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

Mr. Boy, James Patrick Kelly

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

The Shobies’ Story, Ursula K. Le Guin

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

The Caress, Greg Egan

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

A Braver Thing, Charles Sheffield

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

We See Things Differently, Bruce Sterling

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

And The Angels Sing, Kate Wilhelm

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

Past Magic, Ian R. MacLeod

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

Bears Discover Fire, Terry Bisson

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

The All-Consuming, Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier

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

Personal Silence, Molly Gloss

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

Invaders, John Kessel

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

The Cairene Purse, Michael Moorcock

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

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

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

Tower of Babylon, Ted Chiang

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

The Death Artist, Alexander Jablokov

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

The First Since Ancient Persia, John Brunner

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

Inertia, Nancy Kress

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

Learning to Be Me, Greg Egan

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

Cibola, Connie Willis

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

Walking the Moons, Jonathan Lethem

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

Rainmaker Cometh, Ian McDonald

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

Hot Sky, Robert Silverberg

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

White City, Lewis Shiner

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

Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates, Pat Murphy

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

The Hemingway Hoax, Joe Haldeman

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

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

Planet of Exile is one of Le Guin’s earlier works. In fact, this 1978 edition includes an introduction in which the author spends a few paragraphs defending her lack of feminism in the book, explaining she wrote it before feminism got its hooks in to her. Like Rocanon’s World, the plot, settings, and characters are all pretty clunky. Le Guin found her voice and improved her writing skill as she endured as an author.

It’s a lost colony world, as I believe many of Le Guin’s books are. Man is abandoned on Werel. Another humanoid race also lives there, who call themselves man as well. The two groups are somewhat antagonistic, but the formerly starfaring humans have dwindled in number over the centuries and now number only several thousand. The locals (hilfs in English) have quite a few more people.

A northern tribe has begun to assemble an empire rather than conduct themselves according to standard ways of attacking and retreating to their own territory at the end of a season. They are on the march toward the humans and nearby hilfs. Can the groups get along to fight off the horde?

The complicating matter of course is that the leader of the humans picks the eve of the fight to start schtupping the daughter of the hilf tribe.

There’s not a lot to the book. The plot is pretty standard and pretty boring. So are the characters. But, even in this early work I can see a bit of the ways Le Guin would be changing the face of science fiction in later years. For instance, the humans are black. That they are black is hammered home several times. For another example, a traditional sign of respect among the tribes is the act of listening. Members of antagonistic groups will pointedly state that they do not hear their counterpart when he speaks. Just a small way of wording a thing like saving face, but it says so much about what Le Guin might consider important.

I wouldn’t really recommend the book except to those who are studying Le Guin or are completists of her works. But it’s also not a horrible way to fill time if you happen on a copy either.

Title: Planet of exile
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Series: Ekumen; 3
Imprint / publisher: Harper & Row
Format: Hardcover
Length: 140 p.
Publication date: 1978
ISBN-10: 0-06-012559-4
LC classification: PS3563.E42

What a slog! Ten days to read this immense anthology. Too long. Too many works. I’ve now finished both Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies I bought a while ago. I don’t think I’ll be picking up any more. There were three really outstanding stories, but overall I just don’t think I like enough of the stories to bear with more of the Datlow/Windling Best Ofs. The three I like most were Onion, Struwwelpeter, and Gestella. His Own Back Yard follows closely after those. While I didn’t get most of the poetry, I don’t mind it so much because it’s usually short, and those who do like poetry get something they enjoy.

On to the stories.

The Hunter’s Wife, Anthony Doerr (from The Shell Collector)

A stalkerish hunter sees a magician’s assistant performing through a window. He follows her from town to town, and pesters her every year she returns until she marries him. She has the ability to see the dreams of others, as well as visions of the after-life for the recently dead. He dreams of wolves. He lives for the wilderness. But he is frightened of his wife’s ability, and she leaves. Twenty years later, he goes to a séance she conducts, still married but neither have seen the other in the intervening decades. It seemed well written, but I never connected with the character or story.

