Today I continue looking at 1988 science fiction short stories from the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents the 1989 Annual World's Best SF, with selections by the series' editor from the previous year. 1988, sadly, changed forever the way national presidential elections are conducted in America, with hateful and often false innuendoes openly promoted by major political parties against the others' candidates. In this case Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, the pleasant enough and competent former governor of Massachusetts, who I genuinely liked, was torn apart during the final weeks of the campaign by the Republican political dirty tricks machine in scathing televised political ads...and the public bought it, easily electing George H.W. Bush in the election after Dukakis had an earlier large lead in the polls. The lesson from this: wallow in the mud of defamation and lies if you want to get elected...Trumpism is a direct consequence of this campaign. Sigh, back to the stories, which to me were equally disturbing...
THE FLIES OF MEMORY by Ian Watson
Novella-length, this story has the common theme of "aliens among us", ostensibly peacefully going about their business while the press and popular imagination run rampant with speculation about their motives. But the walking "flies" have stated their aim: to "remember" as much of Earth as practicable. The questions then are why, and what about the sections of reality that are suddenly disappearing? The protagonists shift in this tale, from Charles, an expert on body language hired to determine the truthfulness of the flies' claims, to Olivia, who can see into the future. I felt the story could have been a bit shorter without detracting from it. On the other hand, maybe the author had intended it as a novel and cut it down to novella-size, who knows...
SKIN DEEP by Kristine Katherine Rusch
Humans have this terribly annoying trait of settling into an area inhabited by others and then treating the native people and animals as outsiders...this is the story of a shape-shifting native "boy" on a distant, recently colonized world, trying to survive in the midst of suspicion and prejudice. This is the best kind of sci-fi, projected into the future in an otherworldly setting while providing allegorical themes about the shortcomings of our human nature at home in the present...
A MADONNA OF THE MACHINE by Tanith Lee
Reading this immediately reminded me of the old silent movie Metropolis, where workers are practically welded to the machines they work at. In this story of the future, humanity has been reduced to working on "the" Machine, which assigns and regulates every...I mean every...facet of their lives, and their names have similarly been reduced to just uncapitalized first names. But since peter and anna, the story's focus, have only known this life from birth, they see nothing amiss...that is, until a strange female apparition sporadically begins to appear to them and the others. To me this read like a forerunner to The Matrix, with errors in the Machine's design and programming assigned to a special entity...in that movie's case it's the character Neo and here the "Madonna of the Machine". Humanity's increasing dependence on technology gets the full treatment here...
Next week: more reviews from Wollheim's anthology covering 1988 sci-fi...
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