The middle of this anthology wasn’t particularly strong, but you can’t go wrong with something that includes Beggars in Spain. Gene Wars, Eyewall, and Desert Rain round out the top stories in the collection, at least according to me. As I’ve noted before, Dozois’ seeming obsession with naming authors as Big Names and Ones to Watch irritates me. While I think who writes a story is important, Dozois spends more ink in his intros on an author’s pedigree than on the story.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

I think this is the first time I’ve read a short story after reading the novel version. Kress set the standard for the trope I call human evolution: what happens when the next version of humans come along. The idea: genetic engineering allows us to create people who don’t need to sleep. The extra time and some beneficial side effects mean they are smarter and more balanced than normal humans. Who promptly start treating them like crap. Re-reading this is tough precisely because I’ve read so many stories that mimic Kress’.

Living Will by Alexander Jablokov

You are going senile. You know it. You want to off yourself before you get too far gone to be a burden. However, you don’t want to do it while you have some semblance of brain left. The dilemma is that once that semblance has left you, you are no longer capable of making the decision. Could you turn that decision over to someone else? Someone you trusted utterly? Good story.

A Just and Lasting Peace by Lois Tilton

Alternate history in which Reconstruction goes on a lot longer, and southern resistance goes on a lot longer. Rather than the north winning and eventually losing, they never really win. Not bad, but it didn’t impress me either.

Skinner’s Room by William Gibson

I don’t really understand why Dozois’ introduction says this story is about housing the homeless. In a future where cities are falling apart, the poor take over the Golden Gate bridge and build structures for themselves to live in. Nothing earth shattering. Pretty good style though, which sets a mood really well.

Prayers on the Wind by Walter Jon Williams

Sometimes it seems like people disaffected by monotheistic Christianity flock toward Eastern religions or philosophies. Although I don’t share Christopher Hitchens vehement language toward those religions, I do tend to agree on principle. If you can’t find evidence for it, it’s not true. Buddhism is one of those religions that falls into that category for me. If you want to believe it on faith, be my guest, but I need evidence. Reincarnation? Asceticism? Bah! Intentionally or unintentionally, this story fits in very much with my view. A future Buddhist-themed galactic empire runs into conflict with an alien race. But right when things come to a head, the empire’s version of the Dalai Lama dies and the new incarnation of Buddha changes things up a bit. To me, highlights how little sense soul reincarnation makes, as well as how despotic religion can be.

Blood Sisters by Greg Egan

When you do a double-blind test of a new drug, isn’t it kind of unfair (if the drug works) that the control group won’t be cured?

The Dark by Karen Joy Fowler

A dark fantasy/horror tale about a boy raised by wolves who ends up as a C.I.A. experiment. It didn’t do a whole lot for me.

Marnie by Ian R. Macleod

If you could go back to high school/college and do it all over again, would you? Here’s how that might happen.

A Tip on a Turtle by Robert Silverberg

What would it be like to actually have premonition? For the guy in this story who predicts who can win turtle races at a resort, it kinda sucks. Well-written, but I’ve seen this done better elsewhere.

Übermensch! by Kim Newman

A sorta alternative history story. It’s not really alternate to real history. Alternate to the Superman history. Instead of the spaceship from Krypton landing in a Kansas field, and Superman working to save the allies, he grows up in Germany and is a tool of the Nazis. Despite not being particularly fond of alternative history, I did like the story. Maybe because superheros from this kind of perspective are done so rarely (that I run across at least).

Dispatches from the Revolution by Pat Cadigan

Not fond of alternative history unless done really well. This one, not so well. What if… the right wing ascended in 1968?! Yeah, it happened in Germany. Perhaps it could have here. But it didn’t. And I’m not sure we really need another scare piece on what the right wing could do in America. I’m pretty sure we don’t need one at all.

Pipes by Robert Reed

An okay story about environmental restoration. Predicated on cheap food from offshore farms making midwest farming unnecessary.

