Today I advance a year in my reviewing of old science fiction short stories to the year 1984 and return for a while to Donald A. Wollheim's anthology series, this volume titled The 1985 Annual World's Best SF, presenting stories he selected from the previous year. In '84 I was single, living a frugal existence in southwest Gainesville in a studio apartment across the field on Windmeadows Boulevard from my workplace, where I worked as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. I had moved to this area because it seemed quieter...exactly the opposite of what it is like today. But back to those stories...
THE PICTURE MAN by John Dalmas
The protagonist/scientist (a good way to quickly identify a story as science fiction) one night discovers a vagrant rummaging through his garbage. On impulse he invites him in, feeds him and lets him clean up, providing him with fresh, clean clothes. In gratitude the man, identifying himself as a handyman with a Finnish background, asks his generous host to take a Polaroid picture of him. The resulting photos are of different scenes that Jaakko Savimaki's mind unconsciously projects onto film. When he's recommended to the college's scientists for an interview, the stakes grow to the point where there is a danger of his exploitation or worse. I thought the author could have done better with this interesting idea, but he did make the characters' respective personalities stand out well...
CASH CROP by Connie Willis
In a future of interstellar travel and settlement, one planet's settlement cannot grow like the others because of the constantly mutating scarlet fever variety there that keeps the population sick and dying. One little girl seems resistant to it...or is she? A story about how distant settlements might be unfairly treated by the main suppliers, a possible analogy to how in our day wealthy nations treat the poor ones, taking advantage of their natural resources while keeping the population in a precarious state of dependence...
WE REMEMBER BABYLON by Ian Watson
Alexander and Deborah...from different backgrounds in the story's future America...visit a newly resurrected Babylon in the Arizona desert, specially built and designed to recreate as much as possible about this ancient city in order to possibly glean some insight to help humanity get through the future. The setting is Alexander the Great's final days of sickness in his empire's capital city. The two visitors get to know the city and its culture...Deborah even goes up the Tower of Babel, which I thought was only mythical. Alexander has a conversation with his perpetually dying namesake (or should I say the actor who portrays him). I'm not sure what the point of this story was other than try to give a sense of what Babylon may have been like...which seems like a pretty sorry, miserable place if you ask me. But to derive some insight from its re-creation with folks from the present filling the various roles seems like an exercise in folly...
WHAT MAKES US HUMAN by Stephen R. Donaldson
It is the future and humanity has travelled the stars, albeit slowly, staying well under the barrier of the speed of light. One settlement, on the planet Aster, after earlier losing its knowledge of technology, has rebuilt it and is on its own interstellar voyage with all but two of its passengers in deep sleep. The couple that is awake takes turns with the others in maintaining the ship...on this shift trouble comes in an alien robot ship that has them tagged for destruction. The story's ending demonstrates the wily boldness that exemplifies humanity at its greatest,...probably what the author had in mind with its title...
Next week: more from 1984 and Donald A. Wollheim's sci-fi anthology...
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