Today I begin looking at science fiction short stories from the year 1986, as they appeared in the anthology The 1987 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his picks from the previous year. 1986 was a very crucial, turning point in my life as it was when I met and fell in love with Melissa, culminating in our September marriage that year. And here are my reviews of the first three stories from this book...
PERMAFROST by Roger Zelazny
This is quite a brilliant little story, where the protagonist is basically the bad guy...but that's not so apparent at first. It's a frozen planet whose climate is largely regulated for human habitation by an extensive machine system indwelled by a man's consciousness. How he deals with our visiting "hero", who seems to be on a secretive quest, sets the stage for one of the best short story endings I've read...
TIMERIDER by Doris Egan
Think of time travel and you think of people engaged in altruistic work to change the world's flow of history to the better, or of evil entities or machines determined to sustain their future dominion by manipulating the past. But what would probably happen is revealed here: ordinary, run of the mill greed. A spunky young time traveler takes on an assignment for her organization to retrieve a figurine from the past...in the process her eyes are opened...
PRETTY BOY CROSSOVER by Pat Cadigan
Called an example of "cyberpunk" science fiction, a "pretty" young man frequents night clubs, one of them literally run by his old friend, now an entity inhabiting a computer network. If you read the first of today's tales, Permafrost, you get a very similar concept. Only this story is awesome as it is written from a very special point of view in the context of a culture that, if you look at it hard enough, isn't that much different than what we have today...
Next week: more reviews from Wollheim's anthology...
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