Here are my reactions to three more science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fourth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois and featuring his selections from 1986. That year I was completing a lengthy stint as a cook in a local Chinese restaurant...the following year I would start work at the post office and am still there: I don't change jobs very often. Well, here are those stories I was talking about...
THE PURE PRODUCT by John Kessel
Imagine a future world where not only all diseases are eradicated, but the injured body heals and seals itself, guaranteeing people invulnerability as well as immortality. Now imagine further a psychopath from this era who has gone back in time and is currently looking for kicks among us...that's the setting for this tale where the narrator is about as cold and brutal as one could get...
GRAVE ANGELS by Richard Kearns
This story reminds me of Ray Bradbury's nostalgic novel Dandelion Wine in that it depicts the deaths of different people in a boy's life. This time it's from the vantage point of the town's two racially segregated cemeteries, where an angelic elderly black man digs in advance the graves for those about to die...
TANGENTS by Greg Bear
If you're wondering about the 3-dimensional shadows that 4-dimensional "objects" cast, this story's for you. It's also about how our society can make misfits out of its most brilliant members and cruelly dispose of them, as an elderly English man patterned after Alan Turing (see the movie The Imitation Game) and a precocious young Korean orphan boy join forces to explore what lies beyond our ordinary reality. Pretty cool ending...
Next week: more from '86...
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