The Cowardly Coffin, Marin Sorescu (from Sept/Oct 2001 American Poetry Review, subscribe)

A whimsical (and pretty good) poem about a coffin that refuses to be buried, shooting up as if on top of a geyser when it’s dropped in the hole. Sorescu had cancer when he wrote this, which killed him shortly afterward. Considering I generally don’t like poetry, I’m kind of impressed.

In These Final Days of Sales, Steve Rasnic Tem (from In These Final Days of Sales)

I’m really not sure what to make of this story about a very bad salesman. I think there’s a lot of subtext that’s gone over my head. I didn’t connect with it at all.

To Dream of White Horses, June Considine (from Thicker Than Water)

Father and son each have a hard time coming to grips with mom’s suicide. Dad by ignoring it. Son by obsessing over it. At least from the son’s perspective. Until son meets a homeless girl who sees his dreams. I didn’t think this was all that profound.

Skin, Charlee Jacob (from Perihelion Broadside Series, Volume 3)

Narrative poem that I didn’t understand.

Prussian Snowdrops, Marion Arnott (from Crimewave 4: Mood Indigo) (2001 The Macallan Short Story Dagger)

Set in what apears to be pre-World War 2 Nazi Germany, a journalist is stationed in the countryside to let things cool off after he has offended the authorities. He stumbles on a scandal where the doctor in charge of the local insane asylum committed suicide in a spectacular fashion in Berlin, yet no one seems to know anything about it. And the denizens of the asylum have disappeared. Here’s the thing: Nazi Germany made no secret to it’s citizens that certain races and kinds of people were undesirable and treated them very badly. Among those persecuted were Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and the mentally ill. So why would any mistreatment of the insane be considered a scandal? It would be as if the Klu Klux Klan’s lynching of a black person in the 1920s were a scandal. Wrong, yes. But the U.S. tolerated this kind of atrocity. Nazi Germany tolerated it as well. So I don’t understand the premise of the story. Why would a journalist think the German public would make a stink?

The Honeyed Knot, Jeffrey Ford (from the May 2001 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, subscribe)

Another story I didn’t connect with. The college teacher Jeffrey Ford runs into some sort of fantasy stag after one of his students kills someone. Or something like that. I totally don’t get any of the symbolism.

Timmy Gobel’s Bug Jar, Michael Libling (from December 2001 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)

I liked this one! Did you ever trap bugs and put them in a canning jar with holes punched in the lid for air? Even with air the bugs never lived long. So a kid finds a bug jar from the previous summer, but it has more than bugs in it. There’s a miniature headless skeleton also in there. That can’t be anything good, can it?

The God of Dark Laughter, Michael Chabon (from April 9, 2001 The New Yorker, subscribe)

A small-town prosecutor investigates the death of a clown, the body being found shortly after a circus leaves town. Descriptions of this story call it Lovecraftian, but I wouldn’t know as I’ve never read Lovecraft. It does have lost tribes and obscure religions like you’d find in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, so if that’s what makes it Lovecraftian I won’t argue. I liked the story.

The Adolescence of Orpheus, Kurt Leland (from the Spring 2001 The Beloit Poetry Journal, subscribe)

So I know reviewers theoretically aren’t supposed to employ ad hominem criticism. In other words, criticize the text, not the author. Who decided that anyway? Perhaps I should write up an opinion piece on that, because I’m not so sure I agree in the case of literature. Anyway, I didn’t like the poem. Just couldn’t get in to it. Side ad hominem (and why is latin italicized? time to Google® that question too) note: Windling’s introduction notes that Leland has written two books on speculative metaphysics. That’s a nice way to say Leland is loony. Either that or Windling gives some credence to the speculative metaphysics and didn’t want to cop to it. Cause when I go to Leland’s web site, it’s all about astral fucking projection! Yup, it has nothing to do with whether or not the poem is any good. I still want to know when I’m reading the works of the insane.

