Today I begin looking at science fiction short stories from the year 1979, as they appeared in the anthology The 1980 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his picks from the previous year. 1979 was a big year in the news as Iran culminated its Islamic revolution early on and later took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, precipitating an international hostage crisis that lasted until the end of the Jimmy Carter administration. In the same year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in order to sustain a friendly puppet government there it installed in a coup d'etat the previous year. Meanwhile, science fiction did well with a number of good stories...here are my reactions to the first three from that book...
THE WAY OF CROSS AND DRAGON by George R.R. Martin
Martin obviously had a hang-up with organized religion, perhaps stemming from his childhood experiences,, for all I know. In his ongoing fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire he has an intolerant fundamentalist group descend upon the capital city of King's Landing. Here we have an interstellar group of inquisitors bent on upholding the orthodoxy of the brand of Christianity that has spread throughout the galaxy. There is a planet that holds to the heresy of Judas being a savior/hero, and the story's inquisitor is assigned to rectify the situation. He meets a man who revels in being a "Liar", that is he acknowledges the falseness of his Judas preaching as something he entirely made up...yet the revelation places further doubt in the mind of the inquisitor about his own beliefs....
THE THIRTEENTH UTOPIA by Somtow Sucharitcul
Another (groan) tale about inquisitors and religious intolerance, here we see the enforcer of the orthodox faith with a new assignment regarding his specialty: the sabotage and destruction of societies across the cosmos that have claims to being utopias. In this one, they seem to have conquered gravity and hold a special reverence toward their sun...the extent of this is revealed at story's end and also shows the author's own possible philosophy...that self-awareness and identity transcend biological life, a very heretical notion in the mind of this story's inquisitor. But he gets sucked into what they call the "initiation", and is forever changed...
OPTIONS by John Varley
Off into the future, this time solidly on Earth, gender identities are no longer as solidly differentiated as they were, with a "simple" medical procedure available for the masses that "only" involves creating a near-identical clone body of one's own...albeit in the opposite sex...and then having one's brain and nervous system transplanted into it. I had to put down the book for a couple of minutes and laugh after reading that! Varley focuses on a married couple with three children and has the wife consider and then undergo a sex-change procedure...he then examines its effect on the husband and family. A little ahead of its time this story is, although I have a feeling that transplanting brains into cloned bodies isn't going to be in our immediate future. Then again I had no idea a few years ago that people would be walking and standing around everywhere staring at little boxes in their hands...
Next week: more about short science fiction from 1979...
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