With today's article I reach the final three science fiction short stories from 1978, as presented in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1979 Annual World's Best SF...providing the editor's selections from the previous year. If you know me well, then you might have noticed that I have a propensity to memorize long lists of things of diverse topics...this was the year that all that got started. I haven't written very much on this blog about that aspect of myself since for some reason I feel it's a bit personal, but since this IS a record of my thinking for the general world's reading pleasure and "enlightenment", I might just share some of my experiences with lists in future articles. For now, here are my reviews of those last three stories....
WE WHO STOLE THE DREAM by James Tiptree, Jr.
Told from the point of view of the aliens, a humanoid race is oppressed on a distant planet by colonizing humans, but they have over the years furtively and meticulously plotted their escape by commandeering a human spaceship. They also are aware of the existence of their own kind living on the other side of the galaxy and set out to meet them...the resulting encounter sadly reveals the author's position that human nature can transcend even humanity...
SCATTERSHOT by Greg Bear
An alien enemy has hit an Earth spaceship with a device that explodes it through many dimensions. The only known survivor, a woman named Francis Geneva, explores the resulting strange new conglomerate ship with different survivors of the same attack in other dimensions. Now to get everyone...and they're quite different from one another...back to where (and when) they belong. A mind-stretching but ultimately frustrating story with its numerous demands on the reader's ability to imagine the author's strange new world with its strange new creatures and rules about time and space...
CARRUTHERS' LAST STAND by Dan Henderson
Carruthers is an anthropologist selected to initiate meaningful communications with a lizard-like alien race 500 light years distant. He's stationed on the moon, delighting in times when he, pretty much a loner, can get away from the annoying bureaucrats pressuring him with their agendas. Technologically-generated psychic contact is made between Carruthers and Hun, his alien counterpart. According to the social norms of Hun's world, the two have to constantly exchange colorful insults (very funny), and new technologies are subsequently revealed to humanity. But joy turns to fear as the Earth bigshots are now worried that they could be attacked by the others. Carruthers, though, has learned something he realizes he'd better keep from his superiors. The story's a bit murky toward the end, but redeemed by the ending...
Next week I begin my examination of short science fiction from the year 1979...
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