I picked this book up at the dealers room at Wiscon 33 last weekend. I’m not particularly familiar with slipstream, though I’d read one story that appeared in this anthology. But I had such a nice chat with M. Rickert so I decided I would see what this was all about, since one of her stories appears. Verdict: overall probably not my thing. I really liked some of the stories. Some of the ones that didn’t work for me really didn’t work for me. When a story is trying to mess with me, it better succeed well or I’m just gonna be irritable.

Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel start with an introduction trying to explain slipstream. Not define it, exactly, though. It’s an extended musing on the definition, as as it exists, it’s history, whether it should be defined, and the pitfalls of including particular stories for this undefined thing. Throughout the book they’ve also reprinted a series of comments made on David Moles blog regarding what slipstream’s definition. The end result really isn’t a definition any more than Bruce Sterling’s original essay was. Conclusion: hey, there’s some weird fiction out there that has some common elements that we like.

Al by Carol Emshwiller

The first story in the anthology didn’t work for me at all. According to the introduction, it’s sort of a mashup of Lost Horizon and a satire of the New York City art scene. Al crash lands in a different culture and tries to become part of it. That different culture is, in this case, an artist commune of some sort. Not having any connection to any of the pieces, it seemed strange for strangeness sake to me.

The Little Magic Shop by Bruce Sterling

Very cool little story about a fellow who comes back to a magic shop every decade or two to get a magic elixir that returns him to his youth in exchange for everything he possesses.

The Healer by Aimee Bender

Another really good story. Two school girls, one with a hand of fire, one with a hand of ice. The water from the second girl’s ice can heal. But can it heal the unstable fire girl?

The Specialist’s Hat by Kelly Link

A ghost story. I’ve read this story before, and liked it then. My opinion hasn’t changed on re-reading it. When I went back and read what I wrote way back when though, I said something that I probably should have paid attention to. Overall, I wouldn’t read her again, even though I liked half the stories. Just too much trouble. I just bought Magic for Beginners in the Small Beer Press sale, so I might end up not liking it. For $1 though, you can’t really go wrong.

Light and the Sufferer by Jonathan Lethem

Mysterious aliens follow people who have drug habits. Another great story.

Sea Oak by George Saunders

Another awesome story! Absurdist science fiction fantasy crossover. Aunt Bernie comes back from the dead a little more assertive than she was when she was alive. Great bit is a faux T.V. show called The Worst That Could Happen which takes unlikely but possible tragedies and simulates them. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he’s eaten by wolves. Brilliant!

Exhibit H: Torn Pages Discovered in the Vest Pocket of an Unidentified Tourist by Jeff VanderMeer

This is one of the ones that didn’t work for me at all. Shades of H. G. Wells The Time Machine with stratified garbage workers.

Hell Is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang

I wonder if there’s a Ted Chiang story that I don’t like. This one I loved. It’s simple in structure, but thought-provoking. Two big tenets of Christianity don’t have to be taken on faith in this story: god exists and manifests himself all over the place, and hell is the afterlife whose primary feature is being cut off from god. God and angels still are mysterious. They do things for strange reasons. Angels show up randomly, curing some and afflicting others. Neil Fisk’s wife is killed in one of these appearances and ascends to heaven. Neil wants to love god so he can be with his wife in heaven when he dies, but he also hates god for taking her from him. Quite the dilemma!

Lieserl by Karen Joy Fowler

Einstein’s daughter? I think … ? That absence of sound you hear is the vacuum inside my head.

Bright Morning by Jeffrey Ford

Decent but fairly unmoving story about a writer who searches for a lost Franz Kafka story only to have the writer Jeffrey Ford outbid him for it at auction. It kind of pulls a Memento like trick though, in that the gimmick really felt like a gimmick. Clever for cleverness sake.

Biographical Notes to A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes by Benjamin Rosenbaum by Benjamin Rosenbaum

This story tries to pull a similar self-referential trick, but to my mind, the story worked better. Not because of the gimmick though. It’s just a bit more fun is all.

The God of Dark Laughter by Michael Chabon

The second story that I’d previously read. Still like it.

The Rose in Twelve Petals by Theodora Goss

Kind of a re-telling/take-off of Sleeping Beauty with a bit of alternative history. I like it, and I may like it more on a re-reading. It has that kind of feel to it.

The Lions Are Asleep This Night by Howard Waldrop

An alternative history story where a kid in Africa saves his lunch money to buy cheap books and wants to write his own. Alternative history because Europe and America aren’t dominant (and might not ever have been). I liked it, but that’s the book geek in me identifying with the book geek in the kid.

You Have Never Been Here by M. Rickert

This is the reason why I bought the anthology. As the introduction to the book states, it’s very haunting. It’s second person, in a hospital. The doctors are doing something, perhaps conducting an experiment, but perhaps doing something else. They want you to love. It’s confusing. But in spite of the fact that I don’t know what the hell is going on, I liked the story. It works like I wish poetry did for me, mostly by setting a mood and instilling feeling.

Other blogged reviews:

• Everything Is Nice

Title: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology
Editors: James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel
Cover creator: Isabelle Rosenbaum (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Tachyon
Format: Paperback
Length: 288 p.
Publication date: 2006
ISBN-10: 1-892391-35-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-892391-35-3

I have laying around a few older fiction magazines that I’ve never read. So I figured I would knock some of them off over the next month or two. I can’t even remember why I bought this one eight years ago.

As normal, I’m only reviewing the fiction.

Lifeline by Eleanor Arnason

I think Mark Watson states my thoughts best in his review:

The story ends with a lengthy dialog between Duluth and an AI concerning destiny and other matters – which comes across as being what Arnason is really wanting to talk about, with the preceding story the means to get her there.

Duluth is our main character, a former revolutionary who is being studied by the ruling AIs by having an AI implanted in her head. The plot has her getting kidnapped by alien revolutionaries.

The Gods Abandon Alcibiades by Joel Richards

Aliens experience human life by inhabiting ancient Greek personages? And then some of them get too close to the experience and don’t want to go back? And have to be forced? Something like that. Except it’s all talky-talk.

Day’s Heat by James Sallis

Siblings abused by dad somehow. Something or the other about letting dad or another sibling live vicariously, literally, through what they do. And now he’s dying and sister has come home after resenting him for years. I think.

Romance with Phobic Variations by Tom Purdom

Future Casanova Joe Baske discovers that he’s actually a mark for con-women who have genetically modified one of themselves to fit his well-known tendencies. I’m not really sure if I should view it as saying something about the nature of love or if I should just view it as a science fiction caper. It could be viewed both ways. The latter a bit better, but even then it still falls a a bit short.

Exclusion by Daniel Abraham

Have you ever just dropped someone from your list of friends? Completely cut them off as if they didn’t exist any more? Sometimes that can be an easy way of avoiding dealing with problems. Abraham imagines a world where you can do that totally, with technology. Tell your computer to completely edit a person out of your life. Can’t see ‘em. They can’t see you. Take the social phenomenon to it’s extreme.

User-Centric by Bruce Sterling

The story starts off as a series of messages between members of a product development team. Having participated in a bunch of these sorts of things, it felt very familiar. Then the narrative transitions into a story about the subjects of the story developed by the product development team. Cute, but I’m not sure what the point is. We are manipulated by marketers? We aren’t the sum of the stories told about us? Eh.

