Weekly Short Stories: 1979 Science Fiction, Part 2

Today I continue my look at science fiction short stories from 1979 as they appeared in the anthology The 1980 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his selections from the previous year. 1979 represented a special year in my life in which I decided to break away from the drifting college experience I was undergoing to just spend some time on my own supporting myself and living frugally within my means while working at a humble job.  To this purpose I was hired as a cook in a local Chinese restaurant, a position I would continue working at for a while as I sorted things out. In some ways '79 was a very difficult year to live through and in others it was a glorious time of personal growth and independence, depending on how you look at it. But I couldn't imagine how the rest of my life would how turned out if I hadn't lived through it as I did...most of the alternatives were decidedly negative. In the science fiction universe good stories abounded, and here are my comments about two from the book that weren't exactly my favorites...

UNACCOMPANIED SONATA by Orson Scott Card

In a future world claiming itself as a utopia allowing people to play the roles for which they are best suited, a young musical prodigy is selected as a "Maker" and as such subjected to abusive social isolation in order to enhance his senses for picking out music from the surrounding nature...and to avoid the unforgivable sin of derivation.  One day, though, a Listener traveling through hears his music and slips him a recording of Bach...the society's monitors, the Watchers, become aware of it and punish the Maker by removing him from his environment and forbidding him to create any more music.  The story spirals downward from there and I thought this was some hell of a utopia. The ending, which I guess was supposed to be happy, only left me puzzled...

THE STORY WRITER by Richard Wilson

This confusing story portrays a retired successful pulp fiction writer who discovers a second career in writing when he buys a second-hand typewriter at a rural northeastern flea market sale.  He uses it to write stories for the customers stopping by...including a peculiar soul who turns out to be an alien representing his race from another star system and which is planning to settle Earth, albeit primarily in another dimension.  The story gets further muddled when the writer, considered by the aliens to be a prophet whose writings always come true, finds himself in a copied world in the aliens' home dimension (but still on Earth): get lost yet?  The ending made little sense, either...the saving grace in this tale was the insertion of some elementary Polish language greetings and phrases, reminding me of that Polish class I took during the spring of 1978.  Yes, it's all very weird...

Next week: more from the year 1979 in short science fiction...