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

I apologize for the delay in posting this. I’ve been reading this collection for a couple of weeks and finally finished it on a short cruise this week. However, I wasn’t about to pay the rates that Celebrity wanted to use the internet on their ships, so I waited until I returned to finish the review.

As I’ve written before, I think Gardner Dozois puts out great collections of S.F. This is probably the only anthology series I will ever collect. I only have seven of them, but I poke in the used bookstores in Seattle quite regularly to see if any more ever pop up.

On to the stories:

The Wedding Album, David Marusek

I loved this inventive story. The concept is that current picture albums will be replaced by holograms and simulations of events. Rather than posing for photos, a bride and groom will pose for a holographic simulation. In the story, these are not just reproductions of the event, but the technology endows the holographic entities with their own artificial intelligence. They think for themselves, but start with memories from the originals up to the point where the hologram was taken. The story accomplished two things for me. First, it explores how new technology will change our lives in little ways. Many science fiction stories focus on space travel and vast computer networks and the like. This one highlights just a little small change in how our lives could change. And in a very believable way. John Crowley’s Snow explores a similar way we could record our lives. But that story doesn’t seem to describe what I would think would be a realistic way people would use a technology. This does. The second idea The Wedding Album explores is that of artificial intelligence. It’s not new ground, but the effect is new. It’s written from the A.I.s point of view. Imagine being turned on and off at will by a being that also has the power to reset your memories back to square one. Would you be upset to discover you were re-incarnated but that all record of your previous life were erased from your memory? Doomed to re-enact scenes over and over with severe limitations on your free will. Marusek also gives the first credible take that I’ve seen on having self-awareness without complete free will.

10¹⁶ to 1, James Patrick Kelly

In this story, James Patrick Kelly explores a scenario where a time-traveler set to change the future (by assassinating John F. Kennedy) fails prior to the consummation of his plot, and enlists the aid of a child. Will Ray Beaumont go through with it?

Winemaster, Robert Reed

Julian Winemaster gave up his body for a virtual reality ages ago. His daughter was diagnosed with an incurable disease and opted to give up her body. Winemaster felt like he needed to do the same to support her. I suppose kind of like shaving heads today when a friend undergoes chemo. Only she didn’t really need him there with her, and they drifted apart. Now, the U.S. government has sabotaged a nest housing millions of nanomachines that comprised the minds of the virtual reality people. Government policy makes them illegal except in closely guarded nests, and these nests are barely tolerated. Now, the survivors are on the run. They’ve constructed a body so Winemaster can drive them north to Canada. Yes, even in alternate realities Canada is still more inclusive than the U.S. WInemaster is transporting the survivors north, but he is tailed by a man who appears to be a government agent. He offers to help. Do the virtual minds accept the help or is it a trap to destroy the rest of them? I didn’t find much in the way of a moral or new intriguing ideas to ponder, but the story is good to read on the plot alone. It’s a well constructed mileau, and Reed pays attention to the details.

Galactic North, Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds’ story was just there for me. It didn’t repulse me, but it didn’t really excite me either. The plot follows Irravel and Markarian throughout time as Irravel chases Markarian for betraying a mission during a pirate attack in deep space. She wants to retrieve 200 people kept in deep sleep on Markarian’s ship that the two of them were originally transporting. The pirate enslaved Markarian during the attack, but in the course of the story he seems to disappear. Now, it’s important to realize that this takes place over the course of 10,000 years (or more) as the characters are mostly travelling at relativistic speeds, their lives lengthened by technology and time dilution. Oh, and they are also witness to a technology that destroys worlds in the galaxy, slowly converting all known civilizations to greenhouses of plants. Some things about the story just didn’t work. For instance, Reynolds leaves out key chunks that would explain some of their behavior. Sometimes, it’s good to let actions speak for themselves, and sometimes it needs good exposition of reasons. This is one of the latter situations. The little I can tell about the reasons for the chase, long after these people have no rational animosity, completely baffled be.

