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Plato was terrified of how poets arouse our passions. And in his lamentations, I can hear my old boss from my bookstore days decrying anything too far out there for public consumption. Suddenly, the old system of shelving books made perfect sense. When works like Gulliver's Travels or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea are around long enough, or sell enough copies, or enter the public imagination, they no longer feel threatening. Even the oddness of Vonnegut is something we get used to in time. It was never about which books were most worthy—it was about which ones were most worrisome.

This also solved another question that often came up among bookstore browsers: Why are science fiction and fantasy shelved together? What do dragons and spaceships have in common? Why are ancient wizards and cyborgs on the same shelf? I remember how in grade school, when my mom would drop me off at Waldenbooks for hours at a time, I would skip past all the sci-fi looking for a Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms book I had not yet read. What was all this futuristic junk doing among my swords and sorcery? I'd bump into a sci-fi kid asking a similar question about all these books with half-clad men wielding swords as tall as they were.

My old theory would've been that bookstores were clumping together all the literature not deemed "good enough." But when bookstores started carrying graphic novels, manga, and video game guides, these were often put in the same dark corners of the store. The thing in common with these works was that most people didn't understand what happened among those shelves. These were the dangerous poets of the world, writing about what isn't instead of what is. Writers who inspire our passions, who challenge us. The books that make us feel dizzy with wonder.

When I was asked to edit this volume, I was warned there would be a lot of reading involved. As if I haven't been training for this under school desks and at the dinner table my entire life. Threatening me with words is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. As I dove in, I found myself awash with stories that Plato would've loathed. Stories that challenged my worldview, that made me exercise new mental muscles, and stories that brought me to tears. These were not always easy stories to read—they strained my imagination, made me cringe, some are outright terrifying. Even more difficult was choosing my favorites. What they all have in common is that I know where they would be shelved: where they might only be discovered by those who were somewhat ready for them.

These two genres have more in common than I used to think. Reading them as presented here should drive that point home. If you think you lean toward fantasy, you might be surprised to discover that your favorite story here is categorized as science fiction. And the opposite might very well be true. What binds them together and makes each one worthy of inclusion is that Plato would've hated them, and planograms would've banished them. These are dangerous stories. The kind that warp reality and threaten to change the world.

Are you ready? I hope not.

—Hugh Howey

HOW IT UNFOLDS

James S. A. Corey

from The Far Reaches

Science Fiction

INTERVIEWER: It must feel a little strange to spend all this time preparing for something that you aren't actually going to do.

ROY COURT: Except that I am. When the package unfolds, the Roy that comes out of the assembler is going to remember having this exact conversation with you. It's just that he's going to be on some other planet trying to figure out how to restart the human race, and I'm going to be here worrying about my taxes. [laughs]

INTERVIEWER: I can't imagine knowing there's some other me out there.

ROY: It's not really going to be like that, though. We've located tens of thousands of exoplanets that look promising for colonization, but the closest really good candidates are fifteen, twenty light-years out. We call it "slow light" for a reason. The beams we're transmitting aren't quite as speedy as the normal stuff. That's four, maybe five decades before the first unfold could set up a transmitter and send us a hello. We're all mortal here. Those other Roys are going to be doing what they do long after I'm gone.