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Raise your hand if you remember the Ace Doubles. All right, that separates the old-timers from the younger readers. The Ace Doubles were a series of paperbacks that featured two complete novels, printed back-to-back in the same volume. It was extra value for the reader and allowed the publication of some books that might not have sold so well on their own. The form died out as science fiction writers moved away from dependence on the magazines as their main outlet and SF novels became longer and longer in the 60s.

Yet writers have continued to use the short novel, or novella, as one of the best lengths for science fiction. It provides enough room to explore an idea and establish characters and story without requiring a two-week commitment on the part of anyone who wants to read it. But while the novella remains a staple of SF magazines, its length does not fit well in terms of a being published on its own. Thus Gollancz has revived the old double format, (at least in the UK), and, in the case of this volume containing stories by Stephen Baxter and Paul J. McAuley, we can all be glad they did.

Stephen Baxter's Reality Dust is a tale out of his Xeelee Sequence, a linked series of stories, most of them collected in Vacuum Diagrams, detailing the past and future history of not only the human race but of the universe as a whole. Reality Dust takes place in approximately 5400 A.D., just after the overthrow of the Qax Occupation. Hama is a young man charged with investigating the crimes of the Pharoahs, human beings gifted with immortality who served the Qax as administrators and governors. The underlying irony of the story is that during the three hundred years of the occupation the Qax systematically destroyed human culture on Earth, so that the remaining Pharoahs are the only people possessing any memory of humanity's past, killing them will sever the last remaining links to human history. The story proceeds as Hama and his companions travel to Callisto to investigate the activities of a renegade Pharoah named Reth Cana. This is exactly the kind of story that shows Baxter at his best, an interesting speculation in the strangeness of quantum reality with enough characterization and story to insure that it works as a piece of fiction, and not just a lecture on the odd fringes of physics. Reality Dust works both as a stand-alone story and as a new chapter in Baxter's future history.

History, and the way historians approach their craft, is the main theme of Paul J. McAuley's Making History. Fredo Graves, a proponent of the Great Man theory of history, which holds that history can best be viewed by studying the lives of exceptional individuals, has been sent to Saturn's moons to investigate and chronicle the life of Marisa Bassi, the leader of a recently failed revolution against the Three Powers Alliance. There he meets Demi Lacombe, a beautiful young woman working to restore the ecology destroyed in the war, and Dev Veeder, a colonel hunting down and interrogating the last of the rebels. The story unfolds tragically, as the lives of all three characters become intertwined. Making History is a somber story, the setting of a world in-between destruction and renewal gives it a tone very similar to that in Cordwainer Smith's "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard." By the end, the historian comes to realize that history does not always unfold the way we expect it to, and that surprises await anyone who tries to see the future strictly in terms of the past.

Both of the stories in this volume are fine examples of the craft of their respective authors. Readers already familiar with Stephen Baxter and Paul J. McAuley will find much to enjoy here, as will anyone looking for an introduction to the work of two of the better writers of contemporary science fiction.

Reviewer Greg L. Johnson enjoys pondering history, past and future, from his home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His reviews also appear in the The New York Review of Science Fiction.