Dapple: A Hwarhath Historical Romance, Eleanor Arnason

Dapple is the story of a woman in the Hwarhath society, where women are forbidden to perform certain jobs. One of them being an actor. Helwar Ahl’s (a.k.a. Dapple) family apprentices her to a sailor. After several years as a sailor, she sneaks off the ship to apprentice herself to a lowly acting troupe. Set upon by bandits, she must fend for herself and face her desire to break the prescribed ways, and force those around her to face her desires as well. Fairly typical feminist bent to this story, but thankfully it doesn’t have the anti-male everything would be all right if women just ran things feel. Women more or less run things on Hwarhath. They aren’t supreme, but in the grand scheme they make a few more of the decisions and are just as bound by tradition and stereotype as males are. I didn’t think this was particularly deep, but it was a decent read.

People Came From Earth, Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is one of a new wave of hard SF authors. Hard SF meaning they focus on the science and technology, extrapolating out the ideas based on a concept rather than use the freedom of SF to construct interesting conjectures and explore them. People Came From Earth is set on the moon. After a war between Earth and the Moon for the Moon’s independence, Earth released nanotechnology onto the Moon that destroyed all metal constructions. Basically, they set back the moon to the middle ages. The Moon being metal poor, the current residents are extracting every bit of metal they can to restore their technology base, but are making slow progress and may not be in time to save themselves from losing their atmosphere to lack of gravity or their bodies from poisoning. Earth apparently has no intelligent life.

Green Tea, Richard Wadholm

I gave up on this story about halfway through because it was very confusing. From what I can gather, the main character is offering tea to a gentleman he is about to kill for revenge. He then goes into his monologue, the story of why he’s going to kill the person. This person caused some sort of catastrophe on the ship on which the protagonist worked. Most of the monologue is about the catastrophe, and it involves all sorts of advanced technology all given fancy sounding hard-SF kings of names.

The Dragon of Pripyat, Karl Schroeder

In the future, there’s been a second accident at Chernobyl. Afterward, the entire area is sealed off and a non-profit trust is given the money and power to monitor the site. Except they aren’t given a lot of money. Someone is threatening to bomb or otherwise release the radioactivity inside the sarcophagus. And they demonstrate that they have the power to do so. The trust hires Gennady to investigate. He’s a private investigator, willing to take on a risky proposition in order to make serious money. Later, he’s re-hired to pilot a remote robot to get close enough to disrupt the plot. Only the robot only has a couple of miles radius for it’s remote. He beings the robot in and pilots it, while also setting up a relay so it can be operated from greater distances. But the plotters have other plans and destroy the relay with a missile, leaving Gennady as the only person who can pilot the robot. Really, not that hard of a SF story. The technology is limited and the speculation about the future is pretty reserved. What the story is about is Gennady. He’s shy and wants the money so he can disappear into the net, where he feels most comfortable, where he can be who he wants to be and doesn’t have to face people in person. Through the events at Chernobyl, he has to face himself and the fear inside him.

Written in Blood, Chris Lawson

I didn’t like this story much because there really isn’t much too it. Someone invents a technology that allows viruses to embed messages in unused sections of our DNA, so an enterprising Muslim uses it to embed the Quran in the blood of the faithful. Thus meaning it is heretical to spill their blood. More just a quick sketch than anything else, and it felt to me like it should be developed more.

Hatching the Phoenix, Frederik Pohl

This nice story interspersed the story of a rich woman looking for purpose in her life with the exploration of the Crab Nebula (a project she’s funded). How they do this is by taking a space ship out past the front of the light wave of the supernova that formed the nebula. They set up a giant mirror and watch a planet in that sun’s system, and discover a civilization that is about the be destroyed by the nebula. Since it happened thousands of years prior, all they can be is observers. As the mirror is constructed, the researchers can get better and more detailed pictures of the planet. What they discover there is that the civilization, much like human civilization, wars with itself.

