Today I begin reviewing 1988 science fiction short stories from the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1989 Annual World's Best SF, featuring the editor's picks from the previous year. For me 1988 marked my first full year working at the Gainesville post office, in the specialized capacity of a letter sorting machine clerk working the late-night, early-morning shift. I think I can confidently say that I enjoyed that assignment and actually miss working on that machine, which has been long replaced nationwide by automated letter sorting machines. But back then each of us (twelve consoles per machine) would sit there keying the destination codes for each letter as it passed in front of us, 50-60 per minute. The fact that I could listen to the radio on my headset made it even better, initially focusing on my local country station and then switching over time to Rock-104. Good times, good times...that was back when Gainesville's mail processing was done at the Downtown Station, situated across the street from the public library. But enough of my old job, let's look at those stories...
THE GIVING PLAGUE by David Brin
This is an especially relevant story in today's backdrop of COVID-19, different evolving strains and vaccines. Here a new blood-borne virus has been detected, and it owes its own survival and propagation to the effect it has on its carriers: altruism, crystallized in the desire to donate blood. An ambitious and unscrupulous medical scientist narrates this story as he tries to wrest credit from the actual discoverer while trying to determine the scope of this new scourge...
PEACHES FOR MAD MOLLY by Steven Gould
In a not-so-distant future marked by overpopulation and a virtual autocratic police state ruled by those with wealth and privilege...you know, where we're heading...skyscrapers live up to their name as a new subculture thrives on the outer walls, hundreds of stories from the ground where a single false step brings a very long fall and death. The protagonist has a special mission: pick up supplies from a lower floor...and bring back some fresh peaches for one of his co-dwellers. But there's a hitch: twenty of the floors along his way (on the building's outside) are controlled by a hostile gang...and among them is his nemesis. Exciting plot and a clever premise...
SHAMAN by John Shirley
In yet another dystopian future scenario, a technologically advanced police state has created a social withdrawal to localized gang-controlled sectors in the big cities. Quinn, accompanied by his group of Cisco, Zizz and Bower, must pass through an urban zone occupied by a militant Muslim gang to get to the "Middle Man" on the way to rescuing a social activist from the controlling government's tightly run skyscraper prison. The Middle Man has his own ideas about how to fight back against authoritarianism, and they reminded me much of Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods....
SHRÖDINGER'S KITTEN by George Alex Effinger
A young Middle Eastern woman keeps reliving one disturbing scene in her life where she waits overnight in a hometown alleyway to stab (or not stab) a young man who will enter it just before dawn and sexually assault her (or try to). This alternates with flashes forward when she is an assistant to German physicist Werner Heisenberg, author of his Uncertainty Principle and one of the leaders of the Nazi project to develop an atomic weapon during World War II. It was hard for me to figure out this tale, with all the jumping back and forth and all, but I guess the main point is the woman tying in Heisenberg's discoveries with her own experiences...which reminded me of the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five getting "unstuck in time"...only here it happens in multiple universes...
Next week: more from Wollheim's '88 anthology...
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