Weekly Short Stories: 1975 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reactions to two more 1975 science fiction stories as they appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1976 Annual World's Best SF, which presented the editor's choices from the year before.  1975 was a year of détente between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., exemplified by the two countries cooperating with the Soyuz-Apollo docking to become the first space station...yet tensions were growing in Africa with newly independent Angola and Mozambique aligning themselves with the communist bloc and Cuba's Castro sending troops to Africa to aid Angola's Marxist government in its civil war.  As for me, I was still living in Hollywood and attending Broward Community College. But let's get back to those two stories, both of which were long enough to be called novellas...

THE STORMS OF WINDHAVEN by Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin

This is a tale about tradition vs. pragmatism as a stagnated society of survivors from an interstellar ship crash on a remote planet have developed a system of inheritance to determine their people's roles in life.  Maris is a young woman who is a "flyer", i.e. she is accorded possession of a set of special wings made from the former ships vast sails which traversed the cosmos with radiation blowing them along.  But now she is being forced to give them up because of her society's rigid rules.  In rebellion, Maris comes up with a new plan for her world...

ALLEGIANCES by Michael Bishop

Set off on a future Earth following a planetwide apocalypse, much of humanity now resides in insulated domed cities interconnected by tunnels.  From time to time they send out people into the outside "wilds" to bring in people with special skills...here Clio accompanies her colleagues Yates and Guest in search of two exiles for their special information about a rival society set up in northern Europe.  The story becomes one about the meeting of two different cultures and which one is considered more advanced or better than the other.  You start out thinking the domed civilization is supreme, then that of the "outsiders"...and finally that even they may be under the thumbs of yet another group.  A little hard to get through at times, I think the notion of cultural supremacy and inferiority gets a very good discussion here...

Next week I continue my look at 1975 and that year's short science fiction...