Below are my reactions to four more short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection. It was in 1987 that I taught myself rudimentary computer programming skills...all to create a training program, using BASIC language, on an old Atari game console that my brother-in-law left with us, that simulated the city scheme computer training I was undergoing for my impending job as a postal letter sorting machine clerk. My program, consisting of timed random numerical iterations passing by on the screen, fully prepared me to pass the modules that more than 90% of the rest of newly hired trainees were failing. Switching over to working at the post office was a curious type of culture shock for me considering the social climate there that was vastly different from anything I had experienced in the work force before. Well, maybe I'll tactfully elaborate on some of that after I eventually retire...for now, let's discuss those stories...
BUFFALO GALS, WON'T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT by Ursula K. Le Guin
A little girl being flown over the SW US desert falls out of a crashing plane and somehow survives, being rescued and cared for by a coyote...or is it a woman? She soon realizes that there are two types of humanity and her newly adopted community consists of the first, with the residents living dual existences as people and the native animals. This sounded to me like a speculative adventure as to "what if" American Indian myths were literally true...
GLASS CLOUD by James Patrick Kelly
The extremely intricate and advanced march forward with technology is contrasted in this novella with the often-crass inanity motivating humans...and even supposedly more advanced aliens...in their decision-making progress. Architect Phillip Wing's vision of a Glass Cloud has been accepted as one of the future Modern Wonders of the World, but his personal life has entered a time of turmoil and all signs of the cause seem to point to an ostensibly benevolent, but shallow, alien named Ndavu whose race is subtlety ruling the Earth from the background and which is promoting the notion of immortality through machines. The nature of immortality and whether it is even desirable get treatment here, as well as the often-banal reasons for major undertakings...
THE EVENING AND THE MORNING AND THE NIGHT by Octavia E. Butler
The best story of the today's four by far, in my opinion, it's also pure, hard science fiction...and has an ominous bearing on what's going on in the world today. The cure for cancer has been found in a special vaccine shot. Only one problem: it drastically alters the genetic makeup of the recipient to the point that they eventually tear at and eat their own flesh...before beginning on that of others. A young woman is the offspring of two such parents...both of them have succumbed to the brand-new disease and she carries the fatal gene. In a future of no hope, she visits, with another so afflicted, his mother who was in the advanced throes but has been stabilized at a new, special retreat. There they learn their respective fates...
NIGHT OF THE COOTERS by Howard Waldrop
Reminiscent of the old fifties film version of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but with a vastly different (and much funnier) outcome. The invading Martians have picked two Earth sites to stage their invasion: London, England and some hole-in-the-ground rural town in Texas: they should have stayed away from the latter. The local citizenry mobilizes with their weaponry, and they sock it to the thoroughly disgusting aliens before anyone else in the country can get there to help. Ha-ha-ha-ha...
Next week: more about 1987 short science fiction from the Dozois anthology...
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