Matter’s End by Gregory Benford

I did not like this story one little bit. A lot of melodrama about India hating scientists so much any scientist/Westerner will get beaten or killed. Westerner comes to secret Indian physics experiment that is measuring proton decay, which will determine the end of the universe. And then things really go to hell. Everything except the actual experiments felt false to me.

A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations by Kim Stanley Robinson

This seems more like a fictionalized travel essay than science fiction or fantasy. A lot more. Maybe I missed something. As travel writing, it seems pretty decent. I want to travel to the Orkney Islands now. As speculative fiction, it seems lacking.

Gene Wars by Paul J. McAuley

I really liked this story about genetic engineering. Not that it’s necessarily likely to happen. The story follows more along the lines of take something to it’s extreme to good effect.

The Gallery of His Dreams by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Interesting concept. Interesting writing. Interesting point. But for some reason I just didn’t get into the story. Mathew Brady, a photographer who sought to chronicle the horrors of war during the U.S. Civil War, went penniless from his efforts. The story has a time traveler whisking Brady to wars throughout time to use his skills and equipment to chronicle wars of all kinds. In the end, people view his work as art, not history. Good story, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood.

A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis

Good mundane-SF (at least by my estimation) story about rescuing a person from the surface of the moon. The walk in the sun refers to the fact that the castaway’s life support in her space suit is solar powered. She can’t let sundown catch up to her or her ability to breathe will shut off for 15 days (you try holding your breath that long!). So she has to walk ahead fast enough to stay in the moon’s daylight for a month (at least) until a rescue rocket can reach her from earth. Kind of like the premise of Stephen King’s The Long Walk; walk or die.

Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Ian McDonald

A Jew during and before World War II is visited by an angel? I think. I’m not really sure what her visions represent. Another story that didn’t resonate with me, but again probably more me than the story.

Angels in Love by Kathe Koja

A girl overhears her apartment neighbors having loud sex, and she wants some of it. Enough that she starts spying on the woman hoping to get a glimpse of her boyfriend, to see if she can horn in on the action. Nice to see a story about a hard-up undersexed loser being a woman instead of a pasty white geek boy for once. Anyhow, she never sees the man enter or leave the place, despite increasingly stalkerish behavior. What’s going on over there?

Eyewall by Rick Shelley

I loved this story. I have Shelley’s book Fires of Coventry which I really want to read now. Not technically a mundane SF story, but all the key parts of the story are. Basically, a category 5 hurricane leaves 20,000 dead in Florida and a million homeless. A hurricane study group must bow to political pressure. Instead of pure science research, they are supposed to conduct experiments using explosives (including nuclear) to disrupt the eye of a hurricane to get it to dissipate. They don’t like the applied research, and they don’t like using nuclear weapons, and they don’t like that their scientific existence depends on something they don’t like. The non-mundane part is that the experiments occur on a water covered world that has lots of hurricanes and is mostly untouched by human hands. The awesome part is the simmering conflict between the political guys and the original science people. Awesome tension and buildup.

Pogrom by James Patrick Kelly

Another story I liked. Near future story where the young are in conflict with a richer older generation. What I loved is the hypocrisy of the main character, an older woman, commenting on how the younger generation blames the entire older generation for the sins of a few.

The Moat by Greg Egan

Interesting but not compelling (gah! I just used compelling in a review!) idea about people who create their own alternate D.N.A. and why they might want to do so. Hint: it’s an us vs. them thing.

Voices by Jack Dann

Boy talks to the dead. Friend doesn’t believe him. Not inspiring.

FOAM by Brian W. Aldiss

FOAM stands for Free Of All Memory. Unscrupulous people steal other people’s memories to sell, kind of like drugs. Eh.

Jack by Connie Willis

I don’t usually like stories of this type. A type I won’t reveal here so as not to spoil the story, but also partially because the relevant word is never actually used in the pages. But I liked this one. Thought it was a novel take on the idea, and some of the things left unsaid intrigued me. For instance, how down and out would Jack have to be to resort to the kind of subterfuge he does?

La Macchina by Chris Beckett

Yet another version of robots gain awareness. Nothing about this screams best of the year to me, though I wouldn’t call it bad either.