Ice and Mirrors by Brenda Cooper and Larry Niven

Very Niven-esque story. No big dumb object though, and a little contrived. A race wants to colonize a planet. Galactic law requires that a neutral race okay planet colonization to make sure no indigenous races are displaced. This is the story of two human verifiers who play the role for a proposed Thray colonization of an ice planet. It’s the first time the pair have done this, and indeed the first time humans have. The contrived part is that only the team lead can okay it. The team can only be two people. They can only send one message (no consultation). And no one else but the Thray are there with them. Given the unlikely setup, it’s a good story. But that setup just doesn’t make sense other than to inject some danger into the story.

Title: Asimov’s Science Fiction
Issue: February 2001 (301)
Cover creator: Michael Carroll
Length: 144 p.
Publication date: December 2000

Of all the Year’s Best S.F. collection’s by Gardner Dozois, this one might be my favorite so far. There weren’t any stories that just blew me away, but there were only a couple I hated and I quite liked quite a bit. Best stories: Bears Discover Fire, Tower of Babylon, and Learning to Be Me. And now thoughts on the stories…

Mr. Boy, James Patrick Kelly

There’s nothing in this story about genetic manipulation/body modification that I haven’t read before. But it’s still really really good. Mr. Boy is the assumed named of Peter Cage, a 25 year old boy. He’s been genetically modified to stay the age of 13, and acts that age. His mom is a ¾ scale statue of liberty. Being rich, they can do all this. And then he meets Treemonisha Joplin, whose family isn’t rich. She wants in, and Mr. Boy increasingly wants out. It was really easy to get in to the character of Mr. Boy, despite the strangeness.

The Shobies’ Story, Ursula K. Le Guin

Uh. Okay. I think this is about some sort of new instantaneous space travel that ends up requiring those who do the traveling to believe in it. Or something.

The Caress, Greg Egan

Performance art gone bad. Evil genius genetically creates human/animal hybrids to mimic paintings he’s seen. And more. Very twisted. Pretty good. I especially liked the ending, where the victim doesn’t feel anger.

A Braver Thing, Charles Sheffield

Good story about a physicist who wins the Nobel Prize. This is his first-person account of how he made the discovery. Only tangentially science fiction. The meat of the story could take place at any time.

We See Things Differently, Bruce Sterling

Since this story first saw publication, not a whole lot has changed. In fact the story seems even more relevant, even if the time line in the story places the plot nearly a decade ago. U.S. and Russia in decline. The Arab world ascendant. It’s been unified into a caliphate, and although it’s clearly won the cultural battle there’s still resentment against the U.S. An Arab journalist travels to the U.S. to cover a patriotic rock singer who is galvanizing the populace. I saw the ending coming a mile away, so it is kind of predictable. Well written though.

And The Angels Sing, Kate Wilhelm

Kind of a first contact story. Small town newspaperman comes on a being stumbling around town. At first he takes it for one of the local girls, but when he gets her inside he realizes she isn’t a she. The story could be his ticket out. Very well written. I liked it.

Past Magic, Ian R. MacLeod

This story didn’t resonate with me. In a somewhat dystopian future, a rich person tries to hold on to her memories by re-creating her daughter. Told from the viewpoint of the ex-husband father. Not bad, but seemed old hat and I couldn’t get into the characters.

Bears Discover Fire, Terry Bisson

Just an awesome story. One day, bears do what man did tens of thousands of years ago. The bears discover fire. I love the mixture of the practical and absurd. This is begging to be made into a short film.

The All-Consuming, Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier

Lucius Shepard seems to write stories that I either love or that just bore me. This is one of the boring ones. I can see where some folks will like this one, but the style just doesn’t suit my tastes. In this fantasy story, a rich person decides to grok the world by eating it. Our protagonist is a jungle guide type person who provides the rich guy with meals from a magical jungle, and they all begin to notice a change.

Personal Silence, Molly Gloss

This is one type of science fiction I really like, where the science fiction is integral to the story, but it’s presence is not overwhelming. A protester walks around the world engaging in a personal silence (i.e., not talking) to try to end an endless world war of some type. On the Olympic peninsula he runs into a young pre-teen who dreams a little precognitively. Really liked this one.

Invaders, John Kessel

So if you’ve read this blog for the last few months or some of my comments on other folks blogs, you’ve read me saying that I think the meaning of a story isn’t really up to the author. By that I meant that once released, the author gives up exclusive control over the interpretation. If he/she later says something about that book, I feel that readers may at that point decide for themselves whether to accept the additional input or not. Sometimes authors have changes of heart. Sometimes they were just chicken-shit when they wrote their book and didn’t want to say something. After a story has been released, the owner is the reader. The author only owns it until it’s released. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. One way though for an author to have a lasting say is to do what John Kessel did in this story, and that I’ve never seen done elsewhere. He inserted little mini-essay like pieces on his literary intentions about Invaders into the text of the story itself. He broke the 4th wall, so to speak. Anyway, I kind of like it. And I really like that the aliens are just here for our cocaine.

The Cairene Purse, Michael Moorcock

Long and slow story about an engineer who travels to Egypt looking for his sister, who he has reason to believe has run into some trouble. It’s a degraded earth by the time of the story. And locals think the sister is into witchcraft or in league with aliens. I just didn’t care about the character. And the drawn out storytelling really put me off.

The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk, Dafydd ab Hugh

Sometimes I think speculative fiction appears on a grand scale too much. Nation against nation, species against species, fighting for the survival of all that is known to man or alien. Dafydd ab Hugh’s story is small scale. After a genetic accident elevates animals, three of them set off on a quest to bring Progrets and Democrazy to one of man’s redoubts. Kind of hard to get in to the story, but it had a spark that I don’t often see in S.F.

Tower of Babylon, Ted Chiang

Another small scale fantasy story. Ted Chiang imagines the tower of Babel fable from the perspective of a miner digging through the vault of heaven after the tower’s been built to reach that high. I believe this won the Nebula, and for good reason.

The Death Artist, Alexander Jablokov

I only read seven or eight pages of this and moved on. One of those stories that jumps around and changes settings and doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. I don’t like being in a maze of mirrors.

The First Since Ancient Persia, John Brunner

Scientists conduct experiments on unsuspecting local population. New person stumbles on it all. Trouble follows. Not original. Not awful, but I felt like I could have missed this one and not really missed anything.

Inertia, Nancy Kress

Previous story was about biological manipulation. So’s this one, with a much more interesting idea behind it. Some sort of disease strikes humanity, disfiguring the infected with rope-like blemishes. It’s communicable, though it doesn’t seem to have any other apparent effects. Nevertheless, no one wants to catch it so those who have it are banished to internment camps, which become permanent. There’s a little of the Inside/Outside type of theme common to internment camp stories, but there’s also a lot more levels to this than there is in many short stories.

