to the matter of this collection.
It doesn’t matter that Atlantis never existed, or that aliens probably haven’t visited Earth (I am pretty sure most UFOs are the result of waveguiding, but I could be convinced. Consider me agnostic on the alien visitors question), leastways for the purposes of the science fiction writer. What matters is that it makes for fertile ground in which to plant a story. As I say, I adore Stargate, and even Ancient Aliens is fun if you take it for the pseudodocumentary it is. There’s still something of the old world romance in such stories, of a time when the world still had unturned stones in it.
That’s part of what makes them so much fun.
But now, with the edges of Earth’s map almost all filled in and the monsters painted over, we had to move our lost cities off world. If the aliens never visited us, we would have to visit them. Since there were no alien gods beneath the pyramids in Egypt or lost deep in the Yucatan, we’d have to build pyramids on Mars, or the moons of Jupiter, or about some other sun.
This is my last Baen Books anthology—at least for the foreseeable future. The last one on my docket when I resigned my job in May of 2021. Anthologies usually start from a premise. The editor says, “Hey, you know what would be fun? A sword and sorcery anthology!” and rolls with it. This one started—in suitably archaeological fashion—with a lost artifact. We were turning through old files at the Baen offices when we discovered a piece of unused art, a landscape by the great Bob Eggleton, one we’d long ago paid for the rights to use, but that had languished in some obscure folder.
“What can we use this for?” asked Toni Weisskopf, Baen’s publisher—my old boss—with the air of one inquiring what the purpose of some cracked amphora might have been, unearthed in some Achaean tomb.
It depicted jagged pillars of stone rising from the barren surface of an alien world, a galaxy turning in the skies above as rockets left blue contrails against a rosy sky. Like all of Eggleton’s paintings, there was a magic in it, a call to adventure.
“Ancient aliens, maybe?” I suggested, peering over her shoulder. “Like . . . xenoarchaeology stories.”
“That’ll do.”
It’s taken some time to excavate these stories from the minds of their various authors. May of 2021 was already a long time ago, and that day when we unearthed Eggleton’s painting from beneath years of mounded paperwork is even further gone. There’s something bittersweet in this book then. I started working for Baen in my senior year of college, in January of 2015. I was just an unpaid intern then, doing the job for college credit. They hired me about a month after I graduated, about a week after I sold Empire of Silence to DAW Books and became a writer.
A lot happened for me in the years since. I met my wife, got married. I published five novels (the fifth, in fact, shared a release day with this anthology), two novellas, more than a dozen short stories. I edited eight anthologies, released two of my own short story collections . . . and even quit my day job.
But this is the end, my last official task as Junior Editor for Baen Books, and I hope you will forgive this little bit of self-indulgence at the end of this intro. It’s fitting, too, that Sean is coediting this one with me. He took over my seat in the Baen offices, and so I figured I should drag him along and show him the ropes.
So read on, dear Reader. Both Sean and I hope you enjoy the stories here.
And know that when you close this book at its ending, that I closed the book on a long and happy chapter of my life. I’ll let Sean take it from here. He’ll be the one introducing the stories in this book!
—C.R.
May, AD 2022