Rat’s Reading

I’ve been working on this collection for a week and a half. I never seem to get through Dozois’ Year’s Best S.F. editions quickly. They are big. But I think the short story format means I keep getting jarred out of a reading rhythm as well. Just as I get going on one set of assumptions, or one mode, or whatever, the story ends, and I start out at zero with the next story.

Anyway, for today’s Sunday Salon, I finished up with the last couple of hundred pages worth of stories. Forgive me any etiquette faux pas by including my previous reading in today’s review.

On a personal note, I started wearing spectacles earlier this week. Thirty-seven years old and I apparently haven’t been able to read with my right eye for a couple of decades. Not that I really realized this as my left eye has nearly perfect vision and dominates. With glasses, the pages became so much clearer though. But oh is it a change! I am not liking the adjustment. I don’t know how you glasses-wearers do it!

On to the stories…

Tiny Tango, Judith Moffett

Imagining a future in which AIDS and HIV cause carriers to be reviled by the general population. Kind of like in 1989, when the story was published. The story follows a woman who is infected but keeps it secret, as she attempts to live a completely stress-free, ambition-free life in the hopes that it will extend her life. Of course, stress-free is difficult after a nuclear accident makes her home city of Philadelphia uninhabitable and an alien race (the Hefn) appear in the sky. Decent story.

Out of Copyright, Charles Sheffield

A fairly mundane story about multi-national corporations vying for a contract to crash asteroids onto Io. In order to do it better, they all clone famous scientists to run the projects. But clones don’t have memories of who they were. And sometimes they don’t even have the skills that the originals did. Nature vs. nurture and all. The hook for the title is that a scientist has a copyright on himself for 75 years after his death, and so he can’t be cloned until that expires.

For I Have Touched the Sky, Mike Resnick

A story set on Kirinyaga, where ethnic Kikuyu are attempting to create a society based on the old ways of the Kikuyu. One of those ways is that girls are not to learn how to read. And yet Kamari is smart enough to learn to read behind the mundumugu’s (the shamanistic leader) back. He tells her she cannot learn further despite having a taste of it. If she wishes to read she must accept exile from Kirinyaga. She does not like her choices.

Alphas, Gregory Benford

Bleah. Boring story. If you were stranded in space, falling toward a planet cored out by a superstring rotating very rapidly, falling straight down the middle of the axis of rotation, falling with no thrusting power in your space suit, how would you escape? If you can’t do it, you’ll just fall back in when you reach the other side, eventually setting down in the middle of the planet where the hear incinerates you. Oh yeah, the Alphas are the alien race that is coring out the planet.

At the Rialto, Connie Willis

A story about quantum physics. I gave up reading around five pages in. Just not my bag.

Skin Deep, Kathe Koja

A man becomes obsessed with a thing that has sex with him. A lump of flesh kind of thing. Oookay then!

The Egg, Steven Popkes

I really enjoyed this story! In a future Boston beset by flooding and gangs and whatnot, a young orphan Ira and his alien caregiver Gray come across an egg. Ira fixates on the egg as his relationship with his aunt and cousin degrades, but Gray thinks it might be dangerous. Nothing amazing (nor bad either) science fiction wise in the story, but Popkes does a good job putting you in Ira’s head and making it feel right.

Tales From The Venia Woods, Robert Silverberg

This is an alternate history story from Silverberg’s Roma Eterna universe. The key difference from our history being that the Roman empire did not fall, at least not like it did for us. This story is from a present day Roman republic, somewhere near Venia (Vienna?). Two school children come upon a haunted house in the woods, one that used to be a hunting lodge used by the Roman emperor, and they come across a very aged caretaker who remembers times before the republic supplanted the empire. I kinda liked it, even though it was pretty simple.

Visiting the Dead, William King

While on Earth for a funeral from the space-based overtowns, a visitor is caught in the center of war fever. Not too bad, though not groundbreaking either.

