Here are my reviews of three more 1980 science fiction short stories as they appear in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1981 Annual World's Best SF, featuring the editor's picks from the preceding year. 1980 was a rough time for our country, with the Iranian hostage drama dragging throughout the year, relations with the USSR turning icy cold, and the economy tanking at year's end. But saddest of all, in the evening of December 8th, just as I was rejoicing at the Miami Dolphins beating the New England Patriots with a closing field goal, I received the news that John Lennon had been shot and killed at his Dakota Apartments residence in Manhattan...the murderer was a deranged stalker whose name does not merit mention. Lennon was enjoying accolades from his recently released Double Fantasy comeback album, on which he split the tracks evenly with his wife Yoko Ono...Watching the Wheels was my favorite track from it. But back to the stories...
ELBOW ROOM by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Set off in the future at the entrance (or exit, depending on your point of view) of a vortex...corresponding to our notion of a wormhole...a very introverted young woman is stationed there as a manual backup to the automated computer system processing spaceships going through it to and from distant points. Isolated from her crew, she begins to wonder if they're really there at all or rather just computer projections. I can relate to her introversion, but not to her sense of reality unraveling with such an extended period of isolation. I think I would come out of it all just fine, thank you...
THE UGLY CHICKENS by Howard Waldrop
This is a "what if" tale about the extinction of the dodo bird, native to Mauritius and neighboring Indian Ocean islands but soon killed off by colonizing Dutch and French by the mid-1700s. The narrator has discovered a trail leading to a rural northern Mississippi farm...could there have been real dodos there, and if so what happened to them? The scene at the end depicting the dodos' fate is one of the more vivid, unforgettable ones in my own reading history, but probably not all that far removed from what happened to other extinct species, notably the passenger pigeon...
PRIME TIME by Norman Spinrad
This is a disturbing story about virtual living. People can buy their own personal movies and experience them first-hand, going through adventures, parties, history, even orgies if so desired...the real world has become a throwaway, trivial existence. A married couple is mired in this vicarious lifestyle, but the husband has reached the breaking point, his efforts to reach his complacent wife in vain. Sad, but I fear we're miring ourselves more and more in fake life as we depend more and more on social and mass media for our reference points and less and less on what and who are actually all around us. Unlike the couple in this future dystopia, though, we can still step outside our artificial constructions and experience the world as it truly is...go ahead, finish reading this article, and then turn off that smartphone or computer!
Next week: more about science fiction short stories from 1980...
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