Trading Hearts at the Half Kaffe Café, Charles de Lint (from Single White Vampire Seeks Same)

I kinda liked this story. It’s a little on the unoriginal side, but it’s sweet nonetheless. Basically, arty bohemian girl answers a personal ad for a guy who happens to be a werewolf (well, technically a skinwalker, but I wouldn’t know what that was unless a story told me). Only she doesn’t know he’s a skinwalker. Things get hairy when some other werewolves show up. I liked how de Lint alternates perspectives. Again, not original, but it worked well.

Louise’s Ghost, Kelly Link (from Stranger Things Happen, download) (2001 Nebula Award, Novelette)

Louise and Louise meet weekly and gab. Louise #1 has a ghost. She tries to figure out many ways to get rid of the ghost haunting her house. On a superficial level, the story gets a little confusing at the end. I mostly like it, but it’s weird enough that I’m missing something.

Fairy Tale Pantoum, Ellen Wernecke (from The Louisville Review Issue 49, subscribe)

More poetry. Whoosh! That’s the sound of this going right over my head.

The Puppet and the Train, Scott Thomas (from Cobwebs and Whispers)

I didn’t find much about Scott Thomas on the web, mostly because the name is pretty common and I didn’t want to disambiguate. I liked this story quite a bit. Remember in Men in Black when one of the aliens turned out to actually be a robot run by another alien? That’s this story. A small town veterinarian in 1909 is called when a train hits an elephant. It’s a talking elephant even, owned by a circus. As the vet is poking and prodding, a man jumps out of the carcass and runs away. That’s the start of the story…

Crocodile Lady, Christopher Fowler (from Crimewave: Dark Before Dawn)

Pretty good horror/suspense tale about a teacher’s first day back at school after taking a decade plus off because her husband didn’t want her to work. Conflict with other teachers. Classifying kids. Figuring out she doesn’t have too much rust to be there. And then on an outing to the zoo one child disappears on the London Tube.

The Barbarian and the Queen: Thirteen Views, Jane Yolen (from Starlight 3)

Thirteen queens and thirteen barbarians. Thirteen little snippets of stories. All with tea. Interesting, and I’m still deciding if I like it or not.

Becoming Bird, Bob Hicok (from Quarterly West Issue 51)

A poem I got! And even think was kinda nice. Kind of an illustrated man sort of vibe from it.

Sop Doll, Milbre Burch (from April 2001 Realms of Fantasy, subscribe)

A Jack story, a class of stories I’ve never heard of. Jack rolls in to town looking for work and is hired by the mill owner to run the mill while the owner keeps the men away from his wife. The previous two men hired to run the mill ended up with their throats slit.

Plenty, Christopher Barzak (from May 28, 2001 Strange Horizons)

A nice story about going home again and remembering the people who were once important. In this case, it’s a nice old lady across the street who feeds our narrator and his roommate during the lean college years. He’s heading home for her funeral.

Bones of the Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin (from Tales from Earthsea)

This tale from Le Guin’s Earthsea world left me unimpressed. Not bad. Not great either. A Gontish wizard senses trouble, and enlists the aid of a former apprentice. The plot isn’t so much. Any enjoyment of the story really comes from the characters and their relationship. They’re decent, but not overwhelming to me.

What the Story Weaves, the Spinner Tells, Terry Blackhawk (from Calyx, Volume 20, Number 2)

More poetry.

Onion, Caitlín Kiernan (from Wrong Things) (2001 International Horror Guild Award, Best Short Story)

The first story in the collection that I really got completely in to. This was awesome! Gives a great sense of dread to the common trope of parallel worlds, without ever having any truly bad happen right in front of you. Everything is done through intimation.

Where the Woodbine Twineth, Norman Partridge (from The Man With The Barbed-Wire Fists)

Horror tale set just after the Civil War featuring a Confederate soldier that can’t quite forget the war. Again, not particularly inspiring to me.

