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

Sorry for the extended time between books. Again, this blog isn’t abandoned. Sometimes it just takes me longer to read my books. Such as this one, which is 697 pages long, not counting Dozois’ year in review summary of 1995 at the beginning. Now, on to the stories:

A Woman’s Liberation, Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin returns to her Ekumen universe for a story of slaves on the planet Werel. The story meanders through Radosse Rakam’s life as her master dies, and his son frees his slaves. However, other nearby landowners don’t take too kindly to this and simply round up the former slaves and re-enslave them. After a daring escape, they become freedmen in the city, where the abolitionist groups meet and debate their future plans. The government cracks down, and again our heroine escapes to a former colony, freed from it’s slaveowners for a few years. Only there, she finds that she is just as enslaved by the men as she was on Werel. Frankly, this story just fell flat for me. The characters are pretty flat, and the feminist lesson being taught isn’t subtle, nor does it really provide a new take on freedom, for women or anyone. It’s just a pretty blunt re-hash of stuff you can read in other places and in other forms, but much less engaging.

Starship Day, Ian R. MacLeod

This little story is about a starship that has set out from Earth to a nearby star to look for life or a habitable planet. The day for when the starship will re-establish communications with Earth has been calculated, and everyone on Earth is eagerly awaiting Starship Day to find out if humans have made first contact. Still, not everyone is all that thrilled. One man even commits suicide. The reason is because of a little twist that is revealed at the end. Normally, I wouldn’t be too circumspect with spoilers for an 11 year old book, but if you do pick this up, this is a decent story and it’s better if you get to go into the twist blind at least once. (Thanks to Steve for the link to the story online.)

A Place with Shade, Robert Reed

I didn’t really get this story. A father hires a terraformer to teach his daughter how to terraform a cave system on his private planet. There’s some sort of fight going on between him and his daughter, who is an adult. Either she’s crazy, or he is. Anyway, the terraformer doesn’t realize all this, and gets caught in the middle. And then she’s attacking him with their terraformed cave, and I got lost.

Luminous, Greg Egan

Like Border Guards in a previously reviewed Year’s Best S.F., this is sort of a hard-S.F. story. The premise is that mathematics behaves somewhat like matter and energy. Until some sort of matter exercises a mathematical theorem, that theorem obeys Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. You don’t know what the truth of the theorem is. Keep in mind that proving some theorem implies that all related theorems are proven, so only the most esoteric mathematics can be unexercised. So, the protagonists look for undetermined mathematics and find them. Meanwhile, corporate raiders are trying to get their math so they can subvert randomness somehow. And as they explore the math, someone else is fighting them through other math somewhere.

The Promise of God, Michael F. Flynn

This seemed more like a fantasy story to me, with a nanny watching over a charge who possesses magic powers and eventually becoming his wife.

Death in the Promised Land, Pat Cadigan

In this imagined Earth, people spend more time in post-apocalyptic World-of-Warcraft style virtual realms, the most popular of which is one of New York City. These virtual realities are full on virtual reality. The story revolves around an aimless youth who is killed both in reality and in the simulation at the same time, and the police detective (a non-user of virtual reality) trying to determine who performed the murder. A few interesting bits, but overall not particularly exciting.

For White Hill, Joe Haldeman

Nice little story about earth in the future after/during a war with an alien race. The aliens poisoned Earth and made it uninhabitable. Afterward, humans find a counter and some begin to trickle back. An art contest is commissioned to celebrate Earth, and people from all over colonized worlds travel there to participate. Only while there the aliens poison the sun, causing it to age and begin it’s trajectory toward being a red giant on an accelerated pace. Everyone who can get off Earth does, but the artists are left behind. Some commit suicide. Others try to incorporate the impending demise of Earth into their art. And others simply try to go on with what they did planned before.

Some Like It Cold, John Kessel

A particularly short and not very novel story, but one that grabbed me nonetheless. Time travel has been invented and the entertainment industry makes huge use of it to bring back celebrities to start in new movies. Only sometimes they don’t always work out exactly like they should. But no matter, there are infinite moments in which someone can be stolen out of the past, so if the person doesn’t work out taken from one particular moment, they can be taken from another. Each grab creates a new universe, so nothing changes the timestream and there are lots of time traveling former celebrities around now. Including a shoe-shining Albert Einstein, who was presumably grabbed too young and doesn’t develop into a genius.

The Death of Captain Future, Allen Steele

Nice bit of a space western, populated with an interplanetary sailor stuck on a ship with a crazy captain who purchased his commission and thinks he’s Captain Future. A chance encounter with a plague ridden give Captain Future his chance at the glory he always wanted to fight off space pirates.

The Lincoln Train, Maureen F. McHugh

A short alternate history set during the civil war. What if John Wilkes Booth injured Lincoln so severely that he was incapacitated. Dire consequences follow, with Southerners rounded up and sent off to various camps. The popular rumor blames this all on Seward.

We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy, David Marusek

So far, my favorite story in this collection, and like the story Wedding Album shows a very interesting and novel future. Extended life, extreme integration with computers through nano-machines, living holographically, and a war with biological agents. Thereafter, militia computers known as slugs constantly sample human DNA for infection by rogue agents. Those not liquidated on the spot are seared, with their bodies altered so that any biological remnants of themselves self-destruct in small fiery poofs. Including things like semen and eyebrows. Which makes for interesting sex, though these people are avoided generally. The story is about Sam (a semi-famous artist/designer) and Eleanor (a powerful politician) who fall in love, move in together, and receive permission to have a child (in a very interesting fashion, of course). Marusek melds the hard and soft S.F. very well, making a very readable and intriguing story.

Radio Waves, Michael Swanwick

After death, ghosts travel the Earth via metallic objects such as telephone wires and metal conduits. Two ghosts meet and resolve issues from their lives, while chased by a ghost killer.