Learning to Be Me, Greg Egan

Damn fine story. The only story I’ve ever seen that tackles head on one of the implications of uploading oneself into a computer. What happens to the old copy? There’s a bit of David Marusek’s Wedding Album in this, as well as one I can’t remember the title of, where transporting one’s self across the universe instantaneously resulted in a very bad side effect of two copies of one’s self. The story fuses it all together in a fairly horrifying way. It’s also pretty clever too.

Cibola, Connie Willis

Didn’t like this one. A descendant of El Turco, a Native American guide for Coronado who led the Spanish explorer on a wild goose chase for Cibola, leads a Denver newspaper reporter on a wild goose chase for Cibola. Connie Willis led me on a wild goose chase for Cibola.

Walking the Moons, Jonathan Lethem

Virtual reality is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Rainmaker Cometh, Ian McDonald

I didn’t get this and I didn’t finish it.

Hot Sky, Robert Silverberg

Really liked this story about a future after global warming. Small scale story of a boat capturing an iceberg in the Pacific to tow it to San Francisco which like all cities in the story needs fresh water. The plot is fairly conventional. Another boat is in distress, forcing the captain to choose between helping the other boat and bringing fresh water to a city. I liked it because Silverberg put a lot of effort into the details of the story, which all fit together well.

White City, Lewis Shiner

I usually like Shiner stories (the couple that I’ve read). But this one was pretty emotionless. Although the story is supposedly about an emotionless man, I just don’t think that worked.

Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates, Pat Murphy

In a nominally post-apocalypse story, one of the last (dying) people alive is a robotics person. She creates a couple of robots to live on after her, with pseudo-sexual organs. It’s less prurient than the description makes it seem. Kind of on the weird side really. I didn’t get in to it, but I thought it was an interesting story nonetheless.

The Hemingway Hoax, Joe Haldeman

Huh. I must be missing something big here. I really liked this story up until the ending, and then I just got lost. Someday perhaps I’ll re-read it and I’ll get the ending and like it. The story has that sort of feel to it. Like pasta. Better after re-heating.

Title: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover creator: Michael Whelan (artist)
Series: The Year’s Best Science Fiction; 8
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: xxxii, 624 p.
Publication date: 1991
ISBN-10: 0-312-06009-2

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

Not much to say generally. Another pretty good collection of short fiction. Though I do wonder at the preponderance of fantasy stories, particularly given that St. Martin’s was in the 2nd year of their Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series at the time this was published. They did have that niche covered.

Surfacing, Walter Jon Williams

This story takes two S.F. plots and mingles them, and I don’t really like the effect too well. In the first plot, Anthony brings whales to another world because they can help him communicate with a species that lives underwater on that world. Anthony was a scientist who helped decode whale speech. After the discovery that a set of resonances underwater were actually an alien species, Anthony heads to that world to try to decode it, and to figure out what these unseen creatures are. Plot two revolves around a Kyklops, a multi-dimensional alien. This alien has a contract with a woman that allows him to take over her body at will. Anthony falls in love with her, and they plot to release her from the alien’s control. I’ve found other decoding alien languages stories boring, but here I was very interested in it. The damsel-in-distress story? Not so much. The mix? Eh.

Home Front, James Patrick Kelly

Using an apparently unintentional prescient plot device, Kelly explores youth who are eligible to join the military and fight for America. It kind of covers the same ground as Ender’s Game and Lord of the Flies, but in a shorter more digestible chunk. The prescient part is an interchangeable position of Johnny America, the P.R. soldier of the military. Unlike G.I. Joe, Johnny is more of a reality show construction. Except there weren’t reality shows in the 80s when this was written.

The Man Who Loved The Vampire Lady, Brian Stableford

A kind of S.F. take on a fantasy trope, vampires. In this version, vampirism is a blood-born disease sometimes transmitted sexually that allows the vampire to live a long time. Vampires have essentially become the ruling nobility in Europe. Someone finally invents a microscope, and Lady Carmilla (a vampire) assigns her former lover Edmund (a human) to examine the device. He’s a mechanician, which I assume means he’s a tinkerer. He grasps the microscope, and understands the meaning of the little amoeba animals he sees, that they carry the vampirism trait. He knows that the vampires won’t let him live long with the knowledge. Fairly pedestrian idea, but decently well-written.

Peaches For Mad Molly, Stephen Gould

Wow! This was an awesome story. Characterization not so involved. It’s more a concept, and a pretty original one at that, wedded to a thriller mentality. The concept is that when giant skyscrapers are built in the future, a culture of people will live on the outside of them. Think rock climbers in the extreme. The are poor and unable to afford to live inside, or they are malcontents who just don’t fit in there. Our main character decides to go on a trading run down the side of his building, but he has to cross a 10 story area controlled by bandits. He gets past them easily on the way down. But climbing is slower and on the way back up they are ready and waiting for him. Just an awesome story!

The Last Article, Harry Turtledove

Alternate history where the Third Reich wins World War II. In India, the newly dominant Germans take over from the English and inherit their problems with the restless subcontinent. A German officer who is the military governor takes on Mohandas Gandhi. Turtledoves conclusion is that this time Gandhi does not win. The analysis seems to be that nonviolence requires two things to work that would not be present: a very courageous population that would be willing to sacrifice their lives on a large scale, and an opponent that is squeamish about killing people. If the authority has no problem with killing thousands of non-violent protesters, then they will emerge victorious if it scares people into compliance. I think Tian An Men just might have proved Turtledove right.

Stable Strategies For Middle Management, Eileen Gunn

A story about gene manipulation where people can get animal-like bodies. Then it gets surreal by being set in a middle management office and the workers use their changes for advancement. It didn’t really click with me, though it was an interesting juxtaposition.

In Memoriam, Nancy Kress

Would you give up your memory of who you are if that enabled you to live forever?

Kirinyaga, Mike Resnick

I’ve read this story before, but for some reason I always think of the plot of Ivory when I see the title Kirinyaga. Ivory is not as good. Koriba is the mundumugu of the Kikuyu tribe. Originally located in Kenya, they now have their own planet maintained by Maintenance. Kenya is essentially one big metropolis by this time in the future. Maintenance is supposed to have a prime directive like instruction. The Kikuyu get to run it how they want and Maintenance is not supposed to interfere. Only one of the traditions of the Kikuyu is that babies born feet first are demons, and must be killed. Which horrifies Maintenance, as the child of course had no choice in which tradition he would like.

The Girl Who Loved Animals, Bruce McAllister

In the future, many animals are extinct. Some people want to bring them back, using methods like we have heard for dinosaurs. D.N.A. for dinosaurs can be found embedded in amber on occasion. Or mammoths in ice. To my knowledge, we don’t have enough D.N.A. for these animals to clone them yet. And we really don’t have a way to gestate them. Dolly the cloned sheep was gestated by another sheep. But, in the future, we will likely have genetic records for some of the animals that might become extinct. We have live specimens. We can take samples and record everything about their D.N.A. And so if they become extinct, we could recreate them. If we have a way to gestate them. Without artificial uteruses, we’re kind of S.O.L. But, there may be these groups of people trying to revive them. They may have money. And some women may need the money badly enough to take it for these purposes.

