Here are my reactions to four more stories from the year 1986 as they appear in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection. To be perfectly frank, this week's entries didn't exactly set my imagination afire, and the first and third seem to have been written apparently to confuse me as to what was really going on. Sigh...sometimes as a reader you come across weeks like this...
CHANCE by Connie Willis
This is a circular tale about a woman's regrets about her decisions a couple of decades earlier, with the narrative switching without warning between her present, unsatisfactory existence and that past time when different choices...at least in her present mind...would have led to a happier existence. I don't know whether the author was making this point, but I thought that since everyone screws up along the way, then the truly regretful decision is for someone to be overly regretful about their past decisions...I did say this story is circular, didn't I? I'm not sure what was science fiction about this tale, but the worms crawling everywhere outside kind of creeped me out...
AND SO TO BED by Harry Turtledove
Turtledove, later widely known as an alternative history writer, wrote this early tale set in 1661, and which speculates what would happen had the European explorers encountered in the New World of the Americas not Native American Indians, but rather Neanderthals...which they term as "sims". A famous London diarist...a real historical figure...writes "alternative" entries that describe his relationships with the two new sims he has purchased as servants. And comes up with a controversial theory predating Darwin by nearly two centuries...
FAIR GAME by Howard Waldrop
A man, Ernst, who has built his long life on big-game hunting and adventure has been called in to a small Bavarian country village, where he is hired to hunt and kill the Wild Man who has been raiding them and killing animals and people. A Wild Man is a novelty, only in this story: they are hairy, eight-plus feet tall, descendants from "ordinary" people. Ernst is tired and old, and the village people get him a hunting partner: Mgoro, his old friend from many years back in Africa. Not spelled out directly, the nature of this hunt becomes more apparent toward the end...but it's still what I would call a "murky" story...
VIDEO STAR by Walter Jon Williams
Violent youth gang warfare only heightens in a a technology and drug-rich future. Set mainly in Arizona, Cadillac gang member Ric has high ambitions as he involves himself in associations and networks with people and organizations, none of which he can trust. On one international drug smuggling transaction he carelessly lets himself get nearly fatally poisoned and spends months in recovery. A bleak picture of a breakneck-paced future in which technology, violence and drugs rule the social reality...are we really going there (or are we there already)?
Next week I look at more stories from 1986...
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