Today I continue reviewing short science fiction from way back in the year 1979, as they appeared in the anthology The 1980 Annual World's Best SF, featuring editor Donald A. Wollheim's selections from the previous year. I remember 1979 as a musically transitional year as a resoundingly hard rock song, My Sharona by the Knack, took over the top of the charts that summer and the disco era that had dominated popular music for years thankfully began to wane. The new wave, punk...and even rap... movements began to rise up, as well as the presence of music videos. I had pretty much had it with all the dance music...even the Rolling Stones with their Miss You and Emotional Rescue hits were selling out to disco, as well as the Grateful Dead (Shakedown Street). Whew, glad that's all over...wait, I haven't been consistently listening to pop music radio since the early 1990s so who knows what passes for music nowadays. Anyway, here are my reactions to the next three stories in Wollheim's book...
DAISY, IN THE SUN by Connie Willis
Daisy is a girl who finds herself sometimes in her grandmother's house watching her put up kitchen curtains, with her brother on the floor reading a book...then the setting will suddenly shift and they'll be on a train, and then back again. And who are all these apathetic-looking people milling around, anyway? A teenage boy she doesn't like approaches her and eventually explains it all...along with introducing the notion that what comprises our sense of personal identity can continue within settings that would normally not be able to sustain life. It all concerns our sun...and apocalypse...
THE LOCUSTS by Larry Niven and Steve Barnes
This is a profound tale about the fundamental parameters of what makes us human, told in the context of a new settlement on a habitable planet in a nearby star system. Everything seems to be growing well on it, with their plants and animals thriving. But then the settlers' new children are all born genetically changed to a human form going back millions of years in its evolution. How do the grown settlers deal with their offspring other than see it all as a failure and that their line will now die out with them? Only the settlement's doctor has a different perspective on the children and their humanity...this story's ending is brilliant, and it does tie in with the title and the nature of locusts...
THE THAW by Tanith Lee
Cryogenics, the freezing of bodies to prolong them into a future when medical advances can fix whatever problems they have, is the theme of this story, written from the vantage point in the late 22nd century by a young woman who witnesses the resuscitation of her grandmother of distant generations from the "deep sleep". Only what comes back to life seems to be somebody with a completely different personality...with special, ominous abilities. This tale reminded me of a line from David Bowie's masterpiece (and equally ominous) song Blackstar: "Something happened on the day he died, spirit rose a meter and stepped aside, somebody else took his place and bravely cried, 'I'm a Blackstar'"....need I say more about where this story is heading?
Next week I conclude my examination of selected sci-fi short stories from 1979...
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