The Last Of The Winnebagoes (Hugo award for best novella, Nebula award for best novella), Connie Willis

A nice novella about a future when environmentalism is standard. States have outlawed gas hogs and water is a precious scarcity. Many animals, particularly pets, have become extinct. The protagonist is a photojournalist, one of a dying breed as automation pushes humans out of even that field. On the way to his assignment, he sees a dead jackal in the road. Jackals are rare, though not extinct. But seeing it brings up memories of his dog, over which he obsesses. Still, he dutifully shows up to take pictures of and talk to two older people who live in an R.V., traveling highways and making a living by charging people to see their Winnebago. Human interest story. But he’s too distraught to continue on to his second assignment at the governor’s press conference. Here’s the catch: that makes him look suspicious to the Humane Society which is investigating the death of the jackal. I loved this story.

Love In Vain, Lewis Shiner

This story was included in The Year’s Best Fantasy: Second Annual Collection which I reviewed in July. It’s still a great story, but it doesn’t really seem like S.F. to me. Love this story. Go read it.

The Hob, Judith Moffett

Hobs are gnomelike creatures that live in Britain. Creatures of legend. They feel a need to serve masters, kind of like house-elves in Harry Potter. But as modern life encroaches, the hobs retreat from interacting with humans and hide. Except one of them, Elphi, gets careless and allows a backpacker, Jenny, to see him. It’s a nice story, but it didn’t do a whole lot for me. Very ho-hum. Oh, and the S.F. hook is that hobs are really stranded aliens. And that’s about the length of that hook too.

Our Neural Chernobyl, Bruce Sterling

A really short story that describes a future evolutionary cataclysm from the perspective of an even further future. The neural Chernobyl depicted is a genetically engineered virus that makes people smarter, though most can’t handle it and burn out crazy. But it also jumps to a few animals as well.

House Of Bones, Robert Silverberg

A time-traveler is stranded in the past, among Cro-Magnons. Pushes the idea that our assumptions that Cro-Magnon’s were primitive may not be quite correct. The premise isn’t all that exciting, but it’s a pretty well-written story. I enjoyed it.

Schrödinger’s Kitten, George Alec Effinger

Supposedly illustrating the Schrödinger’s cat phenomena, I just found this story confusing.

Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?, Howard Waldrop

Another story that I really wouldn’t classify as science fiction. Maybe I’m just missing something. Frank is still a local in the town where he went to high school. It’s time for the 20 year reunion. Frank becomes a guide to show all the returnees what’s happened to the various places the class used to haunt. The highlight of the reunion is supposed to be a performance by the long since split up high school rock band that briefly achieved stardom right after high school. Only something interesting happens when they play one of their songs. Howard Waldrop stories always seem to have a bit of fun in them. At least the three I’ve read previously. Not deep, but decently good.

The Growth Of The House Of Usher, Brian Stableford

A bit of a homage to Edgar Allen Poe, including the use of language and style of Poe’s period. Here a scientist named Usher lives in a house of biomass in which genetically engineered creatures live. They build the house. They keep it running. Usher wants to pass on his knowledge before he dies, and so invites a colleague to the house.

Glacier, Kim Stanley Robinson

A new ice age has descended on North America. A large glacier is just north of Boston, where the Canadian refugees at the center of the story live. Dad is a professor. Son heads out to the glacier to play by himself a lot. Times are tough. I’m not generally a Kim Stanley Robinson fan, but I liked this story. It shows the effect of climate change on ordinary people. No real explanation of the societal impact of this ice age. You have to glean that from the conversations the kid has with his parents, and some of his interactions with others. So it comes off as a very personal story rather than a birds-eye view.

Sanctuary, James Lawson

This story reminds me a lot of Altered Carbon, except this was written well before. Basically, a computer software designer is found in his office with his mind wiped. And another one working for another company is as well. Cardenas is a cop. His job is to figure out who killed these guys when there is no evidence except the bodies. I’m gonna do something here that I don’t normally do: issue a pretty blatant spoiler. These guys kill themselves. Here’s why I’m spoiling it. They kill themselves because of The Secret. In other words, the law of attraction, which is the stupidest thing ever. The version in this story is that if you repeat something often enough, you set up a harmonic resonance for that action that embeds itself in space-time. Anyone else doing that action latches on to that resonance and can do the action just a bit better than would be expected. So these guys get a super-computer to repeat some program that emulates their brains. And it does it so often that they are literally whisked into the space-time continuum. Urg. Since when did the law of attraction get any traction in anything having to do with science? I’ll buy faster than light travel before this crap.

The Dragon Line, Michael Swanwick

Mordred and Merlin in modern times. I wasn’t so impressed with this.

Mrs. Shummel Exits A Winner, John Kessel

Another story that isn’t really science fiction so much as fantasy. Did Dozois do this in the other anthologies I’ve read and I just not notice? Anyway, it’s not a bad story. Mrs. Schummel is a sad old woman who plays bingo. Lots of bingo. One night at the bingo hall a boy sits next to her. He doesn’t talk. He wins on every bingo card, but never yells bingo! or even waves over the judges. Mrs. Shummel is flabbergasted but doesn’t want him to win over her so she says nothing. He offers her the card, for a price. Will she take it?

Emissary, Stephen Kraus

A researcher finds an alien artifact and turns it on. There isn’t anything groundbreaking in this story, but I thought it was pretty snifty nonetheless.

It Was The Heat, Pat Cadigan

Not science fiction. Not something I liked. The second story in the volume to have appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy: Second Annual Collection.

Skin Deep, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

On an alien world a young woman is starting to have signs of a mysterious disease. Decent story.

Dying In Hull, D. Alexander Smith (David Alexander Smith)

Man, it must suck to have a common last name like Smith and on top of that use your middle name only to have some famous author come along, use your name, and hog all the top Google spots. Anyway, this is a story of the sea rising and slowly inundating the town of Hull Massachusetts. Like Washington State’s Harry Truman, who refused to leave the side of Mt. St. Helens knowing it would probably be his death, Ethel Cobb continues to live in Hull. There she deals with marauding gangs and memories of people long gone. I think this is the oldest story I’ve read that deals with global warming. I recommend it.

Distances, Kathe Koja

Eh. People are specially altered to received faster than light communications from robotic space ships on their way to Alpha Centauri. This story had no oomph for me. Characters were stock. The ideas were stock.

Famous Monsters, Kim Newman

This was fun! A Martian gets in the movies and after a long career mostly in B-movie roles writes this memoir-like retrospective.

The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter, Lucius Shepard

Wow! Beautiful fantasy novella! Original and powerful. Of course, every Lucius Shepard story I’ve read has been unique. Definitely a fitting end to this anthology.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: sixth annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover artist: Armand Cabrera
Series: year’s best science fiction ; 6
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: xxiv, 596 p.
Publication date: 1989
ISBN-10: 0-312-03009-6

This edition of the Year’s Best S.F. seems very heavy with first-contact/gee-wow-there’s-life-where-we-least-expected-it stories. In the list below, I don’t reveal all of them, as in some cases it’s integral to not know about the life ahead of time. But still, be ready for almost any story in this collection to have that as a story element.

Oceanic, Greg Egan (1999 Hugo for best novella)

Greg Egan’s own description is:

The people of Covenant believe they are the descendants of immaterial “Angels” who were brought to the planet by the daughter of God to “repent their theft of immortality” and live and die as flesh once more.

