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

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

Since I like reading the annual Year’s Best S.F. collection put out by Gardner Dozois and St. Martin’s Press, I figured it would be worth the effort to try St. Martin’s companion series covering fantasy and horror fiction. I thought that I might like it better than I do other fantasy, since I’m generally not a fan of Tolkien derivatives. Perhaps the short form would lead to experimentation and something more interesting to me. And it seems, it does lead to more experimentation. Unfortunately, not of the kind I like. Most of the works in this collection were just too confusing for me. However, toward the end, particularly with the horror stories, the collection became a lot stronger. Some of the stories are simply amazing. But overall I didn’t like it as much as I like the S.F. series. This isn’t to say it’s bad. Sometimes I think fiction is just awful. This could be considered good if I understood it, or I was into this kind of deliberately obfuscating fiction.

But on to the stories…

Death is Different, Lisa Goldstein

I suppose these sorts of stories weren’t all over the place in the 1980s, so it was a bit more unusual. By these sorts of stories I mean stories that mix fantasy and reality. I generally like such stories over what’s called high fantasy. But this one fell flat with me. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t seem very imaginative. Monica Schwartz is a journalist, sent to cover travel stories in the city of Amaz where people speak Lurqazi and a Communist rebel leader called Cumaq is fighting a war against the government, possibly with the help of the Russians. She secretly hopes to cover something of the geo-political story, and tries to get an interview with Cumaq. And succeeds, despite the fact that he is killed within her first 24 hours in the city. See, in this country, death is different. Not that she can prove he’s alive, or find him again. That would be too easy. So she returns home empty-handed. But when she does, she finds her husband has died in an accident, and she hurriedly tries to return to Amaz. Only she can’t. The trick to anything in Amaz, I guess, is that you can’t look for what you are seeking. One has to just stumble on it or something.

The Tale of the Rose and the Nightingale (and What Came of It), Gene Wolfe

This isn’t the usual swords and sorcery high fantasy story. It’s set in Egypt, with a combination of Muslim imagery and Egyptian gods. Ali is a street urchin taken by a storyteller’s tale of a bird in love with a rose bush. Another old man listening to the story says the tale is true, so Ali accompanies the storyteller and the old man to see the rose bush. Only the old man and the storyteller have lured Ali into a scheme to get him to bring them a magical rose from the rose bush. But when Ali gets to the bush (in a walled garden of the local ruler), stuff gets all wonky and I had a hard time following it. There’s a girl Zandra, and the two of them are transformed, but I don’t know if it was revealing something they had always been, or turned them into the ancient people of the story, or what. And there’s an alligator god and Ali becomes a pasha and the tables are turned on the storyteller and the old man. Or something.

It Was the Heat / Pat Cadigan

A horror story set in New Orleans. A 35 year old woman on her first business trip encounters a wild boy who leads her astray. Everything is too hot for her, but then the heat gets into her when she’s with the wild boy. Afterward the air conditioning bothers her and she craves the heat. She can’t go back to being who she was before, because the heat’s gotten into her.

The Cutter / Edward Bryant

A former Hollywood editor now owns a movie theater where he re-edits the movies he shows to make them better. Also, he pines for the local barfly/slut, who won’t give him the time of day because he’s older. But for some reason on her birthday she agree to meet him in his theater office, but unbeknownst to him, she is bringing along her current boyfriend. They start to have sex so that the theater owner will walk in on them, and he doesn’t like it when he does. He gets angry. But I don’t get the connection to his being a film editor, a cutter. It seemed tenuous at best.

Voices of the Kill, Thomas M. Disch

William Logan Pierce rents a cabin on Pine Kill Road for the summer. He’s a teacher, so he has the entire summer off. He intends to relax, and wade in the Pine Kill stream, and maybe do some hiking. But the Pine Kill begins to speak to him at night. Water nymphs. I thought this was a nice modern take on water spirits. This takes one of the tropes of high fantasy and places it in a modern context. It was kind of sweet and kind of creepy at the same time.

Secretly, Ruth Roston

Poem about giants. Eh.

The Devil’s Rose, Tanith Lee

Mikhal Mikhalson gets stuck in a small town in eastern Europe when snow blocks the railroads. While there, he becomes intrigued by the young lady Mardya Lindensouth, who he sees stealing away from a church. He begins a brief and torrid affair with the young Ms. Lindensouth who is just as intrigued by Mikhalson. This was a great story, though how it is horror I missed. Maybe there was some bewitching going on that I just missed.