Dori Bangs, Bruce Sterling

Lester Bangs and Dori Seda, two real-life people I’ve never heard of died in the 1980s. Both were involved in counter-culture type stuff. Lester Bangs as a rock journalist. Dori Seda as an alterna-comic book artist and writer. Sterling writes the story of the two of them not dying and instead meeting, dropping out of the counter-culture, and getting married.

The Ends of the Earth, Lucius Shepard

I usually have liked Lucius Shepard stories that have appeared in The Year’s Best S.F. but not this one. An author struggling with a past relationship heads to the Yucatan to exorcise his demons in a relaxing tropical beach setting. There he plays an ancient Mayan game for which he doesn’t know the rules, and is transported into an alternate world. Like Jumanji, but without Robin Williams. Maybe it’s because I’ve already been ruined by the concept of Jumanji that I didn’t like this, even though I never saw the movie.

The Price of Oranges, Nancy Kress

I loved this little time travel story. Harry, a modern day retiree, has a portal to the 1930s in his closet. So he keeps going back then to buy things at cheaper prices and thus making his Social Security check go farther. But he also thinks the 1930s were less cynical, and he wants his grand-daughter to meet someone from that time period so she’ll be less depressed. He hatches a plan…

Lottery Night, S. P. Somtow (Somtow Sucharitkul)

A fantasy story where Samraan goes to the cemetery to spend the night. His great-great-great-aunt’s ghost will hopefully come to him and reveal the winning lottery numbers so his family can reverse their decline. Hopefully. Of course, Samraan could meet demons as well. Dozois calls this story gonzo in the introduction. I agree. It’s different than most fantasy stories that I’ve read.

A Deeper Sea, Alexander Jablokov

This could’ve been a really good story, but in the end I was really disappointed. The premise isn’t too unusual: humans can communicate with dolphins and whales. This is the story of Colonel Ilya Stasov. He tries to use aural pictures to communicate with dolphins. He’s successful, but mostly because in doing so he fakes sonar of the sea bottom to the dolphins, which drives them mad. Kind of like if we established communications with aborigines by feeding them hallucinogenics. Turns out the dolphins could talk the whole time; they’d collectively decided to boycott human interaction in the time of the Greeks. But the hallucinations basically made them cry out I want to die!. The rest of the story is Stasov trying to atone for dragging out speech from them as well as involuntarily enlisting them in the Soviet military.

The problem is that the story doesn’t reveal what was so horrible that Stasov did until late in the plot. And then when it does I don’t think Jablonkov really put enough effort into what pain he imagined the dolphins went through. Stasov’s atonement is to help the dolphins achieve their Messiah story culmination. But the authors explanations of that were so choppy I couldn’t figure out what it was he was actually doing.

The Edge of the World, Michael Swanwick, The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award

This isn’t really science fiction. It’s fantasy, set in a world very much like our own. All the countries of Earth exist, and there is conflict of some sort between the U.S. and some Arabic countries. Here’s the difference: the world is flat. Swanwick doesn’t bother to explain how it would all work. There’s no directions in the story about where all the countries of a spherical world would fit on a flat one. It doesn’t matter. Three kids, Russ, Piggy, and Donna live somewhere near the edge. One day they decide to descend a set of stairs built into the side of the world. They aren’t the first at all. There’s lots of graffiti and vandalism, as well as trash thrown over the edge and caught up on the landings from air flows. But even this isn’t a huge part of the story. Really, it’s just additional flavor for a story of three kids and how they relate. Pretty damn good.

Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man, Megan Lindholm (Margaret Ogden)

This is an eager story about a failed writer working as a sales clerk at a department store. A nondescript balding fortyish man comes in asking for silk. She only notices him because work is slow that evening. He comes in again another day, and that leads to magical adventures.

The Third Sex, Alan Brennert

Brennert tries to get inside the head of a new third sex, androgynes, people without a sex. How do you find love? Do you care? That sort of thing. I thought it not all that insightful.

Winter on the Belle Fourche, Neal Barrett, Jr.