Martin is a Freelander, raised on the ocean, and a personal experience as a child convinces him of the truth of this account. But when he becomes a biologist and begins to study the native life of Covenant, his work leads to revelations about the true history of the planet, and the nature of his own beliefs.

There wasn’t anything especially new or groundbreaking about the story. It’s a pretty typical attempt to explain how religious belief could spring up, and pretty typically sides on the side of rationality. It’s a well-crafted story though and works as such, even if the deeper exploration of religion is boring.

Approaching Perimelasma, Geoffrey A. Landis

I liked this story about a trip into and out of the event horizon of a black hole. The story requires the assumption that we’ve solved a bunch of problems with physics, but I suppose it’s plausible given the assumption. I don’t generally enjoy straight hard S.F. but this one I did for some reason.

Craphound, Cory Doctorow

This story is one of the reasons why I love S.F. so much. People think it’s all about aliens and space ships and laser guns and whatnot, and in reality it can be a way to explore people’s sense of home and of their childhood. It’s also on of the frustrating things about S.F. to me. This story spends all it’s time exploring someone’s attempt to possess part of their childhood, and throws the S.F. twist in at the end, and that twist really doesn’t add anything substantive to the story.

Jedella Ghost, Tanith Lee

Jedella Ghost is one of those stories that sits on the edge of fantasy and science fiction. A young woman appears in town and appears to know nothing about death. Where did she come from and why does the dying of things confuse her? Is it because she is already dead? A ghost?

Taklamakan, Bruce Sterling (1999 Hugo award for best novellette)

In the future, a couple of well-equipped freelance spies are commissioned by N.A.F.T.A. to check out a Taklamakan desert base which might have starships. But the death of their spook contact leaves them on their own. Enticed by the allure of the big score, they go on without him, unsure of what they will find.

The Island Of The Immortals, Ursula K. Le Guin

A tourist hears about an island that has immortal people in residence. Determined to see them for himself, he finds that one can become immortal by the bite of the flies on the island, but that everyone on the island keeps themselves covered in mosquito netting to avoid becoming immortal. Because not dying can be as much of a curse as a blessing.

Sea Change, With Monsters, Paul J. McAuley

Indira Dzurisin is a monster hunter on Europa. The colony wars with Earth, and loses decisively. Among other things, Earth released genetically engineered monsters into Europa’s anaerobic ocean under the ice, which keep its residents from using the ocean to their benefit. Years later and back under the subjugation of Earth, some of the monsters still live there, like undetonated mines. One of the monsters is threatening a virulently male-only monastery, and Indira (a woman) is sent to cleanse their farm of the monster as a joke on them. Nice mix of story, setting, and prognostication.

Divided By Infinity, Robert Charles Wilson

I didn’t like Wilson’s story particularly much. The premise is that some bookseller has a theory that people can’t die. The second they die, many alternate incarnations of their soul appear in other universes. But since you can’t communicated with them, and can’t know about them, there isn’t much point. The protagonist is resurrected in part 2 by aliens from his D.N.A. Maybe I’m just dumb but I didn’t get the connection between this and the first part.

US, Howard Waldrop

This is Run Lola Run as an S.F. short story. What would Charles Lindbergh Jr.’s life look like under a few different scenarios? One, he follows his father into flying. Two, he takes advantage of his fame in Hollywood. Three, he retreats to fish in western Washington. Oddly enough, at the time of publication, Howard Waldrop retreated to western Washington to fish. I can’t fault his taste in regions.

The Days Of Solomon Gursky, Ian McDonald

Eh. Solomon Gursky invents/discovers the methods for reincarnating as an employee of a conglomerate. Since he doesn’t quite agree with the conglomerate’s politics/ethics/whatever, they ice him. Thus begins a life of reincarnation and fighting the man. As the first person to be able to be reincarnated, he eventually becomes the man millions of years in the future, when humans are more than humans. Let me repeat, Eh.

The Cuckoo’s Boys, Robert Reed

Phillip Stevens is a genius geneticist and biotech company owner. He makes a billion dollars before he’s 26. But he goes a bit mad, and let’s loose a virus/bacteria that replaces the D.N.A. in human female’s eggs with his D.N.A. Thus a fair number of them give birth to kids not having their own genes, but those of Phillip Stevens instead. The P.S. kids are smarter than your average bear, and are treated very differently, owing partly to their genius, but also owing partly to how they were conceived. Houston Cross is a mentor (tutor) who works with middle school students. This is the story of the year he mentors his first three P.S. kids, and the ways he challenges them to be better than they are. Plus, there’s even a twist ending that I didn’t see coming. Though even without the twist the story would have been interesting.

The Halfway House At The Heart Of Darkness, William Browning Spencer

An addiction counselor who helps people addicted to virtual reality gets caught in a virtual reality where he helps addicts detox from virtual reality addiction. It’s not really as circular as it sounds, and it’s not another Matrix-like what is real? story. But it’s really only average at best. Weird thing is, this appears to be the last published story by Browning, though there is a collection of his short stories that was published in 2006. None of those stories appeared to be new though. Weird that he dropped out after this story.

The Very Pulse Of The Machine, Michael Swanwick (1999 Hugo award for best short story)

First contact story. Martha Kivelson is exploring Io when a freak accident kills her partner and strands her miles from the lander. With no backup and no radio she has to get back to the lander on her own, with barely enough oxygen to do so under the best of circumstances. And then she begins hearing a voice in her communications system…

Story Of Your Life, Ted Chiang (1999 Nebula award for best novellette)

This is a story for the linguistics geeks. It’s the story of the people who are trying to get the language down after first contact. Only the languages are very different. I’d love to see the universal translators on Star Trek handle these languages. Much more complicated than a Tolkien language.

Voivodoi, Liz Williams (blog)

Teresa’s brother Roman is the victim of a genetic illness from experiments gone wrong. He takes on the appearance of the vodyanoi. His family wants to commit him to a sanatorium, both for his good and for their reputation.

Saddlepoint: Roughneck, Stephen Baxter

How much volatile elements (e.g., carbon) are buried in the Earth’s mantle? The surface of Earth is covered in them. But the surface of the moon is not. After Earth’s surface freezes over, the people living on the moon get by with very little water, etc. Enough to survive, but not to grow. Where can they get these elements? Two options are crashing comets onto the surface of the moon and digging into the core of the moon. Because the moon is much smaller and cooler than Earth, it should be much easier to dig a deep core mine.

This Side Of Independence, Rob Chilson

Years in the future, mankind has spread throughout the solar system and basically lives on various habitats orbiting the sun. We cannibalize all the various planets to construct them. But now we need more material and all that is left is Earth, which is cooling off because all the habitats block the sunlight. Much like various people refused to move off Denny Hill leaving houses standing on very tall columns, some people refuse to leave Earth. But now it’s been 300 years since the last folks left and we run into one last bunch, in Independence Missouri. Discovered by the crew digging up Kansas, we gotta figure out what to do with the remaining people.

Unborn Again, Chris Lawson

This is a fun story of revenge. Basic plot is this: people in China come down with rare disease, disease is traced to a U.S. lab, investigator shows up to interview former head of lab, who promptly gives him a prepared written confession. As he reads it, he discovers why she did it.

