Today I finish examining some 1982 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The 1983 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his choices from the preceding year. I remember 1982 as the first year I really paid deep attention to Major League Baseball by watching it on TV: the Atlanta Braves were featured on Ted Turner's Superstation WTBS and I followed their Cinderella season with manager Joe Torre, finally rising from obscurity in the National League West with stars like Dale Murphy, Bob Horner and Phil Niekro to win that division by a game over Tommy Lasorda's Los Angeles Dodgers...a terrible late-season slump by the Braves had made it much closer than it might have been. Well, here are my reactions to those final three tales in the book...
SOULS by Joanna Russ
Many hundreds of years ago a European abbey is besieged by a group of barbaric, conquering Normans, but the abbess in charge attempts to save her own people by offering the invaders a special deal, promising riches that they couldn't imagine as long as they refrain from violence. Over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that she is something quite beyond who she is pretending to be, in this world but not of it. This novella reportedly was only a part of a larger work, but editor Wollheim included it in his anthology...to me it was only marginally science fiction...
SWARM by Bruce Sterling
In the future what is left of humanity is divided in a life and death struggle between the Mechanists who control the asteroids and the Reshaped, who dwell out by Saturn's rings. An agent of the latter is on a mission to a special star system populated by a swarm of highly interconnected organisms...he wants to take their genetics and generate a force of slave labor for his own people. The unexpected ending is profound and sadly timely, reflecting on mankind's self-destructive nature through war. When this came out, the Cold War was ramping up again...and now with the invasion of Ukraine, here we go again...
PEG-MAN by Rudy Rucker
Reading like a couple of South Park episodes I know, a woman's husband has become something of a video game addict where he works as an arcade mechanic. Only he claims there is more to his favorite game, "Peg-Man", than it seems. One day she and her old calculus professor pay him a visit at his workplace...like I said, it's like South Park (especially that fifth-season episode with Towelie and the Crab People)...
Next week I'll begin looking at 1983 science fiction short stories...
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