Weekly Short Stories: 1986 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look at 1986 short science fiction as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1987 Annual World's Best SF, featuring his picks from the previous year.  1986 was the year of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown disaster in northern Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union.  Now it's 2022 and the invading Russian forces seem to have learned nothing about the environmental consequences of damaging these kinds of facilities...doesn't look good for our planet's future when madmen can gain control over entire, heavily nuclear-armed nations and sacrifice untold lives and threaten the world order just to alter borderlines on maps. It's almost as if I'm living out a surreal apocalyptic story, sad to say.  But back to the book's final four tales...before we all run out of time... 

INTO GOLD by Tanith Lee

A historical fiction tale set in the frontiers of post-Roman Empire rule in Central Europe, the remnants of an outpost town, beset earlier by a devastating fire, are treated to a trade caravan from the East that includes a young woman who can transmute anything to gold.  The narrator is suspicious of her motives as she seduces and marries his old friend, the town's military leader.  A story that brings up notions of alchemy and the possibility that some of us just might be more than human...

THE LIONS ARE ASLEEP THIS NIGHT by Howard Waldrop

Imagine an alternative world where the African slave trade is reversed, colonization is overthrown much earlier, and this continent rises to become a modern society.  A little boy in a western African nation likes to read and has aspirations as a writer. His books inspire him to write a play based on an earlier, more traditional society...but will the local publisher accept it? 

AGAINST BABYLON by Robert Silverberg

Here "Babylon" is really Los Angeles in the present time (1986) as a firefighter pilot works with others to contain massive fires started by the landing of three large alien ships around the city.  What are their intentions, and were the fires, which seem out of control, deliberate or accidental?  The pilot's own wife, a freethinker, appears to have been abducted by the strange visitors, complicating matters further.  I think this could make a good movie...

STRANGERS IN PARADISE by Damon Knight

A space traveler finally gains permission to visit perhaps the only human paradise in the universe, a planet settled and terraformed a few hundred years before, with what seems to be a perfectly workable social system without violence.  He wants to visit where their great poet lived and learn why she suddenly ceased writing anymore.  A rather stark, sad reflection on what it means to be human, even a "good" human...

Next week I'll continue reviewing science fiction short stories from 1986, but from a different source: Gardner Dozois' excellent anthology series...