Grist, Tony Daniel

Kind of surprised it took this many stories into the anthology, but I only read a couple pages of this novella before skipping on to the next story. Something about priests chatting, and the introduction by Dozois talked about how there are superpowerful beings. The conversation between the priests just seemed too obscure for me. I don’t like have to guess what the hell is going on. Some amount of mystery is fine. Trying to confuse me is another story though.

La Cenerentola, Gwyneth Jones

This one kind of went over my head. Thea Lalande and her wife Suze Bonner are spending time in Europe looking for a place for a summer home. They run into a woman who appears to have two twin children cloned from herself (in the perfect Paris Hilton mode) and one ugly stepchild. Except the perfect mother and twins fade away at times. Supposedly a retelling or a twist on Cinderella, I still didn’t get it, other than the pretty sisters ugly step-sister thing.

Down In The Dark, William Barton

Living on Titan with a few other technicians and scientists, Hoxha Maxwell helps maintain all the equipment. They’re stranded when an asteroid hits earth, obliterating all human life on the surface after an attempt to blow apart the rock with nuclear missiles only causes multiple fragments to crash across the globe. His wife dead and with only a remote chance of returning to the moon with the few hundred other people in space, there’s not a lot of point to living. And a few commit suicide. Maxwell, zombie-like, plods on. Enter Christie Meitner, who discovers something in the frozen landscape but won’t tell Maxwell what it is. While not exactly curious, he does have to maintain her equipment for his own sanity.

Free In Asveroth, Jim Grimsley

I loved this story! I think it’s mostly the atmosphere. On some planet, sentient creatures are enslaved by two-legged aliens that seem much like humans (it’s never said that they are). The indigenous life is rounded up and put in pens. Three escape, years after enslavement, and lead the subjugators on a merry chase across the countryside. See, they like to run, and leap. Huge distances in each jump. Story is told from the point of view of the non-humans.

The Dancing Floor, Cherry Wilder (Cherry Barbara Grimm)

Aliens visit various human places when few people are watching. Each time they build a platform of some sort, then perform a complicated dance on it, with only a few people around to witness it. Then they leave. Three such artifacts have been found prior to the story, which follows someone investigating the fourth.

The Summer Isles, Ian R. MacLeod (1999 World Fantasy award for best novella)

An alternate history story, posing the question What would happen if the Germans won World War I? Instead of the Germans paying crushing reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, it’s the British, and that prompts the loss of Empire. Resentment builds up, and a former soldier named John Arthur quickly rises to power and then dissolves Parliament and rules by decree. Soon the Jews, the homosexuals, gypsies, and other minorities are sent away to camps. In other words, Germany and Great Britain switch places in the lead-up to World War II. This would all be a boring story if that’s all though. Take a history of Germany and England and switch over the names. Luckily there is more. The story is told from the perspective of Geoffrey Brook, a former lover of the closet homosexual John Arthur, who has even more in his past. Brook has his own resentments toward Arthur, some personal, and some political. Can one megalomaniacal man like John Arthur really steer a country wrong, or does he merely lead where the people already are headed?

Title: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin / St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 1999
Length: lix, 609 p.
ISBN-10: 0-312-20445-0

As always, Gardner Dozois picks a great anthology.

The Jaguar Hunter, Lucius Shepard

This is more a tale of fantasy than science fiction. Estaban Caax agrees to hunt and kill a jaguar that terrorizes a section of jungle that a local developer wants to build. Estaban owes the developer money for his wife’s purchases. Only thing is the jaguar protects a gateway between this world and the world of the gods of Esteban’s tribe, a set of gods mostly forgotten. Soon, the gateway will not longer exist. Will Esteban kill the jaguar or will he defect to the other side?

Dogfight, Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

This is a cyberpunk story that illustrates why I’m mostly not a fan of cyberpunk. It’s a great story, about a young punk who gets into a sub-culture of people who dogfight with holographic airplanes. It’s not dissimilar to the culture of barroom pool players (to which this actually makes a reference or two). To advance, Deke tries to fob off a piece of wetware to an unsuspecting young girl, who turns out to be very suspecting and much more competent with wetware than anyone Deke has met. A short romance buds, but the girl has been trained with an aversion to being touched by her family, which wishes her to remain chaste until she’s finished school and got a job. Which is something that not many people do in that milieu. She’s about to get out of her aversion early by using a drug called hype to ace an interview. Only thing is Deke also wants her hit of the drug so he can duke it out with the local dogfight champion. It’s a good story. But it doesn’t need the cyberpunk veneer. Not in the least. Why make a standard story inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t want to wade through 300 made up terms describing some futuristic networked world? Sure, if the story needs it, I have no problem with the device. But this story doesn’t need it in the slightest.

Fermi and Frost, Frederik Pohl

Nice little short story about a nuclear war apocalypse.

Green Days in Brunei, Bruce Sterling

An interesting love story set in a future Luddite kingdom of Brunei, after oil is no longer king and technology has divided most of the world into haves and have -nots. In Brunei, technology is mostly underground, and so an economy built around kampongs, extended households, has grown up. An outside engineer hired to restart the country’s robotic-equipped factory falls in love with the crown princess and has to figure out what to do with his life.

Snow, John Crowley

If something could record your life, but you could only watch the records in random snippets, would that be any different from your own memory? John Crowley writes of just such a technology, where people can have a miniature bug record a few years of their lives as it follows them around. After death, your loved ones could view your life at your mausoleum.

The Fringe, Orson Scott Card

Card wrote a few stories about a post-apocalyptic civilization living in the Utah desert. This one centers around a palsied teacher who turns in a few of the community’s leading citizens for black market profiting. Living on the edge, such smuggling works to the detriment of all. Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates the teacher’s actions, least of all the children of the arrested men. They attempt to take revenge by leaving the teacher without his wheelchair in a wash just before a flash flood.

The Lake Was Full Of Artificial Things, Karen Joy Fowler

A women tries to reconcile her guilt about leaving her lover as he headed off to Viet Nam by undergoing a futuristic memory treatment that brings her memories of the man alive.

Sailing to Byzantium, Robert Silverberg

There are lots of stories out there that explore the meaning of what it is to be human. Famous among this is Isaac Asimov’s Robot series. Even such pop S.F. as the new Battlestar Galactica explores this theme. How can you tell the difference between a construct and real life? Is there any real difference? Silverberg’s Sailing to Byzantium explores it from the perspective of the construct that doesn’t yet know it is a construct.

Solstice, James Patrick Kelly

A man cloned himself as a woman so he can find love, but his clone has emotions of her own. Kinda flat, this one.

Duke Pasquale’s Ring, Avram Davidson

A Dr. Eszterhazy story. I read about ten pages and gave up. Too many characters without introduction for me. If you’ve read other stories in this series it might make more sense.

More Than the Sum of His Parts, Joe Haldeman

In some was this story was enjoyable and in others it wasn’t. The man goes mad due to technology theme is no different that The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells that I read over my Belize vacation. But for some reason the cyborg technology theme did draw me in. One thing that made that effective (where it wasn’t in The Invisible Man) was that you see the transformation from normal to power-mad. In Wells novel, the main character is mad prior to his introduction in the story.