One Perfect Morning, with Jackals by Mike Resnick

I like this story because of what a bastard Koriba Kimante (the elder) is, so beholden to his convictions that he cannot be a father.

Desert Rain by Mark L. Van Name and Pat Murphy

The miracle of artificial intelligence illustrates this story about one woman’s one person bubblehead validation brigade. A BVB is always a little more empty than you’ll think it will be. I’m not sure if this is my favorite story in the book or not. I guess it depends on how I think people relate to their BVBs. Most days, I don’t think most people get that a BVB is skin-deep. Those days I probably will like this story even more.

I kinda do want to know why this particular year is still in print. I bought this new from Amazon. New. It was published over 15 years ago and every other edition of the series older than a year or two has to be purchased used. So why this one?

Title: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover creator: Bob Eggleton (artist)
Series: Year’s Best Science Fiction; 9
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 575 p.
Publication date: 1992
ISBN-10: 0-312-07891-9

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

Could someone please tell me what’s happened to Mike Resnick? He used to write great adventure tales set in his Birthright universe. But in the last few years he’s started writing more and more crap. The Return of Santiago, The Outpost, and Starship: Mutiny were not good. Dragon America was better but still less than stellar. I just finished Starship: Pirate and it’ll be the last of this particular series that I’ll read. I’m not going to give up on Resnick just yet, but he’s quickly falling down the rungs.

Pirate continues the story of Wilson Cole, a brilliant officer in the navy of the galactic Republic. Back in Mutiny he pissed off one too many a bureaucrat landing him in the brig for insubordination. His crew busted him out and at the start of Pirate they’ve decided to become space pirates to support themselves. Only thing is, they don’t really know how to be pirates, so they are a bit clunky at first. Nevertheless, the crew of the Teddy Roosevelt successfully dispatches another pirate ship and steals its loot. It takes several tries, but they finally unload it.

The second half of the book begins when they meet a former pirate by the name of the Valkyrie who, while supposedly a good pirate, didn’t inspire much loyalty in hew crew. They ran off with her ship while she was sleeping off a drunk. In return for being taught how to be good pirates and other sundry details, the Teddy Roosevelt agrees to retake her former pirate ship for her.

The basic plot synopsis isn’t bad. The execution is. The bulk of the text is simply the characters arguing. Aren’t they supposed to be a disciplined former military crew? Cole dispenses with military rigmarole. No sirs for him. So his crew argues with him every time he opens his mouth. Mostly this is so Resnick can have him explain the utter perfection of his logic. Except for once in a while when Cole yells at people for questioning his orders. The way Resnick exposes this logic is just irritating. Even once it would be irritating. But it’s just the whole book.

Oh, and Cole is sleeping with his security officer. She constantly monitors all conversations aboard ship, interjecting in bodiless fashion frequently. At least a few times she yells at Cole for raising his voice, telling him she’s already listening in and doesn’t need a higher volume to be heard. How many times does Resnick need to do this? Though she and Cole aren’t in a committed relationship, she constantly bickers with him over the possibility he might sleep with someone else. She also frequently threatens to withhold the sexin’ but changes her mind when Cole calls her bluff. So very tiresome.

I could go on. But I think that last sentence in the previous paragraph sums up the entire novel. It’s just so very tiresome.

Title: Starship: pirate
Author: Mike Resnick
Imprint/Publisher: Pyr / Prometheus Books
Series: Starship ; 2
Publication Date: December 2006
Format: Hardcover
Length: 336 p., including six appendices and an author biography
ISBN-10: 1-59102-490-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-59102-490-3
Subject: Space ships — Fiction
Subject: Piracy — Fiction
LC Classification: PS3568.E698S737 2006

Dragon America looked like a more serious work by Mike Resnick because the cover has a nice painting rather than the typical Resnick pulp space opera artwork. I was wrong. It’s not part of his Birthright Universe books, but it is definitely an adventure tale. It doesn’t have the same qualities as Kirinyaga (the one serious Resnick work) though. And at first I thought it would be a fantasy work in the vein of Card‘s Tales of Alvin Maker. In reality it falls somewhere in the grey area between fantasy and science fiction, very similarly to Harrison’s West of Eden. It even starts off with a bit about how the America we know as reality is the subject of an alternative universe science fiction story, just as West of Eden also uses that device in it’s appendix.