Wang’s Carpets, Greg Egan

Another what is alive? type S.F. story. In the future, humans discover primitive life on another world, carpet-like sheets of fungal sea-life. While not sentient, the carpets encode mathematics, wherein humans determine that the mathematics itself shows signs of sentient life. Are they alive and what does it mean for humans who have long since encoded themselves inside virtual worlds and no longer live corporeal existence.

Casting at Pegasus, Mary Rosenblum

Nifty story about a girl who sneaks into an abandoned airport to create temporary light sculptures. She’s accompanied by a tagger and chased by the night watchman. Until tragedy strikes and they fall through a rotted floor, when she finds out the night watchman isn’t just faceless. The S.F. element here is pretty small, and frankly I think this would work better as a completely mainstream story, but it’s still modestly nice.

Looking for Kelly Dahl, Dan Simmons

A former teacher is transported through the past and future by a former student, Kelly Dahl. These worlds are devoid of all people except the two of them, and Kelly wants him to kill her to exorcise both their demons.

Think Like a Dinosaur, James Patrick Kelly

Humans meet another species. Other species has very advanced technology, including a method of transporting matter (including life) across light-years of distance. Like the transporters of Star Trek, humans are encoded, the information is transmitted and the people are reconstructed on the far side. But what do you do with the person who still remains on this side? It’s not like the matter is consumed, so now you have two of the same person!

Coming of Age in Karhide, Ursula K. Le Guin

This felt like filler to me. As in, I must explain every piece of Karhide. I wasn’t moved much by the story.

Genesis, Poul Anderson

I read like 5 pages of this and skipped on.

Feigenbaum Number, Nancy Kress

This story is about a guy who can see both real people and the ideal person they could be. It’s depressing and disorienting to him. And then he meets another person who can see the same ideal people.

Home, Geoff Ryman

Ryman has written a very twisted near-future story where life isn’t valued so much. Kind of a picture of social darwinism if it were taken up by the public as a defining philosophy and taken to it’s logical end. Ryman captures the fatal flaw of social darwinism, that unlike actual evolution, it isn’t the most adept or adaptable that are selected for necessarily. It could be the useless who survive, and the human race easily paints itself into a social darwinist corner.

There Are No Dead, Terry Bisson

I loved this story about three men who create a fantasy world for themselves in the woods in their youth. Over the years, the live their lives and continue to reunite for yearly camping trips. Yes, there is an S.F. element, but it’s not the fantasy world they create for themselves.

Recording Angel, Paul J. McAuley

This is the story of a human, who goes by Angel, who returns as part of a crew that explored other galaxies. It’s millions of years from when she left the Milky Way because of time dilation and humanity has become different. In fact, humanity’s descendants have been genetically programmed to render assistance to the Preservers (original humanity) should they re-appear.

Elvis Bearpaw’s Luck, William Sanders

If you go to William Sanders’ web site through the link above, you’ll figure out he’s kind of cantankerous. That shows in this story about Native Americans after wars have decimated black and white people, leaving Indians and their descendants populating North America. They cling to their traditions, but something has been lost a bit. Our narrator is a youth who squires his elderly blind cantankerous grandfather around. The setting is the upcoming Games which attract nearby tribes to participate, and there is a traditional truce during Game-time. A lot of the elements have been used before, but Sanders puts them together in an inventive way, and I laughed out loud (which I rarely do) at the commencement of the big Game. It fits so well with contemporary Indian reservations but is totally at odds with the stereotypical white views of Indians. You expect the noble Indians to have noble games, and this is definitely not that.

Mortimer Gray’s History of Death, Brian Stableford

Kind of an exploration of the theory that what makes us human is our fight against death, as seen through the eyes of a future historian of death. Others will probably find this to be more profound than I did.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: thirteenth annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Series: The year’s best science fiction ; 13
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: lxiii, 704 p.
Publication date: 1996
ISBN-10: 0-312-14451-2

Since I mentioned the book in my review of Swanwick’s story in the Year’s Best SF 17, here is a repost of a review I wrote in 2003 for Bones of the Earth over in my personal blog.

The third book I read in New Zealand is a time-travel book by Michael Swanwick. This is the first time I’ve ever read a novel by Swanwick, though I might have read a short story or two from his pen. The story is a little bit hard SF and a little bit SF farce. The plot is basically this, what if someone in the future invented time travel, then brought the technology back to the human race of the early 21st century. While most time travel novels spend a lot of time avoiding causality issues, Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth revels in the contradictions inherent in the idea. The main characters bounce around in time so much that they simply leave memos for their other selves to pick up to carry out actions in the past or future.

Paleontology becomes the centerpiece of the story. The project for which time travel is used is a series of camps scattered throughout the timeline of the dinosaurs. Except there is a saboteur in the midst of the project. The saboteur strands a group in the Jurassic era. No problem, by the standards of the book, and plenty of time to figure out what to do. Because you can manipulate time at will almost, simply go back in time 10 minutes after they are stranded. You have all the world in time to set it up. Or simply go back in time to ten minutes before the sabotage, and prevent it from happening.

It’s a lovely concept, and Swanwick runs amok with it because he doesn’t care about the contradictions. He’s messing with the subgenre of time travel.

This is one of the few books I’ve read recently that had a crappy plot (outside the time travel contradictions) and only average character development that I still liked. Simply because he messes with the time travel idiom so well.

Title: Bones of the earth
Author: Michael Swanwick
Imprint / publisher: HarperTorch / HarperCollins
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 383 p.
Publication date: February 2003
ISBN-10: 0-380-81289-4
Subject: Dinosaurs — Fiction
LC classification: PS3569.W28 B66 2002

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

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