Struwwelpeter, Glen Hirshberg (from SciFi.com)

I really liked this story, and it really irritated me as well. It’s set in Ballard, which is a plus, though it’s not quite the Ballard I know. Hirshberg has taken liberties with the location. That’s totally fine. It works well in the story. What I didn’t like about it was a couple of things about suspension of disbelief. Like a lot of horror stories, Struwwelpeter asks the reader to believe something that it just plain weird. No, not the supernatural. I mean the idea that a haunted house on the hill will be completely ignored by kids for ages and ages until the kids in our story come along. Aside from that though, this is an awesome story. Kind of a classic ghost story feel to it, even though it’s not an old classic. The kids in the story explore the yard of a haunted house type of place, and are scared away by the owner telling them they’ll wake the dead. Two years later they return to the scene, one of them determined to reclaim his superiority over the one place that affected him. Of course, it’s Halloween, and it’s dark, and they have a couple of girls with them.

Outfangthief, Gala Blau (Conrad Williams) (from The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women)

Well now, turns out that one of the stories in the so-called Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women is actually by a man. Gala Blau is Conrad Williams. So is it bad to use an ad hominem criticism here? I kinda wondered how a supposedly previously unpublished author was included in a prominent anthology. Not that new writers can’t appear in anthologies, but anthologies usually have people that have been published once or twice. I wonder if the editors knew. Anyway, this is actually a pretty decent, if pedestrian, vampire story. Sarah and her daughter Laura are running from loan sharks who own a rather large amount of debt owned by Sarah. In her flight, Sarah crashes a car. But something saves Laura in the night. The saviors, Manser (the criminal element), Sarah, and Laura all converge on a lonely house in the countryside at night.

Rites: Cleaning the Last Bones, Gavin J. Grant (from Dark Planet)

Poetry about animals picking the bones of something dead. Very eh.

Watch Me When I Sleep, Jean-Claude Dunyach (from Interzone, subscribe)

A re-working of the fairy trope. In this version, fairies are parasites that pupate in a person’s stomach, stealing the person’s intellect when they emerge. Seems like a fair number of fantasy short stories (especially vampire short stories) fall into the category of re-working a fantasy trope. My internal reaction is usually along the lines of Well, aren’t you clever? You have to imagine that with dripping sarcasm. That’s probably not fair to the stories, but it seems to be automatic in my case.

The Tattoo Artist, Patrick Roscoe (from Fall 2001 Descant)

A unique tattoo by a legendary artist becomes a burden over time instead of a boon.

Cleopatra Brimstone, Elizabeth Hand (from Redshift) (2001 International Horror Guild Award, Long Fiction)

An award winner it may be, this seemed to be a pretty run-of-the-mill revenge fantasy with a bit of a supernatural twist. I think I didn’t like it because so little was revealed of what went on in our protagonists head. If you are going to make the bad guy the protagonist, just simply iterating through his actions makes it uninteresting.

Grass, Lawrence Miles (from September 2001 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)

A short alternative history story about mammoths in the Louisiana Territory and Thomas Jefferson sending Lewis and Clark to find them.

If Death, a Preprimer, Sandra J. Lindow (from The Magazine of Speculative Poetry)

Poetry goths would like.

The Bird Catcher, S. P. Somtow (Somtow Sucharitkul) (from The Museum of Horrors)

How one child met a serial killer and blames himself. Not for what you might think tough. Not great, but pretty good.

Black Dust, Graham Joyce (from Black Dust)

Ghost story. By the numbers. Man talks to boy, turns out he died minutes before.

Annabelle’s Alphabet, Tim Pratt (from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 9)

Cute little story about a little girl, Annabelle, who dreams of flying.

Tom Brightwind, or, How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby, Susanna Clarke (from Starlight 3)

A decent story, but one that seems to be overwhelmed by how little goes on. Clarke’s novel showed how lots of text can describe very little when the author is aping a Jane Austen feel for her writing. This is the same. Seriously, it’s a one-trick pony and shouldn’t be trotted out story after story (just like Gregory Maguire).

