This week I have more 1984 science fiction short stories to review from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Second Annual Collection. 1984 for me was one of personal growth in the area of financial management. I was already living on relatively meager resources when that April I developed and implemented a plan and mindset of frugality and wise economic choices. It was here that I developed within me the notion that there was such a thing as "enough" and that I would never be personally susceptible to ad campaigns that tried to manufacture a want for a product I didn't want in the first place. But back to those stories...
ROCK ON by Pat Cadigan
This story is a play on the notion that rock n' roll music is based on the rhythm of sex...the setting is into the future a few decades (around now?) when rock stars record their music while connected to "sync-ers"...people with a special ability to transmit the essence of a hit while hooked up electronically...and hooked up sexually as well. The narrative is about one such sync-er...or "sinner" as the common parlance goes among them...who decides to leave the artist she's under contract with. And how once she's on the loose she then becomes a target for other acts. To me this story was a commentary about the demeaning and degradation of popular music in our time...not just in a moral sense but also in that less and less personal talent and creativity factor into stardom nowadays in favor of technology and production...give a listen to local pop mx station Kiss-105 for a little while to see what I mean: yuck....
SUNKEN GARDENS by Bruce Sterling
Another (groan) futuristic short story taking place in Sterling's fictional universe (that the editor seems to love) where Shapers and Mechanists vie for control of the solar system, here the focus is on Mars and its ongoing terraforming. The organization controlling the project has settled various outcast subgroups of Shapers on its surface and is holding a contest between them at a site called the Sunken Gardens to see which has the best terraforming ideas. But those in charge, while communicating the fact that the previous ecology there from an earlier project must first be cleared, don't tell the whole story about the life they will be obliterating...
TRINITY by Nancy Kress
This novella is a combination cloning/sibling rivalry/search for God tale. A woman's seeker sister is staying at an institute where siblings are paired in a machine to generate a strange entity that the scientist running it suspects may be God him-it-her-self. Knowing from her own past in research that such a study has produced an unusual number of deaths among the participants, she tries every trick she knows to dissuade her sister from participating and to get her out of there. Complicating matters is the clone her now-late father had made of her sister and the efforts to bring him into the project. I think my problem with this story is that it had too many different areas of focus...
THE TROUBLE WITH THE COTTON PEOPLE by Ursula K. Le Guin
Set on a future Earth or may another world...the author doesn't reveal this...society is rather primitive with the northern area trading their wine across the Inland Sea for the cotton grown and provided by the southern people. Only one problem: the cotton they are receiving is starting to be inferior quality...should they send it back, cut back on their wine exports, or do something else? Finally, they decide a combination of all three, choosing to send a small delegation to the south to ascertain the problem and negotiate a solution. It is their experiences with the "cotton people" of the south that seem to form the moral of this quizzical tale about how to get along with those one has a dispute with...
TWILIGHT TIME by Lewis Shiner
For me the best story of the five I'm reviewing today, it does use time travel to alter the past...not necessarily the best premise for a story although H.G. Wells and Stephen King have used this device to perfection. In a near future America...and world, I presume...where proctors have been voted into permanent control of society, a couple of scientists perform an time travel experiment in their rural Arizona town. The one "going back" discovers evidence of an extraterrestrial craft tearing up a road...and a couple of frightened children convince him that something amiss is happening here. The story is a puzzle of different pieces that all come together nicely at the end...bravo, author!
Next week I continue with comments on stories from Dozois' anthology covering 1984...
No comments:
Post a Comment