Suicide Coast, M. John Harrison

At first Suicide Coast appears to be a cautionary tale about becoming so integrated with computers that a person loses touch with the real world. The main character is a writer (as best as I can tell) who writes about adrenaline junkies. The second character is a rock climber and adrenaline junkie. It becomes apparent about midway through the story that he’s had an accident at some point as is now paraplegic. He turns to computer games, and slowly becomes unable to separate himself. But then at the end, Harrison turns it all around on the reader. I liked this. Harrison is hard for me to read. I have two of his books that I purchased after reading a laudatory bit from China Mié about Harrison, but I didn’t get very far in them before I put them aside for reading later. I liked what I read, but Harrison’s style is more opaque than some, and it took more work reading it than I cared to do at the time. Now that I’ve got more time on my hands and after liking this story, perhaps I’ll pick them up again.

Hunting Mother, Sage Walker

This little story is about life on a colony ship of some sort. The prospective colonists have brought animals along much like Noah’s Ark. They’ve also genetically engineered some crosses between species, including between humans and animals. Since it’s a long voyage, some of the animals have to be culled, since there aren’t natural predators (with natural contact with prey at least). The story is all about a human/animal person who is in charge of culling animals. He must contemplate culling his own mother as her life is nearing its end.

Mount Olympus, Ben Bova

This is a man against the elements story, where the men and elements are on Mars. Two men on a manned mission to mars fly a specially built craft to the top of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. After rappelling down the inside of the crater a few yards, an accident strands one of the explorers inside a lava tube with no power. The other explorer must save him. I kind of liked this, despite only a limited amount of science fiction involved.

Border Guards, Greg Egan

This surreal story takes place in a future where humans live in other dimensions or in computers (I’m not sure which exactly), solving problems of resource scarcity and life expectancy. A lot of the story is about a game of quantum soccer, which I didn’t really understand. Follow the link for more information and a Java applet that lets you play. The story is mostly about Jamil and Margit. Margit is one of the inventors of the space in which everyone lives, but she has seen people die and is traumatized by it. Few people see that anymore. The story felt flat to me. Nice ideas, but no real story and the characters were hard to get into.

Scherzo with Tyrannosaur, Michael Swanwick

Swanwick had an interesting, but largely empty novel about time travel called Bones of the Earth. I liked that novel overall despite a lot of flaws. Scherzo is placed in the same setting as Bones. Basically, at a high society fund-raiser for the time travel project the main event is the viewing of a tyrannosaur through a safe window. While the project takes a lot of effort to protect the timeline from paradoxes, the project leaders break their own rules frequently. One of the table captains asks to be excused, as a woman at the table hitting on him doesn’t know he’s actually her son (from the future). So the project director sends him off and replaces him, to disastrous results.

A Hero of the Empire, Robert Silverberg

I liked this little alternate history of the Roman Empire, where the Roman Empire never fell. It’s divided between east and west in an uncertain coexistence. The protagonist, Corbulo, is exiled to the Arabian peninsula to represent the western emperor. He looks for a way to get back in the emperor’s good graces and locks onto a charismatic Arab named Mahmoud as his ticket. Mahmoud professes a belief in one god, the same god as the Hebrews. Yes, he’s Islam’s Mohamed and he’s beginning his conversion the Arabs to Islam. Only Corbulo sees the danger and sees his way to get back to Rome.

How We Lost The Moon, A True Story By Frank W. Allen, Paul J. McAuley

This moon story is much better than the previous moon story in the collection. Here, a significant mistake releases a small black hole into the moon, triggering massive catastrophic changes on the just beginning to be settled body. So bad that eventually the moon is consumed. A little bit of hard science fiction, and a little bit of first-person story-telling from the character at the heart of the experiment that went awry.

