Destination 3001

Anyone know anything about an anthology titled Destination 3001, edited by Robert Silverberg and Jacques Chambon?

It was published by Flammarion and/or Imagine in 2000; it consisted of a bunch of stories set in and around the year 3000. One such story was Nancy Kress's "My Mother, Dancing," which was recently reprinted in Asimov's (warning: the version I'm linking to, on the Asimov's site, is only the beginning of the story; I wish whoever runs that site would include a note at the top of their story excerpts making clear that they're excerpts); another was Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," which was reprinted last year in F&SF and is on this year's Hugo ballot.

One might think that prior publication would make the Haldeman story ineligible (and I wish both magazines had made clearer that these stories had been published before), but I'm beginning to think that the anthology was in French.

Which would mean that several top English-speaking sf authors wrote stories in English, and then those stories were translated into French and published, and some of them are only now appearing in their original language for the first time. (The anthology also featured several stories by French sf authors, but I don't know anything about those.)

Anyone know more? There are several web pages about Destination 3001, but almost all of them (including this review) are in French, and I don't speak French, and machine translation isn't as useful as one might wish for this sort of thing.

7 Responses to “Destination 3001”

  1. Trent Walters

    Yes, as I remember Nancy Kress talking of it, it was in French. I believe there was supposed to be a simultaneous English version but it didn’t pan out.

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  2. Jon

    A search in Abebooks turns up just two copies, both in French. Using the two ISBNs they give finds copies in Amazon.fr, but no place else. Sounds like they’re just now coming into English.

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  3. Wendy

    According to the review you linked to, the authors involved in the project were international: 7 French, 8 American, 1 German, 2 British and 2 Italian, and the stories are themed around the year 3001. And I thought I could read French, but otherwise this was waaaay out of my league! But I remember Nancy mentioning the project when she read her story at the Clarion readings last year.

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  4. Anon

    The idea was to get many American and European SF authors to write stories in it and then publish it simultaneously in Europe and United States, but apparently they never found a published for it in US. It sucks really, because Europe has great SF authors, but their works are almost never translated in English.

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  5. Roger

    Here is the list of the 10 English language stories,and some publication information. All the English stories were published elsewhere except the Haber story. Also, I found one of the French language stories in an English translation.

    Destination 3001 (English half) (ed. Silverberg)
    Silverberg, The Millennium Express (Hartwell Best SF 6)
    Simmons, The Ninth of Av (Worlds Enough and Time, ac)
    Priest, The Discharge (Silverberg Best SF 2002)
    McAuley, Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World (author’s website) (Postscripts 15, Summer 08)
    Spinrad, Entities (Interzone, Aug 02) (fictionwise.com)
    Haldeman, Four Short Novels (F&SF, Oct/Nov 03) (Hartwell Best SF 9)
    Card, Angles (Silverberg Best SF 2002)
    Benford, The Hydrogen Wall (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 03) (Hartwell Best SF 9)
    Kress, My Mother, Dancing (Asimov’s, June 04) (Strahan /Haber Best SF 2004)
    *Karen Haber, The Unfortunate Problem with Grandma’s Head
    French
    Dunyach, Jean-Claude, Useless Nights (Les Nuits Inutiles) (Night Orchid, ac, 2004)

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    • Jed

      Thanks, Roger! Glad to see most of those eventually appeared in English; too bad most of the French ones didn’t.

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  6. https://me.yahoo.com/a/5NsRwIgfhubIutA6zewMifQsJuWlzDtKOeOEaKCtg8LONkGCu5O14JNFbA--#fe4bf

    Karen Haber’s The Unfortunate Problem with Grandmother’s Head was just published in Unidentified Funny Objects 4. This is the last of the English language stories from Destination 3001 to appear in English.

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