Wempires, Daniel Pinkwater

Though this was first published in OMNI Magazine, I believe the text of this story is the same as that published in Wempires. Jonathan dresses up and pretends to be a vampire because he thinks they are cool. And then they visit and he learns what they are really like! This is an awesome story. If you find a copy of the illustrated book somewhere (it’s out of print), grab it to read to your kids.

Scatter My Ashes, Greg Egan

A photographer has a fascination with a serial child murderer, and it has dulled his sense of responsibility.

Unfinished Portrait of the King of Pain by Van Gogh, Ian McDonald

A re-imagining of Van Gogh’s madness from a fantasy perspective. I didn’t find this too engaging, except for the idea of how Van Gogh might have been able to cut off his ear. Rather than feeling pain, he’s been granted the gift of seeing color instead of pain. Bursts of wild colors, which he can then paint. Of course, there’s a drawback to feeling no pain.

Shoo Fly, Richard Matheson

Don’t let things get to you. Or find out the hard way like Roy Pressman as a fly in his office gets under his skin and he just has to kill it before he can do anything else.

The Thing Itself, Michael Blumlein

A love story about Laurie and Elliot. Elliot has cystic fibrosis, but he’s also visited by magical beings. Who don’t really do much.

The Soft Whisper of Midnight Snow, Charles de Lint

Tomi Douglas’s husband leaves her with no warning. She doesn’t adjust well to being alone. She starts seeing a figure watching her from the snow at her cabin in the woods. Until one day on her way home from town her Jeep skids off the road into a snowbank. Collapsing in the road while attempting to get home, her vision becomes real.

Roman Games, Anne Gay

Interesting tale of Sister Tom, on a train from the Vatican back to her home country of Ireland. She’s not exactly sure of the strength of her belief, and a dragon appears to take advantage of her weakness. Can Sister Tom save the imperiled mother? I’m ambivalent about this story. It’s well-written, but I’m already tired of the maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not theme to a lot of the stories so far.

The Princess, the Cat, and the Unicorn, Patricia C. Wrede

Children’s fantasy about a princess who sets off to seek her fortune, primarily because the king’s counselors think she’s not behaving like a proper princess. She’s accompanied by a cat, who turns out to be an enchanted prince. Love prevails. Blah blah blah. Thought this was boring.

The Book and Its Contents, Robert Kelly

Interesting, yet unfulfilling story about a country town doctor who is a little weird. He has (or is writing, I’m not really clear) a book that is all about language and words. And then the words come to life. Or something like that.

The Great God Pan, M. John Harrison

I’ve tried to read Things That Never Happen and Light based on China Miéville’s recommendation of M. John Harrison. Yeah, I just get lost. I didn’t get quite as lost with this story, but I am still in over my head. Something about something the characters did in the 1960s and now visions and demons are after them. Or something. I’m beginning to think that short form fantasy really isn’t my thing.

Lost Bodies, Ian Watson

While at their cottage in the country, four people come across a bodyless fox. Also, they play poker and it ends up getting naughty. Do these authors try to make their writing inscrutable on purpose?

Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds, Dan Simmons

Roger Colvin works for a NASA subcontractor. He feels incredibly guilty because liked the prospect of a Vice President position in his company more than he liked his principles. So he approved changing the O-ring parameters for the space shuttle Challenger. Now a two minute forty-five second fall haunts him.

Preflash, John M. Ford

Because of trauma, Griffin has double vision. He can see normally, but he also see visions of people’s deaths in his left eye. Except for a few people like super-celebrity and singer Suzy Lodi.

Life of Buddha, Lucius Shepard

Feeling guilty over how his life led his mother to worry herself to death, and his wife to commit suicide, Richard Damon (a.k.a. Buddha) numbs himself into oblivion in a crack house in Detroit. His only real interaction is with Taboo, a pre-op transsexual with whom Buddha establishes a loose friendship. Taboo has the magical power to remove warts. Taboo also has the hots for Buddha, but he can ignore that because Taboo has drugs as well as wart-removal power. And then everything goes to hell. For once, I got the story. And even liked it!

Appointment with Eddie, Charles Beaumont

Shecky King is the biggest entertainer in the world, but until Eddie the barber decides he likes him well enough to give him an appointment, Shecky feels like he’s a failure.

Fragments of Papyrus from the Temple of the Older Gods, William Kotzwinkle

A dead Pharaoh finds himself on the wrong boat on his journey to the afterlife. See, Pharaohs are supposed to have their own golden craft. This one finds himself on the boat of his chief praiser. The praiser’s wife is a little ticked too; she didn’t appreciate being summarily tossed into the Pharaoh’s tomb on his death.