Gestella, Susan Palwick (from Starlight 3)

So far this is vying with Struwwelpeter and Onion for my favorite story of the collection. It’s a werewolf tale, with somewhat of a twist. It doesn’t really re-work the rules of werewolves, thank god. Just takes the trope and extrapolates some of its implications, then puts a human face on it and combines it with some human foibles. Vague enough? Okay, here’s the gist: werewolves age at a wolf rate rather than a human rate. A man and a werewolf woman hook up and fall in love. But she (Gestella) ages at a much faster rate than he does. Now run with that. It’s one fucked up, awesome story.

The Legend, Ray Gonzalez (from The Ghost of John Wayne)

I think this story concerns when a ghost haunts the person who killed her. I think. It could be the ghost is helping him instead. I can’t tell.

Oh, Glorious Sight, Tanya Huff (from Oceans of Magic)

John Cabot sails to America with a little bit of help from a magical flute and a ragamuffin he saves on the dock before sailing. Of course, being religious he thinks the magical flute is witchcraft. Good story!

Home Cooking, Daniel Ulanovsky Sack (from With Signs and Wonders)

After the death of their mother, a family discovers that Eustaquia has learned how to cook mom’s specialty dishes. Maybe I’m just a foodie at heart, but I liked this story even though I never quite figured out all the relationships in the story. I can totally understand bonding over food and associating certain meals with particular people, so that part totally sucked me in.

Queen, Gene Wolfe (from December 2001 Realms of Fantasy)

Two men show up in town to take an old woman to the coronation. The town’s wealthiest man helps them find her, and then serves them food before they all leave. Not a particularly exciting story.

The Project, Carol Emshwiller (from August 2001 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)

An interesting story, one without much in the way of overt fantastic elements. Harrier is a mountain man, though he suspects he may be a bastard son of the bigger lowlands people. Because of his size, he’s the foreman of the tribe’s Project, which involves moving large rocks for reasons I never quite figured out. But it’s really important to him. A mountain lion eats his child while he works on the Project. His wife is livid at his devotion, and sets off to stalk the mountain lion herself. Harrior discreetly follows and kills the mountain lion (as his wife wouldn’t be able to do it herself). But it seems Mrs. Wife has plans to head off the mountain, and Harrier can’t understand why. Despite not quite getting everything, I still found myself really getting into Harrier’s mind. It’s done so well I can understand his devotion to the Project even though I never figured out what the hell it was.

The Man in the Comic Strip, Liz Lochhead (from Winter 2001 Poetry Review, subscribe)

Again, I’m not so much on the poetry, but I do like hearing this reading of a version of the poem by the author, Liz Lochhead.

Strange Things About Birds, Scott Thomas (from Cobwebs and Whispers)

Short story where an older woman tells disturbing stories that involved birds that happened to her in her youth.

What We Did That Summer, Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg (from Redshift)

Pretty creepy story, but I totally didn’t get the ending.

Aesculapius in the Underworld, Ryan G. Van Cleave (from May 2001 Poem)

Didn’t get it.

Scarecrow, Gregory Maguire (from Half-Human)

A mostly decent story about assuming things from the perspective of a newly conscious scarecrow who is told stories by crows and foxes about how he came to be and what happened to the farmer who owned the field. And then he’s the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz and I got irritated.

The Bockles, Melissa Hardy (from The Uncharted Heart)

Always keep your word with magical creatures. This was so by the numbers I could count to ten using it.

His Own Back Yard, James P. Blaylock (from SciFi.com)

Heading down nostalgia lane, Alan stops at his old house while his wife and son are out of town. The house is boarded up. He digs up a coffee can time capsule he buried as a kid, which transports him magically into the past. In this case, he can go home again. Pretty good story.

Title: The year’s best fantasy and horror: fifteenth annual collection
Editors: Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling
Cover creator: Thomas Canty (artist)
Series: Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; 15
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin / Holtzbrinck
Format: Paperback
Length: cxviii, 542 p. (includes supplemental material)
Publication date: August 2002
ISBN-10: 0-312-29069-1
LC classification: PN6120.95.F25 Y4

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

Oceanic, Greg Egan (1999 Hugo for best novella)

Greg Egan’s own description is:

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

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

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

Approaching Perimelasma, Geoffrey A. Landis

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

Craphound, Cory Doctorow

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

Jedella Ghost, Tanith Lee

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

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

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

The Island Of The Immortals, Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Sea Change, With Monsters, Paul J. McAuley

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

Divided By Infinity, Robert Charles Wilson

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

US, Howard Waldrop

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

The Days Of Solomon Gursky, Ian McDonald

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

The Cuckoo’s Boys, Robert Reed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voivodoi, Liz Williams (blog)

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

Saddlepoint: Roughneck, Stephen Baxter

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

This Side Of Independence, Rob Chilson

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

Unborn Again, Chris Lawson

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

Grist, Tony Daniel

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

La Cenerentola, Gwyneth Jones

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

Down In The Dark, William Barton

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

Free In Asveroth, Jim Grimsley

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

The Dancing Floor, Cherry Wilder (Cherry Barbara Grimm)

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

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

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

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

The third and final Earthsea book, at least until Tehanu.

In this installment, Arren, a young prince of Enlad, arrive at Roke with news that magic is disappearing in Enlad. Wizards and sorcerers can no longer remember the incantations and their meanings. Roke is the wizard headquarters, where the Archmage Sparrowhawk resides. Sparrowhawk, or Ged, if you remember, is the child and young wizard from the first two books of Earthsea. Older, wiser, and he’s become the most powerful mage in Earthsea. But even he doesn’t know why magic is dying. So he sets off on a quest with Arren to find out why. Their travels take them to the south reaches, amongst an ocean-dwelling raft people, through the isles of dragons, and finally to Selidor, the home of dragons where they enter the realm of the dead to confront the evil mage who has cheated death and offers immortality to everyone. Only it’s the immortality that is killing magic.

Religious themes aside, since I didn’t have the patience to ponder through them too much, the story is about Arren’s relationship with Sparrowhawk. Initially he sets the Archmage on a pedestal. Through the story he becomes disillusioned. In the end he achieves a much more balanced relationship with his mentor.

Yup, I didn’t like this as much as I liked the first two books. Probably because their travels seemed just as aimless to me as it does initially to Arren. The characters’ actions in the first two books had a much more understandable point than this one does.

Title: The farthest shore
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Illustrator: Gail Garraty
Title: The Farthest Shore
Imprint/Publisher: Bantam Books
Year: 1972 (printing 1975)
Pages: 197 p.
Subject: Magic — Fiction
Subject: Fantasy
LC Classification: PZ7.L5215 Far

Being the second of the increasingly misnamed Earthsea Trilogy.

I can’t recall if I’ve ever read The Tombs of Atuan or The Farthest Shore. I’ve owned the books for ages, and I loved A Wizard of Earthsea. So it would be odd if I hadn’t read the sequels, but on re-reading it I didn’t get the sense of déjà vu that I normally do when I accidentally re-read a book I’ve previously read. Too bad. It’s a wonderful book and I should have picked it up again long ago.

The story returns to Ged, the young wizard from book one, but this time he is not the main character nor is the story even told from his point of view. Instead, the book introduces us to Tenar, a young girl on the island of Atuan in the Kargish Empire. Unlike most of Earthsea, the Kargs do not use magic and instead worship gods and ancient spirits through rituals, if they believe at all. The Kargs believe the High Priestess who serves the unnamed gods is reincarnated on the day she dies, and search throughout Kargish lands for a girl who fits the criteria. Tenar is that girl. Whisked off at the age of five to be cloistered in a remote place of worship to eventually become the High Priestess, she is raised mostly in isolation. She becomes Arha, the Eaten One. She grows up knowing she will be high priestess in the remote temple complex where few bother to worship anymore. Her interactions with others are limited and twisted. Hence, she develops somewhat of a youthful ego, sense of entitlement, and tendency to want to do things without help.

Beneath the temples lies a vast network of underground caverns where only she and eunuchs may travel. There are two entrances and only one exit. The two priestesses who serve the named gods may enter into the first portion of the caves, but no further. She learns her way around her underground domain by touch, as the gods do not like the light. One day she finds a man in the cavern, searching the ground by a light glowing from the top of his staff. It is Ged, the wizard from book one. He has come following a legend that half of the ring of Erreth-Akbe may be found here. Stolen by the Kargs after vanquishing an invader, the whole ring might unite Earthsea.