This is an alternate history novel where the premise is that dragons are real. These aren’t the fanciful dragons of myth, but instead are another class of the chordate phylum, similar to reptiles. No dragons live in Eurasia or Africa. The separation of the New World by ocean has limited the spread of dragons to those continents. There are different varieties of them, from small flying dragonkin to large plodding herbivores with vestigial wings to ferocious raptor-like meat-eaters. Like mythical dragons, some defend themselves by breathing fire, mostly the herbivores. The carnivores use claws and teeth for fighting.

The alternate history is set in the time of the American revolution. George Washington’s army is badly outnumbered and slowly being defeated by Lord Cornwallis’ Redcoats. He turns to his friend Daniel Boone to go west to form an alliance with the native American tribes. Refused by his adopted Shawnee tribe, Boone would rather not return empty-handed. So Boone heads further west with a former slave and a Shawnee in search of legendary dragons the size of houses, hoping to find a way to use these animals to the revolutionaries’ advantage.

It’s an intriguing concept and for the most part very well executed. But I have a quibble. I always have a quibble, don’t I? Resnick’s dialogue kills me. Not only to his characters think aloud, they are always clearly able to see the hidden conclusions of various actions in an analytical god-like way. The former slave, Pompey, does not have the wilderness skills of the Shawnee or Daniel Boone. And so Boone and Gray Eagle (the Shawnee) insist on explaining things in a repetitive condescending manner despite noting that they have no skill similar to Pompey’s ability to understand new languages and it’s necessity in their journey across the land of multiple tribes. A typical exchange goes like this:

Boone

Well, let’s go up to these house-sized dragons and touch them.

Pompey

But they’re huge and will kill us.

Boone

Of course they won’t. All the signs point otherwise.

Pompey

How do you know that?

Boone

Because they are herbivores.

Pompey

And yet the herbivores can defeat many predators through that hideously huge flame from the mouth thing.

Boone

Obviously, they won’t use it on us.

Pompey

They used it on our Indian guide.

Boone

Of course they did, that’s because he went near the dragon cub.

I am possessed of superior knowledge of how software works, at least compared to many regular joes. And yet when I have to state a conclusion about someone’s messed up computer, my conversations never resemble anything like Resnick’s characters in this book (and for that matter in Starship: Mutiny). My conversation about why we could go up close to the dragons would explain the bulk of the description in just one exchange, because if I were Daniel Boone, I wouldn’t want to be an ass and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to drag out the conversation the way he does. Only a person who wants to appear very superior does it that way. I know, because I’ve done that once or twice with people who irritated me to put them back in their place. And yet there’s no reason to put Pompey back in his place in this novel.

But if you can get past that, it’s a fun, intriguing novel.

Title: Dragon America
Author: Mike Resnick
Imprint / publisher: Phobos Impact
Format: Paperback
Length: 258 p.
Publication date: July 2005
ISBN-10: 0-9720026-9-3
Subject: Washington, George, 1732-1799 — Fiction
Subject: Boone, Daniel, 1734-1820 — Fiction
Subject: Dragons — Fiction
Subject: United States — History — Revolution, 1775-1783 — Fiction
LC classification: PS3568.E698 D73 2005