Spillage, Nancy Kress

A coachman is flung from a coach in an accident. I think he dies, but it’s hard for me to tell what the hell is going on. I’m getting pretty tired of this in these stories. Seriously, is it that hard to make it clear what the hell is going on in a fantasy story?

Snowman, Charles L. Grant

Harry helps a lost woman in Leicester Square during a snowstorm. Everything becomes quiet, people and the crowds disappear. The woman thinks she has died and she’s in the afterlife. But she’s not. Harry is hoping she’s the love of his life that he’s been waiting for.

The Scar, Dennis Etchison

A woman, her daughter, and a man walk the highway into a small town. But there’s something a little off about the man. A little too on edge. And then the busboy takes his plate and he goes just a little berserk. An okay story though by the standards of this anthology I love it.

Laiken Langstrand, Gwyneth Jones

The king of a destroyed land becomes obsessed with finding the last object that is part of his kingdom, a fishhook. He’s drawn to a beach where everything lost in the sea legendarily returns to be eventually found. He never finds his fishhook on the beach, but he strikes up a relationship with the girl in the next hut over. Turns out she’s a banished sea creature, the daughter of the sea serpent that destroyed his kingdom. Finally! A fantasy story that I thought was interesting and one that I could follow! Awesome!

The Last Poem about the Snow Queen and Pinocchio, Sandra M. Gilbert

Pinocchio, Sandra M. Gilbert

If I don’t get the obtuse fiction that comprises most of this anthology, I’m really not going to get poetry. I’m not against poetry. It’s just mostly over my head. In my collection of 1200+ (and growing) books, only two are of poetry. Just not my thing. So I’ll skip commenting on these two poems.

Game in the Pope’s Head, Gene Wolfe

Please re-read the comments I’ve made about several other stories and make like I made them about this story too.

Playing the Game, Ramsey Campbell

Loved this story! All sorts of dread induced! Hill is a newspaper reporter for a local newspaper in a washed up town. He gets information that a former carny (Matta) has set up as a healer in the run-down and nearly abandoned docks on the river, docks that boats can’t even reach anymore. Hill actually ran into Matta as a child, and came out of the experience worse for the wear. So he has a vendetta to expose Matta. His editor says Hill can’t do investigative work, so he heads out after work with the intention of selling the story elsewhere. But he knows Matta is up to something in the docks, drug smuggling perhaps. Of course, after work is after dark, and the alleyways between the abandoned warehouses are forbidding. He finds Matta though. Matta knows immediately that Hill is there to expose him, so Matta sends Hill on his way. On his way out, he can see Matta’s assistant giving him some kind of game to play. Just awesome! Campbell doesn’t tell you everything, but enough that I wasn’t confused as to what the hell was going on. Enough to follow the story, but not enough as well, so I got a good feeling of dread.

Faces, F. Paul Wilson

Though a bit heavy on the bad parents make monsters of children shtick, this is still a great story. Kevin Harrison is the detective working on the Facelift Killer case. Seven good looking young women are found, mutilated with their faces chewed off. Standing at the scene of the seventh killing, he feels someone watching him. He directs the other officers to search the rooftop where he felt he was watched from, where they find telltale traces of blood. Later in the early hours of the morning, the killer makes contact with Harrison at the police station, starting a short but brief dialog between the two.

Snowfall, Jessie Thompson

This story just makes me sad. Sad that there even has to be stories about child abuse.

Seal-Self, Sara Maitland

Maitland writes about a man who has to cross-dress as a woman in order to kill a baby seal to make a cloak for the lovely lass he fancies. Whoosht! That’s the sound of something going over my head. However, the story does have a great line worthy of repeating. She is taller than he is, and her legs run up under her skirt, legs so slender and long that they must lead somewhere good. That’s about all that’s good in the story.

No Hearts, No Flowers, Barry N. Malzberg

A half-crooked columnist for a newspaper makes a brief mention of an overheard conversation in a restaurant. Something about a Valentine’s Day Massacre, which takes place perpetrated by the local mob. The mob summons the reviewer to met with them, and he’s quaking in his boots thinking he’s gonna get offed for blowing their cover. A nice story, but it didn’t have that sense of dread a horror story should have.

The Boy Who Drew Unicorns, Jane Yolen

This is the story of a traumatized boy who is picked on in school. He doesn’t talk. He just draws unicorns. Of course, that’s that sort of different thing that other kids jump on like sharks to blood in the water. The kids doesn’t seem to mind it that much, mostly because he is in his own unicorn world. Sort of a children’s story, and I liked it.

