Here are my reactions to the opening three 1981 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and presenting his selections for the best from the preceding year. 1981 saw me kicking some bad personal habits and settling into some positive routines, among them daily study of Chinese through the incredible John DeFrancis textbook series (published by Yale University) each day after work. Historically, old man Reagan was inaugurated as our 40th president and shot soon thereafter by a lone armed lunatic...sigh, not much has changed since then with our culture of gun violence, has it? Anyway, here are my takes on the first three stories...
BLIND SPOT by Jayge Carr
A surgeon seeks to preserve the sight of an artist belonging to an underclass humanoid species from a distant world, but fails. When she asks to return to her home planet, he insists on accompanying her and discovers the social disparity between the "superior" treetop dwellers and the "inferior" trogs to which his patient belongs. One day she disappears, presumed dead on the forest floor that is densely populated by predators. Overcome by grief, he leaves but later discovers his lost patient's true place on her home world as well as the trogs and upper-dwellers. A story about interdependency among disparate groups that speaks to our current understanding of society as well as ecology...
HIGHLINER by C.J. Cherryh
In a future world where massive cities have grown with their skyscrapers fused together into a massive superstructure reaching upward toward space itself, a team of "highliners", that is construction workers in the outside heights, finds itself caught up in corporate corruption as they are warned to go along with sabotage of a certain building project. Wow, you could make a great series...book, movie, or television, out of this premise, and the visuals would be stunning...
THE PUSHER by John Varley
A middle-age man calling himself a pusher, who hangs out at children's playgrounds to find himself a "suitable" girl to isolate, isn't as horribly sinister as John Varley intimates, but the author goes out of his way in the beginning to make the story's protagonist look like a predatory pervert. As the story progresses, however, we learn about the relativistic effects of space travel at very high velocities, with the traveler aging much more slowly than the planet-bound people he left behind. In this story, the spaceman has hardly aged after returning to Earth where everyone else has grown 40 years older. Now try to tie these two seemingly completely incongruous threads together to come up with a much more innocent ending...
Next week I continue looking at science fiction short stories from 1981...
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