Phallicide, Charles Sheffield

Normally, it seems like Sheffield writes a lot of hard S.F. This one is not really in that sub-genre. Rachel is a bright woman raised in the polygamous community of Bryceville, Utah. Needing money, the Blessed Order sends Rachel off to be educated and work for Tilden, Inc. where, among other things, she is designing a drug to cure the Blessed Order’s senile 90-plus year old patriarch of his impotence. However, her time away from the Order has awakened her to its reality and she’s devising a plan to release her daughter from their clutches. This is complicated though by the strict roles that women play in the Order and by their use of truth serums that she’s developed on herself.

Daddy’s World Walter Jon Williams

This is a cool short story about a child growing up in cyberspace, literally. A university researcher has his son’s brain scanned before he dies and implants the scan in a programmed world on a university computer. The little cyberspace world where the main character Jamie grows up exists entirely in this computer. And so it can be as fantastic as a child would dream. Not that he dreams and programs it (at least not at first), but his father certainly does. Williams pays attention to lots of details, such as a common thing in universities where resources have to be shared, so Jamie only runs part-time, and his sister in real life grows up in real time. So in her brief forays into the imaginary world she ages faster than him. And she shows typical teenage rebellion and tells Jamie that he’s not a real boy anymore.

A Martian Romance, Kim Stanley Robinson

This is a sequel to the story Green Mars, which appears in the third annual collection. I thought that story was good reading for a single read. This one isn’t so much. Now some of the characters from that story as ice-boating on Mars. Terraforming seems to have failed, and all the water on the surface of Mars has pretty much frozen. Didn’t like this at all.

The Sky-Green Blues, Tanith Lee

On an alien world undergoing civil war, a journalist finds out that she is a figment of the imagination of the author she is interviewing. Eh. Wasn’t very compelling to me.

Exchange Rate, Hal Clement

Here, explorers on world halfway across the galaxy encounter an alien intelligence. It’s typical first-contact we-don’t-understand-each-other stuff, but very well executed. A pretty good read.

Everywhere, Geoff Ryman

This one is a big Huh??! to me. Way over my head. Did not get it at all.

Hothouse Flowers, Mike Resnick

What would the quality of life be if we could effectively live forever? Most S.F. stories that deal with immortality assume we also get to stay young and alert as well. But what if you can keep people alive but you can’t reverse aging or senility? In the world of Hothouse Flowers we’ve reached that point, and society also believes the adage that all life is worth keeping. Resnick takes the concept to its absurd ends.

Evermore, Sean Williams

Evermore explores a facet of awareness without true free will. Cyber-people on a probe crossing the galaxy that has an accident and veers off course. Deprived of their original purpose and constrained by their programming, many simply slow themselves down and live in their own little worlds where they don’t have to think much. Their creator, also a presence on the probe, figure out a way to expand their programming so they can learn and grow. Doing so raises the possibility of repairing the probe, but also disturbs the slacker utopia they’ve programmatically built for themselves.

Of Scorned Women and Causal Loops, Robert Grossbach

Grossbach writes an interesting (though I’m sure not completely novel) theory on time travel. The theory is: since moving through space takes time, it should be possible to travel back in time by moving through space. In other words, if a person move far enough away in space, there’s no possibility of getting back to the original spot in time before leaving. Thus, there is not possibility of a time paradox. Now, the discoverer of time travel doesn’t realize this principle, but one of his researchers does. He belittles his researcher when she can’t prove her assertion. But when he expands the time travel field to attempt time travel himself by going back in time a significant amount, he discovers the space component the hard way. Fun story. Of course, scientists that experiment on themselves should always suffer greatly, if you have read any amount of S.F.

Son Observe The Time, Kage Baker

This is a story of The Company, the future enterprise that runs time travel and creates a race of immortal cyborgs who rescue priceless things to make The Company money. So long as they don’t change recorded history, they can do whatever they want. Very blah to me, this story. Basically, a Company operative runs into a renegade operative who implants the idea that the recorded history which is taught them could be faked.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: seventeenth annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Series: Yhe year’s best science fiction ; 17
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin / St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: liii, 625 p.
Publication date: July 2000
ISBN-10: 0-312-26417-8
LC classification: PS648.S3 Y43

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