Out Of All Them Bright Stars, Nancy Kress

Loved this little tale of prejudice against aliens. Little blue men come into your café. Kind of freaky looking. Would you want to serve them?

Side Effects, Walter Jon Williams

I’m not really sure this qualifies as science fiction. Doctor makes his money by over-enrolling his low-income patients in pharmaceutical trials and both he and the companies quietly (yet without much coordination) cover up the problems that ensue. The only thing science fiction ish about this is the side effect actually regresses someone in biological age. Dunno Williams’ intent when he wrote this, but given all the issues with drug trials in the last couple of years, this sort of thing could be happening now.

The Only Neat Thing To Do, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)

This story reminded me a lot of Robert A. Heinlein’s novels for youth written in the 1950s. Here, a young girl runs off solo to the stars because she wants to be on the cutting edge. She gets to be, meeting up in a first contact with an alien race. Yet, tragically, she is quite unprepared for what happens.

Dinner In Audoghast, Bruce Sterling

I did not get this story at all. Big huh?

Under Siege, George R. R. Martin

This is the story of a time traveller who is attempting to prevent World War 3 by preventing the Russians from taking over Sweden (or Finland, I’m not quite sure) prior to the Russian Revolution. No one is sure what will happen to him and his compatriots in the future should they succeed. He and several other time travellers are freaks bred for the job. And they cannot affect the past physically. Only by mentally nudging participants are they able to do anything, and their powers are feeble at best. Told both from the perspective of the time traveller and the host person he’s trying to influence.

Flying Saucer Rock & Roll, Howard Waldrop

During the 50s, two gangs from Michael Jackson’s Beat It video decide to settle their differences through a sing-off. Mysteriously, one of the boys disappears during strange power outages right at the end. Could it be aliens?

A Spanish Lesson, Lucius Shepard

A slacker hanging out on the Spanish riviera meets up with aliens from another dimension and helps them seal the rift between dimensions through which Adolf Hitler threatens to emerge. Then a bunch of pages where the slacker drags the mental husk of one of the aliens around the world to a Tibetan monastery. No point at all. Awful stuff.

Roadside Rescue, Pat Cadigan

A frustrated motorist waiting for A.A.A. to fix a flat (or the equivalent) is helped by an alien in a limo, only to find out the alien is using him. Nice at it’s length.

Paper Dragons, James P. Blaylock

Another one for the huh? category.

Magazine Section, R. A. Lafferty

A writer of Weekly World News type stories is canned and wonders what he’ll do with his life now and can’t decide which of the many fantastic stories he’s written he’ll retire to.

The War At Home, Lewis Shiner

Very odd story about a man having flashbacks to someone’s Viet Nam war experience. Luckily it was short so I didn’t have to really grok it before it was over. Liked it, but had it gone longer I would have gotten really confused.

Rockabye Baby, S. C. Sykes

Loved this little story, which takes the idea of starting all over again to extremes and does it well. Suppose you get the opportunity to start all over again, but you don’t get to know what you know now? Would you? How about if you’ve had a terrible tragedy that meant you had nothing pleasant left to live for in your current state?

Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson

I’ve read at least one of the Mars series, though I can’t remember which book it was I read. I remember not being particularly impressed. Green Mars, isn’t bad though. It’s the longest story in this anthology, but it consists mostly of a fairly non-genre account of mountain climbing. Sure, it’s Olympus Mons on Mars. Except for occasional monologuing by our main character on how he misses the mostly un-terraformed Mars of his 300 years ago youth, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t a normal ripped-from-the-headlines climbing story. Decent reading, once.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: third annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Series: The Year’s Best Science Fiction book 2
Publisher: Blue Jay Books
Format: Hardcover
Length: 621 p.
Publication date: 1986
ISBN-10: 0-312-94486-1
Subject: Science fiction, America
LC classification: PS648.S3 Y43 1986

Been reading Gardner Dozois’ collections recently. This is the first I’ve ever finished completely. I think it’s a wonderful anthology with many of the truly best stories from the previous year.

Immersion, Gregory Benford

Immersion describes the process where through neural implants, humans may ride other animals mentally. The main characters are sociologists who visit a game park in Africa to ride chimps and get some insight into human nature. So far in the history described, only close primates can do this neural immersion thing. However, all is not right in chimp world, as some politics that I never understood cause the person running the show to prevent our heroes from jumping out of the chimps minds. Then he sends hunters in after them. Can they escape?

The Dead, Michael Swanwick

I’ve previously read Bones of the Earth and found it decent, if uninspiring. In The Dead, a company has figured out how to reanimate dead people. No soul left, but they make excellent cheap labor.

The Flowers of Aulit Prison, Nancy Kress

This tale puts humans on another planet populated by distant relatives. Species-wise that is. Everything there is about a shared reality or, in other words, the common good. Criminals are shunned. Some criminals are allowed to pretend to be unshunned, if they inform on their fellow citizens. In return they are promised eventual unshunning. I thought this story was a bit lacking.

A Dry, Quiet War, Tony Daniel

I really liked Tony Daniel’s first story in this anthology. It’s about a time-traveling soldier. There’s a war going on at the end of time. All the soldiers are multi-dimensional. After the war is over, the main character returns to his own time. The only caveat is that if he reveals who won the war, it pretty much unravels time, and he’ll have to go back to the end of time and re-fight the war. So his resolve is put to the test when a group of deserters from the way show up to terrorize his town, attacking and killing the father of his girlfriend. It all sounds very hokey when described as such, but dammit if the story doesn’t work and work well.

Thirteen Phantasms, James P. Blaylock

Eh. So-so story. Main character find that when he sends an application to join an S.F. reading group advertised in a 50 year old magazine, it somehow reaches the original founders of that reading group 50 years in the past. And they begin to correspond. I don’t want to reveal the ending, but it was boring.

Primrose and Thorn, Bud Sparhawk

Primrose and Thorn is adventure S.F. Jupiter has been settled. Mostly it’s floating stations in the atmosphere. Goods are dropped to a few of them via a space elevator, and transferred via sailing vessels. The sailbots are a little different from ocean boats in that they can operate in three dimensions instead of two. Anyway, some giant corporations sponsors a race. Only on of the contestants (Thorn?) runs into difficulties. Luckily for them, a shipping rig happens on them and the story chronicles the attempt to save the racers.

The Miracle of Ivar Avenue, John Kessel

And this story is mystery S.F. Local homicide cops find a body that perfectly matches famed but washed up directory Preston Sturges, right down to his fingerprints. Thing is Preston Sturges isn’t dead. He’s running around all over the story. Is he secretly an alien? Our protagonist unravels the mystery. The story was well-crafted and enjoyable, but it wasn’t something I look at an think oooh Nebula, for which it was apparently nominated.

The Last Homosexual, Paul Park

The U.S. has broken up and a theocracy has taken over Louisiana. They’ve somehow discovered that social ills are caused by viruses and are communicable. Or so they say. So everyone who has a social ill is locked up. Including homosexuals. Too overbearing for my taste.

