Today I move on to examine four more 1985 short stories in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Third Annual Collection, edited by the late Gardner Dozois, a sci-fi writer in his own right. In 1985 I was living in Gainesville and in August one Saturday morning I woke up to find my town in a panic as powerful Hurricane Elena had abruptly changed course and was sitting in the Gulf of Mexico just past Cedar Key, poised to strike us. I hurried to my nearby Publix...it was overrun with folks crazily buying up everything and I just turned around and went home. Turns out Elena did another about-face and ended up striking the Gulf Alabama-Mississippi coast instead, completely missing us. But back to those four stories...
SOLSTICE by James Patrick Kelly
This is a rather disjointed novella set in the future when the solar system is being explored in person. People can be regularly placed in suspended animation for decades and developers of novel mind-altering drugs are treated as rock superstars. One such "drug artist" is Tony Cage, or Cage for short. His ongoing story is his concern for the welfare and happiness of his clone, a young woman named Wynne. She's falling in with a man to whom Cage, an unlikable manipulative sort, objects...does any of this interest you? Funny, it didn't me...neither did the strange sections scattered throughout the piece describing the history of Stonehenge in England and various theories about what it was for. Sometimes with short stories I come across an unsatisfactory one, but when it's a novella I feel as if I just wasted a lot of time...
DUKE PASQUALE'S RING by Avram Davidson
Another novella in this very fat anthology of stories, it's set in Europe late in the 19th century as a would-be minor nobleman, a pauper with his wife in their hometown, is still accorded the respect of a king by others...at least nominally. But the story is really about how one of the author's recurring characters, a kind of Sherlock Holmes of this time and place, encounters an evil individual and thwarts his designs on the king and queen. Not exactly science fiction unless you consider shapeshifting as a qualifying element of that genre. I liked the tongue-in-cheek, humorous way this story was written...
MORE THAN THE SUM OF HIS PARTS by Joe Haldeman
In the future, an engineer suffers a horrible accident in space near the moon and is quickly operated on, most of his body replaced by parts making him primarily a cyborg...and much stronger and invulnerable in many respects than everyone else. It all goes to his head...reminded me of one of the first original Star Trek episodes...
OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS by Nancy Kress
An alien walks into a country diner...sounds familiar if you've seen the old Twilight Zone episode. But in this brief tale the alien is the normal "person" as the diner's employees and patrons display the full gamut of knee-jerk and bigoted reactions to this polite and reserved individual dressed in a nice suit with a blue head under his hat. I didn't get what the author was trying to say except that maybe that she thought country folk were a bunch of ignorant hicks...
Next week I continue reviewing 1985 sci-fi stories from the Dozois anthology...
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