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

It’s rare that I am disappointed by a Mike Resnick book. Resnick first and foremost tells stories. Along the way he occasionally has a moral. Starship: Mutiny is the first book in a five book series by Pyr a new S.F. imprint from Prometheus Books. New to me at least. The story is set in Resnick’s Birthright universe, toward the end of the Republic era. The protagonist is Wilson Cole, a hero in the Republic’s war against the Teroni alliance. While he’s a hero, it’s always been at the expense of the navy’s image and sometimes against orders. At the start of the book, he’s been demoted and exiled to the Teddy Roosevelt a decrepit ship with a crew no one wants. Theoretically, nothing should be happening in the sector the Teddy R. patrols, but inevitably, Cole discovers something. The captain and first officer are hostile to him, so he takes matters into his own hands, in the process defeating a Teroni incursion onto a Republic world. Things don’t go much differently on the second assignment either. Cole is constantly fighting the brass above the the dereliction of the men below. Resnick writes about larger than life characters. Wilson Cole has brilliant analytical capabilities and manages to turn every situation to his advantage. Unlike in other Resnick books, there aren’t a plethora of other larger than life character and that’s a bit of a change.

Title: Starship: mutiny
Author: Mike Resnick
Series: Starship ; 1
Imprint / publisher: Pyr / Perseus
Format: Hardcover
Length: 286 p.
Publication date: December 2005
ISBN-10: 1-59102-337-8
Subject: Space ships — Fiction
Subject: Mutiny — Fiction
LC classification: PS3568.E698 S735 2005

This is one of my favorite books of all time. After reading it I got hooked on Mike Resnick, even though (I.M.H.O.) none of his other books quite measures up to Santiago. It’s a space opera. In the far future, the Democracy runs the galaxy. It’s the government of Earth morphed several times as it has maintained control over most of known space and many alien races. It’s basically a huge bureaucracy, and for the most part it’s a benign, but rigid government. But it’s huge and it doesn’t really adjust well to individuals.

On the edges of their control, on the Outer Rim and Inner Frontier of the galaxy, the planets are somewhat like the wild west. Nominally subject to the Democracy, these planets are home to outlaws and fabulous characters. And this is where the story starts. Sebastian Nightingale Cain, otherwise known as The Songbird is a bounty hunter. The outlaw with the biggest price on his head is Santiago. Santiago’s vast criminal enterprise rakes in huge amounts of money, but insulates its leader very well. No one even knows where he lives.

But the Songbird gets a bread crumb of information, and decides to follow it to its source to collect the bounty. Oddly enough, there’s not a lot of action in the book. BIts and pieces, though when it happens it’s fun. Santiago is about the characters. Think of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill or Annie Oakley. All the characters are larger than life. Comparatively speaking, the characters in another Campbell hero tale, Star Wars are boring.

Our cast

Sebastian Nightingale Cain, The Songbird

He’s a former soldier who has killed thousands. Now he kills for money, but he really only goes after people he feels are truly criminals.

The Angel

Another bounty hunter, the Angel is the best. No one comes close to his record of bringing in criminals. But he’s recently moved in from the Outer Rim to the Inner Frontier in search of Santiago. Essentially he starts a rush among the trade to really get Santiago.

Virtue MacKenzie, The Virgin Queen

She’s a drinking swearing sleeping around reporter. She wants to interview Santiago, to be the first to ever report on him. It’s her ticket to fame and fortune.

The Jolly Swagman

He runs his own frontier world, which he finances mostly by dealing in stolen goods. Particularly art. He wants to get Santiago because of all the loot.

Father William

Father William is an itinerant revivalist preacher, wandering the worlds of the Inner Frontier preaching hellfire and redemption from tents and temporary grounds. And killing wanted criminal along the way.

Black Orpheus

Black Orpheus wanders the frontier, assembling a massive poem about the characters and people he meets along the way. Simple poetry really, but you measure your worth on the frontier by how many stanzas are devoted to you.

It’s a fast, but fun read. If there’s any moral to the story, it’s that even a benign government needs to be kept in check if it gets too large. Though it isn’t a lesson so much a theme that runs throughout the characters’ stories. And I will reveal one spoiler… someone finds Santiago. But which bounty hunter does? And does the bounty hunter turn him in for the money, or does Santiago get the best of him? Read to find out.

Author: Mike Resnick
Title: Santiago: a myth of the far future
Imprint / publisher: Tor
Format: Mass market paperback
Publication date: March 1986
Length: 376 p.
ISBN-10: 0-812-55112-5

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