As I continue my look back at 1981's science fiction short stories as presented in the anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF (edited by Donald A. Wollheim with stories from the previous year), I remember the sports scene at the time. Charlie Pell was the Florida Gators football coach, in his third season with them going a mediocre 7-5 including a convincing bowl loss to West Virginia. In major league baseball, the players went on strike in the middle of the summer and they ended up making an awkward split season out of it all...the Cincinnati Reds, sporting the best overall record in baseball with their ace pitcher Tom Seaver going 14-1, didn't even make the playoffs! The Miami Dolphins, with the alternating quarterback duo of Woodley and Strock, got back into the playoffs but lost an incredibly exciting opening round playoff game against Dan Fouts and his San Diego Chargers at year's end...I think the 49ers with Joe Montana ended up winning their first Super Bowl of many that season. But back to those sci-fi stories...
POLYPHEMUS by Michael Shea
An exploratory mission to a mostly desert distant world finds the crew in a life-or death struggle in one of its lakes as a behemoth of an aquatic creature, much worse than Moby Dick or Jaws with its neural network of tethered shark-and-squid-like "components", takes apart and consumes the trapped crew one by one. In their midst is a classic he-man hero type, Nemo Jones, and of course he has to take center stage in their final desperate act to escape the monster's clutches. The novella's premise was fun and exciting...the author's tendency to overly describe the creature's biology in painful detail wasn't and made the story drag...
ABSENT THEE FROM FELICITY AWHILE... by Somtow Sucharitkul
Reminiscent of the Bill Murray Groundhog Day movie that came out twelve years later, humanity on Earth one evening is beset by an advanced alien elementary school class that freezes everyone into repeating the same day...going on millions of years according to their own time scale as they are practically immortal. Everyone is aware of the situation they are in and many try to change their actions to effect different outcomes, discussing their tactics during the two-hour daily "free time" the aliens allow them. What a quirky little tale that made me wonder whether the creator of that movie didn't get his or her ideas from here...
Next week I continue reviewing science fiction short stories from 1981...
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