Today I continue discussing short stories from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best SF, Fifth Annual Collection. 1987 was an interesting year for me in sports. In baseball, the World Series, between the St. Louis Cardinals and the improbable Minnesota Twins went seven games: that's nothing new. But it was the only time that the home team won every game in the Series, leading all of them into the ninth inning. In pro football, the NFL experienced its second players' strike in five years...this one in mid-season...and the owners decided to use replacement non-union players (scabs in union parlance) to fill in the missing games. So, in the American Conference East, Baltimore went 3-0 during this period while my Dolphins, without Dan Marino, went 1-2...and missed the playoffs by one game: what a rip-off. The only redeeming factor in the season was former Tampa Bay quarterback Doug Williams, now for Washington, thoroughly kicking Denver in the Super Bowl...but that happened in early 1988. Okay, enough about sports, how about those stories...
EVER AFTER by Susan Palwick
This is dark fantasy, not science fiction. In a medieval culture, this story reads more like Cinderella with Caitlyn subbing for her, and her "fairy godmother" is an earthly woman of a distinctively familiar, scary persuasion...maybe I should term this tale "gothic fairy tale horror" instead...
THE FOREST OF TIME by Michael Flynn
An alternative reality in which the United States is broken up into warring sections, the "country" of Pennsylvania is visited, accidently, by a scientist from "our" Earth who has researched interdimensional travel and has lost his way back home. Different individuals in the military interrogate him in captivity after his rescue in the wilds. It's these interactions that make the story work for me as the reader sees different motivating factors at work...
THE MILLION-DOLLAR WOUND by Dean Whitlock
My favorite story of today's bunch, it takes the state's exploitation of its soldiers in wartime to its logical conclusion as Billy thinks he got his "million-dollar wound" that will take him out of the brutal ongoing Bolivian war and save him...but he instead is "saved" by advanced medicine and returned to combat duty. He and his buddies soon see that their loophole of surviving this conflict through injury is being thwarted at every step, as modern medical technology and procedures seem to have the answer to every eventuality. You might think a story like this is promising, but it's really kinda scary...
THE MOON OF POPPING TREES by R. Garcia y Robertson
The 1890 massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee and its leading causes, including the Ghost Dance, form the focus of this tale, told from the vantage point of a young Indian woman caring for an elderly shamanic Indian man. Their dreams are entangled with modern physics of the relativity sort, recognized by a white Quaker at the local school. He helps them as they embark on a vision quest into the forbidden Black Hills. And then there is the Tachyon, which really sends this story deeply into the science fiction realm...
DINER by Neal Barrett, Jr.
Where are the birds and why are there so many annoying bugs? This question and others are eventually answered as a man in a near-future western Gulf coast fishing town lives his daily existence in poverty along with the other townsfolk...the food, drink...even cigarettes...are all substandard, but they get by. And then there are the Chinese functionaries and soldiers who exercise authority over them. Implied is a future conflict between the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. that's leaves the Chinese in control to pick up the pieces and reorganize the world as they envision it...
Next week I conclude my look at short science fiction from the year 1987...
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