Initially angry at Ged for trespassing on her domain, Arha traps him in the deepest part of the caverns intending to let him die a slow death without food or water. But she cannot bring herself to let him die. And she cannot reverse her training as High Priestess either and free him. So she keeps him somewhat in limbo for a time until one of the other subordinate priestesses (Kossil) discovers Arha has let Ged live. Though subordinate, she’s older and and longer serving and, most importantly, does not believe in the gods she serves. It’s a useful fiction for her, a means to religious power. And Kossil sees in Arha’s failure a way to achieve ascendancy.

So the lesson that Arha/Tenar must learn is that of trust. Can she learn to trust Ged, who looks, acts, and believes differently than she. In fact, his belief in the ancient gods is stronger than hers, though he knows them to be not gods but malevolent ancient spirits. To survive against Kossil and the spirits angry at the light that has disturbed their domain (not hers after all), she must put her life in Ged’s hands.

And yet, the moral here doesn’t overwhelm the story like a bad ABC After School Special. It’s obvious and not subtle, but comes out naturally in the flow of the story. There’s no long pause for a speech about trust. Ged does have to exhort Arha to trust him a couple of times, and in the hands of a bad director, a long speech will be inserted, or a suitable pause as Ged reaches for her hand while the camera focuses on their faces after each other to show Arha coming to a decision of trust. But in reading it, is all part of the action.

Title: The tombs of Atuan
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Illustrator: Gail Garraty
Imprint/Publisher: Bantam Books
Publication date: 1971
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 146 p.
ISBN-10: 0-553-14946-6
LC Classification: PZ7.L5215 To

Though written for the young reader, I think Le Guin‘s Earthsea stories work well as adult novels and reveal some of the major flaws in the high fantasy books to which it is sometimes compared.

This is the coming of age story of Ged, who will become the Archmage of Earthsea someday. Earthsea is an island and sea world. Thousands of islands make up the land. Though travel by boat between islands is quick, few make the journey in the wooden galleys. Ged is born Sparrowhawk on Gont, famous for it’s wizards. But he is born a goatherd. He learns a charm or two from the village witch, including some minor weather-working. When men from Kargad attack Gont, Sparrowhawk saves the village by enveloping it with fog, whereupon the villagers pick off the invaders. This brings him the attention of the island’s wizard, Ogion, to which he soon becomes an apprentice.

The fun begins because of Ged’s impatience and pride. Goaded into several boastful acts, he releases a shadow creature from the land of the dead. Fearful of what would happen to Earthsea should this shadow possess him, Ged begins a quest to right the wrong. At first the shadow hunts him and he runs and hides. Eventually though, Ogion counsels him to become the hunter. On doing so, the shadow turns and runs. It feeds on his fear. Ged chases it to the ends of Earthsea to confront it. He defeats it with its true name (how all magic on Earthsea really works, a true name gives one power of something). The shadow’s true name is Ged, his own. It is part of him and he becomes whole.

The language and descriptions aren’t overly flowery. The story features people who aren’t kings and princes. I also like that, while it’s swords and sorcery fantasy, it doesn’t resemble too heavily King Arthur-style stories. The morals, while clear, aren’t laid on too thick. One other thing as well: the main characters are black, red, and other colors. The only white people in the novels are the Kargish invaders. I kind of like the fact that the only non-civilized people in the book are white. They aren’t exactly uncivilized, but the small piece they have in this book shows them to be ruthless and somewhat bloodthirsty.

And at less than 200 pages, what does anyone have to lose?

Title: A wizard of Earthsea
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Cover artist, illustrator: Ruth Robbins
Series: Earthsea ; 1
Imprint / publisher: Bantam Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 183 p.
Publication date:
ISBN-10: 0-553-23461-7
Subject: Magic — Fiction
Subject: Fantasy
Subject: Wizards — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.L5215 Wi

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