Barrett’s story isn’t a deep exploration of anything. It’s a nice alternate history western what-if. What if Emily Dickinson traveled the west and got herself stranded in the winter in a cabin with a western woodsman/trapper/hunter? What if he was also a poet? I really liked it, because Barrett made some pretty good, if somewhat stock, characters.

Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another, Robert Silverberg

In U.S. elections lately there has been a focus on personality. George Bush is your next door neighbor. Hillary Clinton is too emotional, and simultaneously too cold. As if we really know how to judge what or who a person really is. All we have is their public persona. There is a large volume of information about politicians these days. Is it enough to really know?

Silverberg’s story explores what a person might be like if we recreated them based on the public record. A fantastic computer program creates artificial intelligence based on what we know about a historical figure. The idea is common (Hyperion had one), but in this short form it’s done fairly well. Francisco Pizarro meets Socrates in a computer simulation. It definitely reminds me that I hate the Socratic method. Resnick uses it in dialog in a particularly annoying fashion. Here it isn’t overdone and it fits, because it is Socrates.

Relationships, Robert Sampson

Short short story about a guy who starts seeing women he’s been involved with appear out of thin air. Mad? They tell him he is not, and also that he can’t continue to live in the past.

Just Another Perfect Day, John Varley

This is 50 First Dates. I don’t suppose they made the movie from the story, but the parallels are there. After an accident, a man wakes up every morning with no recollection of what he did the previous day. He last remembers a day in the summer of 1986. He continually wakes up the day after, at least to his recollection. It’s all written as a letter to himself from his previous day’s self. Also, there’s some business with aliens.

The Loch Moose Monster, Janet Kagan

At first I didn’t like this story of life on a colony planet, but as I read further it grew on me. What annoyed me at first was not understanding what was going on, but in the end I think Kagan introduced things at just the right point to keep the story moving along. Loch Moose is a lake jokingly named after Loch Ness with a twist. Jokingly at least until a real monster shows up and the colony’s genetic policewoman (so to speak, she has more duties than that) Mama Jason heads there to find out what’s going on.

The Magic Bullet, Brian Stableford

A murder mystery of genetic engineering. Rather pedestrian except for the ending. Meaning I can’t really say much about the premise of the story without ruining it.

The Odd Old Bird, Avram Davidson

This is a Dr. Eszterhazy story. It’s a recurring character in some sort of European empire/country. In this case, he and his genteel fellow scientists are discussing Archeopteryx, the transitional species between reptiles and birds. Except on of the folks in the discussion dismisses the topic with Seen it. This story just bored me. I think I skipped the Ezterhazy story the one other time I saw one. They just don’t grab me.

Great Work of Time, John Crowley

A work of time travel fiction, concerning a secret society started by Cecil Rhodes to preserve the British Empire. I think I am tired of time travel stories, what with all the jumping around to avoid paradoxes and whatnot. Occasionally there’s something interesting about them, but it’s rare. The more interesting part of this story is the whole preserve the British Empire aspect of the story. What would British hegemony look like? Is British civilization a good thing? This review looks at the secret society as an allegory for the British Empire itself. As it tries ever more complicated means to attempting to keep control, the more it inevitably will lose it. In the order the story is told, I agree. In the order of time, when time travel is involved, things become much more muddled. Which happens a lot with time travel stories. Of course, I did like another time travel story in this collection, so don’t mind me.

Well, my general impression is that I wasn’t as fond of this anthology as I have been of some other volumes in Gardner Dozois’ series. I’m not about to go check statistics, or even really compile them. I quite enjoyed five of the stories. A lot of others were decent, but didn’t really move me. Dozois seems to like to end these with a longish novella. I think he’d do better to start and end with punchy, really good stories. Draw the reader in quickly and send them off with a bang. That didn’t happen this time, at least not for me.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: seventh annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover artist: Thomas Gold (or Cold, I can’t read his signature real well and neither can I find any info on the web)
Series: Year’s best science fiction; 7
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: xxvi, 598 p.
Publication date: 1990
ISBN-10: 0-312-04452-6
LC classification: PS648.S3 Y43

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