The Darling, Scott Bradfield

The Darling is the story of a serial killer woman, who kills most of the men in her life, as well as possibly a few other people. I’d say it’s creepy more than horror-inducing, but it’s still a pretty good story. One thing that came to mind though is towards the ends when the doctor is treating Delores for her pathology and he takes a turn for the creepy, I didn’t mind so much. Perhaps it’s a bit of moral relativism at work in me.

Night They Missed the Horror Show, Joe R. Lansdale

The dedication at the beginning of this story reads: For Lew Shiner. A story that doesn’t flinch. For damn sure this story doesn’t flinch. Leonard and Farto are small town racist hicks. Even in a racist environment, they outdo their neighbors so much that no girl will look kindly on them, and so they begin the story alone in the 7-11 parking lot drinking whiskey. They are bored, but too racist to go to Night of the Living Dead at the drive-in because it stars a black man. Instead, they tie up a dead dog behind Leonard’s ’64 Impala and drive around drinking watching pieces of the dog fall off. Until they drive by a group of students from the rival high school beating on a black man on the side of the road. Not really wanting to help him, they do so because he plays quarterback on Leonard and Farto’s team, and he’s their nigger. So they help him, but things go from bad to worse both for Scott (the black quarterback) and then for Leonard and Farto. Lansdale’s story doesn’t flinch at all. For one, he has Leonard and Farto using epithets like nigger to show how grotesque they are. And his story doesn’t flinch from a very scary vision of racism that probably isn’t too far off from that experienced in some southern small towns in the 1960s.

Winter Solstice, Camelot Station, John M. Ford

This is a poem. I read the first stanza or so and realized it’s not one of those poems that I really get, so I just skipped the rest. It’s probably pretty good for those who are into this sort of thing.

The Boy Who Hooked The Sun, Gene Wolfe

A little fable. Very eh. Didn’t do anything for me.

Clem’s Dream, Joan Aiken

Not my thing. Tooth fairy accidentally steals a kid’s dream when she takes his tooth. So he quests to retrieve it with the help of other fairies.

Love in Vain, Lewis Shiner

This is a story about a serial killer. A troubled prosecutor is sent to trip up the killer, who has been confessing to pretty much every murder around. He carries a wholly made-up case file, and yet the killer still knows intimate details of the murder that only the killer could know despite it being a fiction. Just an awesome story. Also, Shiner has made the story available under a Creative Common license. I’m a big fan of Creative Commons, and the license allows anyone to put together or repost Love In Vain so long as they don’t charge for it, don’t change it, and credit Shiner. I’ve got a copy in case he ever pulls down his site, and I’ll post it in that case. But Shiner deserves some kudos for making his fiction available this way, so go read the story over at his site.

In the Darkened Hours, Bruce Boston

Poetry. I read this one though. Still no tingly feeling though.

A Golden Net for Silver Fishes, Ru Emerson

A woman’s child is stolen by a dryad, and in order to get the child back she has to collect fish for the dryad’s pond. If she ever fills the pond with fish, she can get her child back. Of course, the dryad eats the fish nearly as fast as the woman fills the pond. But the creatures of the forest have another plan to defeat the dryad and return the child. Will the woman follow their advice?

Dancing Among Ghosts, Jim Aikin

Terri Windling’s introduction to this story calls this her pick for the best fantasy story of the year. I think it’s one of the best in this book. It’s the story of Carla and Tony, two ad executives dating and by the end of the story planning to get married, and Carla’s friend Joann from college. Joann is a painter, and a little off her rocker. Her very last painting before she suicides by overdose is a ballroom scene, people among ghosts, dancing. Joann heard the ghosts and the music calling to her, even while she was painting the scene. And in one brief moment in Joann’s apartment just after she and Tony find Joann dead, she touches the painting and is drawn into the world of ghosts. Joann is there, not dead after all. Or perhaps she is dead in the real world as a way to prevent herself from returning. The rest of the story is about Carla hearing the music from the ball, and fighting being drawn back there, and at other times questioning her own sanity.

Title: The year’s best fantasy: second annual collection
Editors: Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling
Cover artist: Thomas Canty
Series: The year’s best fantasy and horror book 2
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 579 p.
Publication date: 1989
ISBN-10: 0-312-03007X
Subject: Fantasy fiction — Periodicals
Subject: Horror tales — Periodicals
LC classification: PN6120.95.F25 Y4

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

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