When the young Gerald Durrell’s family was about to flee Corfu before the oncoming storm of World War II, the family retainer wrote to Durrell’s sister to the effect that ‘War has been declared—don’t tell a soul’.

So, if I can take you into my confidence, I’d like to announce the imminent(ish) publication by Tor of a book I’ve been editing. It’s called Futures in Nature, and is an anthology of the best of the science-fiction columns Nature has been publishing over the years under my uncertain and often bemused stewardship.

The stories were very short—each one an integral page—so I’ve managed to cram in a round century. It’ll be out in November, I hope, just in time for you to order a stack for use as gifts to celebrate the Festival of the Plurdling of the Grummet-Nadger’s Scrode, or whatever the winter holiday will be called this year.

It’ll be a great book for dipping into, perfect to have by the bedside or in the bathroom—just the thing for the incontinent or insomniac SF fan in your life. (Admit it, we all have them).

If you are unfamiliar with Futures, and aren’t a Nature subscriber and thus unable to dig into our digital vaults, you can see a few of them for free care of the Concatenation web site.

Although I’ve been planning this anthology for a while (anthologies require more work than you’d imagine) I could appreciate the book in totality only last week, when Tor sent me the copyedited typescript, and I had to sit down and read the whole thing more or less in one go.

The first thing that struck me was the diversity of voices in the anthology.

There are stories from venerable colossi of SF such as Frederik Pohl, Michael Moorcock, Dan Simmons, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson and (whisper it soft) Sir Arthur C. Clarke (I Am Not Worthy!)

There are stories from the brightest and best of the current crop of bestselling SF stars, such as Peter F. Hamilton, Justina Robson, Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross.

And there are stories from people trying their hand at fiction for the first time—the youngest being Ashley Pellegrino, who was 11 when she wrote her contribution.

In a field unjustly tarred with the image of boys’-own-rayguns-and-spaceships, I was able (largely through Vonda McIntyre, who also contributed a piece) to seek out many women writers such as Nalo Hopkinson, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai and Syne Mitchell, whose work deserves to be better known than it is. Futures in Nature will offer readers a chance to sample the work of many great writers they hadn’t heard of—think of it as the SF ‘taste’ menu platter.

Although most of the authors are, perhaps inevitably, based in the United States, some appear to be recent immigrants from elsewhere. There are quite a few Canadians in there, as well as people from England, Wales, Scotland, and Australia, and there are even two tall tales from Brazil.

Such stories serve the anthology well, not from any obeisance to political correctness (which I loathe in all its forms) but because they add to the many flavours of SF represented in the anthology—making for a more varied reading experience as well as a showcase for the best in current SF.

But what struck me most was how easy it was to read the anthology as a whole. It definitely exists as an entity, rather than just another collection of miscellany. If I could sum up the tone of stories which range from dark and gothic to screwball and comedic, it is elegiac, almost mournful, as if offered in nostalgia for the future.

But hey, quit my yakkin’, let’s boogie. Futures in Nature will be out soon, just as soon as we’ve got through the final contractual niggles. Look out for it.

But remember, it’s Our Little Secret.