Today I continue my look back at 1986 in the realm of short science fiction, switching to Gardner Dozois' lengthy anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection. As is usually the case between the two year-by-year anthologies I'm currently covering...the other one is edited by Donald A. Wollheim...there is a small bit of overlap. Although the following stories are in the Dozois book, they're also in Wolheim's, so I've already read and reviewed them: R & R by Lucius Shepard, Strangers on Paradise by Damon Knight, Pretty Boy Crossover by Pat Cadigan, Against Babylon by Robert Silverberg and Into Gold by Tanith Lee. And now here are my reviews of the first four tales (excluding the above) in the Dozois anthology, all of them interestingly Earthbound...
HATRACK RIVER by Orson Scott Card
This is a story set in a rural alternative American Midwest, either pre-or-postindustrial. Eleanor is a little girl with an acknowledged and accepted gift of telepathy. The people in her family and others are very superstitious...no science or advanced technology here. A flooded river threatens to wash away another family trying to cross it, including a woman about to give birth. It's up to Eleanor to summon up help, but will it be in time? I had some trouble wrapping my head around this story, although the characters were compelling...
FIDDLING FOR WATERBUFFALOES by Somtow Sucharitkul
A farcical introduction to traditional Thai culture as an alien has mentally possessed a young man's brother, with the aim of extracting on of their crucial components left behind at an archaeologic ruin some centuries earlier. Lek's abrupt changes in behavior flummoxes everyone and may interfere with the two brothers' plans to open their own live-dubbing movie theater. Mary, an American visiting archaeologist, romances our hero and sheds light on her mission, tied in with the aliens' agenda. A really kooky, funny tale...
SEA CHANGE by Scott Baker
Sometime in the future the Tla, benevolent giant alien beings, have arrived and live on Earth alongside a depleted human population. In what is left of Venice, Italy, one of them dies...but a little boy thinks he knows better as he is able to hear the Tla, now in a much smaller form and in the water around him. Many of them call to him, resulting in an ambiguous ending, either happy or tragic depending on your viewpoint. It reminded me of a much earlier story from 1943, Lewis Padgett's classic Mimsy Were the Borogroves...
COVENANT OF SOULS by Michael Swanwick
The world is not only severely running down in this tale of a most peculiar, large church with a sinister entity hovering over its altar, but it's also on the brink of a nuclear holocaust: oh joy. Hard to find anything to hold on to here...everything seems to be getting worse as Peter, the manager, is ordered to fire the aging custodian Sam, who is suffering from cancer, while desperate homeless people are everywhere and a young woman, Jenny, is seen as a ghost infiltrating the church. Throw in a badass government black-ops dude and the dystopia is complete. Swanwick must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that morning when he wrote this, but Dozois obviously liked it...
Next week: more of my reactions to stories appearing in the Dozois anthology from 1986...
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