Here are my reactions to the final three 1984 science fiction short stories appearing in Donald Wollheim's anthology The 1985 Annual World's Best SF, featuring choices from the year before. Let's see...1984 was a special year for me in spectator football: the University of Florida Gators, under head coach Charlie Pell, won their first Southeastern Conference championship ever, but wait: Pell violated some important rules, the championship taken away, and all we got was a new coach, Galen Hall. The Miami Dolphins had a storybook year under second-year quarterback Dan Marino...it looked for a while as if they might go undefeated. But their stellar defense from just two years earlier was depleted and they got kicked in the Super Bowl against Joe Montana's San Francisco 49ers. And now, those stories...
BLOODCHILD by Octavia E. Butler
Not a story for the squeamish, Bloodchild exposes the adaptability of humans to one of the most extreme of conditions: complete subjugation by an alien race that reproduces by infesting their bodies with larvae. Gross, utterly gross...and fascinating, especially all the rationalization going on from the humans' perspective: it seems that it's possible to develop a good-sounding doctrine for anything, good enough for folks to swallow hook, line and sinker...
THE COMING OF THE GOONGA by Garyl W. Shockley
Sometimes in science fiction stories the aliens are humanoid and very similar to ourselves...in this story they are vastly different, not only in chemistry and structure but how they view their own deaths. A human exploratory party on such a planet goes into war mode after one of them is killed by a goonga, a native organism their sentient adversaries use as a weapon. The story is unique, written by an alien after its death...reminds me of a hilarious old John Belushi Saturday Night Live skit where he's a demented sailing ship captain and ends with "Chapter 2: I Was Eaten by Sharks"....
MEDRA by Tanith Lee
Medra is a woman living in isolation on a distant planet, on the 89th floor of the hotel her father had built in a completely abandoned metropolis. Her waking life is lonely, she being the only human left on this forsaken world, but her dreams liberate her to travel across the universe. A man lands there on a paid mission to find a fabled weapon of universal destruction. How she handles him, and what her own true mission is, comes out at the story's end. It is a brief but beautiful and sad little tale...in a funny way it reminded me of Stephen King's Dark Tower series that I am now rereading...
Next week I start examining 1984 stories from the Gardner Dozois anthology...
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