Today I review the final two stories from the anthology The 1975 Annual World's Best SF, presented by Donald A. Wollheim with his selections for the top science fiction from the previous year. In the fall of 1974 I began college at Broward Community College, just a few hundred yards from both Nova Blanche Forman Elementary...which I attended from 1965-68 and Nova High School, where I studied from 1968 to 1974: I have my own strong opinions about each of these three educational institutions and their respective approaches to teaching and learning...for now, let me just diplomatically say that I was generally pleasantly surprised at the much more reasonable and professional level of instruction at BCC. But I stray with the personal memories...here are my reactions to those two final tales...
THE BLEEDING MAN by Craig Strete
Written by a Native American with a Native American take on life and death, this is a remarkable story about a young orphaned man who has bled from a horrendous gash in his chest his entire life, but only stands there grinning and staring. The government with its secret research operations has "bought" the uncommunicative individual from his caretaker uncle, and now the physician in charge finds himself in conflict with a cold-hearted, dismissive official over the bleeding man's future. This story has more of a horror feel to it than science fictions: readers beware...
STRANGER IN PARADISE by Isaac Asimov
I enjoy reading Asimov's writing in the same way I like Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King...all three deliberately write in plain language without cluttering the page with a lot of crap intended to look artistic or trendy. In this story, it is several centuries after the "Catastrophe"...presumably a nuclear holocaust...and the worldwide society has transformed into a utilitarian kind of "utopia" that stigmatizes close family relationships to the point where two scientists find it awkward and embarrassing to discover that they are brothers with a strong mutual resemblance. They have a collaborative assigned project: to figure how to operate a research robot on Mercury from Earth using a melding of human thinking with computers. One of the brothers has saved an autistic man from euthanasia by making him a research subject...this leads to an interesting ending that seemed a little derivative to me nonetheless. Stranger in Paradise is definitely NOT a part of Asimov's fictional universe tying together most of his science fiction...
Next week I begin looking at science fiction short stories from the year 1975...
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