Recording Angel, Ian McDonald

Aliens are terraforming Earth. Basically, they’ve dropped big machines onto Earth which move at a relatively slow pace of about 18 inches per hour. One reporter is sent to cover the demise of a famed hotel in Kenya that stands in the path of this alien machine. Oh, and no one knows anything about the aliens.

Death Do Us Part, Robert Silverberg

One of the most famous S.F. authors writes a story set in a future where life can be extended indefinitely. Consequently, most marriages last only about 40 years before people move on. This story is the story of one woman’s first marriage, undertaken before she has even undergone her first life extension treatment. Her husband is some 400+ years old, with a number of ex-wives. He’s devoted to her and intends the marriage to be to death do us part. She’s less inclined to that, spending much time daydreaming of what she will do after 40 or so years and what her future husbands will all be like.

The Spade of Reason, Jim Cowan

A very likable story about how Cax6ton watched Sesame Street one day as a child and learned about silent ‘e’. He then knew his name was spelled Cax6ton, but the six is silent. Anyway, the story is mostly about his pursuit of god. His chosen method is to look for English narrative in strings of random digits and letters. He pursues better and better sources of randomness over the yearsm because as most people know, random numbers in computers aren’t truly random. It’s kind of a take-off on quantum physics, where positions aren’t truly set. There are only probabilities that something is in a particular place. Which, if there’s anywhere god is going to operate in this universe, it would be there. So he waits for god to speak to him.

The Cost to Be Wise, Maureen F. McHugh

Set on another planet, which like the planet in The Flowers of Aulit Prison, has recently seen the return of its human forebears who lost touch with the planet years prior. While a anthropologist from earth is visiting, a neighboring tribe attacks.

Bicycle Repairman, Bruce Sterling

In the future, the world is covered by buildings. Several floors of one building have been firebombed, and squatters have taken up residence therein. One of them, an unlicensed bicycle repairman, received a package for an erstwhile roommate, a shady type who may or may not work in black ops for intelligence agencies. He opens the package, and it’s a cable box. It turns out to reveal the musings of the artificial intelligence program for a Senator. Only the A.I. is more or less running the senile senator. And his staff doesn’t want anyone to know, so they send in the cavalry to save their Senator and handle the repairman.

The Weighing of Ayre, Gregory Feeley

Set in old world Europe, this story chronicles an attempt by England to spy on Dutch lensmakers who have invented microscopes and make telescopes. England wants to see how these lenses can be used for war. Didn’t enjoy this one.

The Longer Voyage, Michael Cassutt

Mission is a space station. It’s original intent was to serve as an interstellar ship to explor Alpha Centauri, where SETI discovered signals 50 years prior. However, getting a Mission going is not easy to do, and most residents of the station have given up hope of ever leaving the solar system. Many do not want to even, particularly second generation residents.

The Land of Nod, Mike Resnick

One of my favorite authors write a Kirinyaga based tale about one of the original Kirinyaga settlers. Kirinyaga is a planet settled by expat Kenyans who want to return to the old ways of Africa. Only it turns out they can’t live without, and he exiles himself back to Earth and Kenya, which has become thoroughly modernized and which he self-righteously disdains. But a compatriot is the keeper of Ahmed, cloned from the D.N.A. of a famous elephant in the past. Thus the mundumugu hatches a plan to escape with the elephant.

Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland, Gwyneth Jones

Enacting out a rape fantasy in a world of virtual sex.

The Lady Vanishes, Charles Sheffield

A female scientist in the employ of a C.I.A.-like agency invents a technology that sort of creates invisibility. The cool thing about it is I’ve seen Slashdot articles within the last year on a prototype of what this story describes.

Chrysalis, Robert Reed

After a war decimates Earth, a starship leaves the solar system with the last surviving humans. Run by artificial intelligence, the ship travels for several million years around the galaxy, picking up new denizens as it occasionally passes by planets with sentient life and adding to it’s increasing bulk by mining various asteroids. Everything goes wrong though when they visit a world of ice and find Earth D.N.A.

The Wind Over the World, Steven Utley

A tunnel back in time to the past. Silurian times in fact. Sound something like Julian May’s Saga of the Pliocene Exile series? Yup, did to me too. Silurian time is before insects and even most plant life. Just centipedes. Only thing is, the person who travelled back in time with our protagonist didn’t make it.

Changes, William Barton

This unassuming story follows the life of Mark Severn. He’s a basic guy, but he’s always been interested in spaceflight and follows the various space launches. I liked this story because it wasn’t really about S.F. There’s precious little of it. Just a nice little bit of technology near the end that Mark Severn shares with his great grandson while watching a space launch from his home nearby in Florida.

Counting Cats in Zanzibar, Gene Wolfe

I didn’t really follow this story about a woman on the run from something. The company she’s on the run from sends one of the world few robots after her, and it is nearly indistinguishable from a human. She can tell though. Why she’s running and why they want her back and why she interacts with him the way she does, I never got.

How We Got in Town and Out Again, Jonathan Lethem

Lethem is this year’s new flavor, having recently made it big with The Fortress of Solitude. This short story is about carnies traveling from town to town in a post-apocalyptic America and a couple of street urchins that hook up with them for one town in order to each.

Dr. Tilmann’s Consultant: A Scientific Romance, Cherry Wilder (Cherry Barbara Grimm)

Rosalind is a servant for the Ostrova family, who has a schizophrenic son. The family takes refuge in a sanitorium/spa for the rich where the doctor attempts to cure the son. Rosalind falls in love with the doctor. On a return visit, the Doctor is mysteriously curing the mental patients, through the help of a strange Russian bear. But then the Great War breaks out, and they must all flee. On her last return five years later, the doctor remembers her well, but doesn’t remember how he cured the many patients. He has forgotten. But Rosalind remembers.

Schrödinger’s Dog, Damien Broderick

Schrödinger’s Cat describes a quantum experiment. In the experiment, a cat is placed in a box. An atomic particle is also placed in the box, along with a device that kills the cat. If the particle decays (which it has a 50% chance of doing), it sets off the device. The box is then closed and sealed. According to quantum physics, until you open the box, the cat is neither dead nor alive, and both dead and alive at the same time. It is the act of observing the cat that creates the actual outcome. Except according the Broderick, it’s not really a choice between dead or alive. The true experiment with a quantum effect could result in putting in a cat, and retrieving a dog. In the story, that principle is used to send humans to alternate universes, where history is subtly or not so subtly changed.

Foreign Devils, Walter Jon Williams

What if War of the Worlds was set in China.

In the MSOB, Stephen Baxter

The last of the space pioneers dies. I didn’t get this.

The Robot’s Twilight Companion, Tony Daniel

Daniel’s second story in this year’s collection, but I didn’t get it. A mining robot gains some form of consciousness. So far so good. It’s on a mission to bore to the center of the earth in the Olympic Peninsula which is the center of a war between the types from Ecotopia, and descendants of loggers. Why it’s boring down I don’t know. Why it’s attempting to protect certain people I don’t know. Maybe just a bit too different for my tastes.

Editor: Gardner Dozois
Title: The year’s best science fiction: fourteenth annual collection
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Format: Paperback
Length: xliv, 589 p.
Publication date: June 1997
ISBN-10: 0-312-15703-7