Today I conclude my look back at the year 1980 in short science fiction, using the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1981 Annual World's Best SF, featuring Wollheim's selections from the previous year. Although it sometimes appeared that year that the world was "going to hell in a handbasket", for my own actual life I was self-sufficient and healthy, with only a predilection for drinking a little too much beer two or three times a week (usually Miller Lite or an occasional Michelob) being probably my single worst habit...other than being at the time incurably antisocial and insulated. '80 was a good year for music...Funky Town and Another One Bites the Dust stand out in my memory. But this article is about the stories from that year, and here are my reactions to the book's final three...
WINDOW by Bob Leman
A truly scary tale worthy of Stephen King, Window addresses the problem inherent in being able to enter a portal into an alternate reality...sometimes that might mean someone on the "other side" can then enter into ours. At a secret installation, American scientists have created such an entranceway to possibly another dimension or universe, as they watch in amazement a seemingly normal house with what appears to be a normal, happy nuclear family residing there. Once a day there is a five-second period allowing objects to pass from our reality into theirs...all hell breaks loose when an overeager young scientist suddenly rushes across the barrier onto the house's lawn during one such interval...
THE SUMMER SWEET, THE WINTER WILD by Michael G. Coney
This story, uniquely told from the collective perspective of a migrating wild caribou herd, examines how some of what we might think of as virtuous and compassionate behavior like empathy toward other species and nonviolence can ultimately cause more death and suffering than a more selfish, cutthroat mode of existing that has typified the evolution of life over the eons. Pretty thought-provoking, how the author makes a subtle connection between wolves and humans as the collective consciousness envelopes all sentient life in the area...
ACHRONOS by Lee Killiugh
Reminding me a little of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe in Douglas Adams' hilarious series A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a motorist one day finds himself having inadvertently driven to the end of a dead-end road at a beach. Getting out of his car, he stoops down and picks up a living trilobite, which evidently had just washed up onto the shore although they had gone extinct hundreds of million years before. Then he discovers people from the distant future there...eventually the mystery is explained: this place is "achronos", or not belong to any time, and is accessible from different time periods. But why won't the future people he has encountered try to return to their own era...and what does it mean to be alive in a place where time doesn't advance? Pretty provocative...
Next week I move on to 1981 and that wonderful year's best sci-fi short stories...
No comments:
Post a Comment