Today I continue looking at 1988 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixth Annual Collection and featuring Dozois' selections. They're all good stories with interesting premises...three of them are intimately connected with the future fate of animals on our planet while the others are split between a serial killer, an indigenous culture fighting submergence and a tribute to northern European mythology. Sometimes with short stories it can take a bit of effort to figure out exactly what's going on...the second and third stories below fit that bill. My favorite of the bunch? Judith Moffett's The Hob. And now, to the stories and my reactions...
KIRINYAGA by Mike Resnick
The Kikuyu people of Kenya, like so many other groups, had to endure the oppression of European colonialism, not only dominated economically and politically but also socially and culturally, with the colonists' ethics and values supplanting their own. In this story it's a future where humans are abundantly settling other worlds, and the Kikuyu are accorded their own planet...but the outside organization monitoring and supplying them is still bound to interfere whenever a traditional practice conflicts with their own values. The response from the Kikuyu is traditional, sad...and effective...
THE GIRL WHO LOVED ANIMALS by Bruce McAllister
On our world in the future the extinctions of animal life have progressed to the point that going to a zoo is basically looking at holograms of the animals as they appeared in the past. A young abused, low-IQ woman is pregnant, having accepted money to be a surrogate mother...but it isn't a human she is carrying. The protagonist breaks her out of state custody for the sake of her own well-being and that of her growing baby in the face of adverse social and legal actions...
THE LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOES by Connie Willis
Sometimes the author in a story will quickly switch without warning back and forth between two different times and experiences...it can be a bit confusing, especially at the beginning when the reader has not picked up on the narrative's parameters. That aside, this tale of the "extinction" of Winnebagoes and other RVs is dwarfed by the realization of a much larger extinction...as well as what can happen when one regulatory agency accrues too much power for itself...
LOVE IN VAIN by Lewis Shiner
A Texas D.A. travels from his home in Dallas to a town jail just outside Austin, where dwells an accused serial killer. Only problem: Charlie has confessed to thousands of killings with detailed knowledge...killings he could not have possibly done. As the D.A. digs deeper into this mystery, his own unraveling personal life is revealed. I felt this could have been the start of a series, what with the personal back story...
THE HOB by Judith Moffett
A hairy, long-living humanoid group is coming out of its secluded hibernation in the remote Yorkshire heath country in northern England. Elphi awakes first and discovers one of his fellow hobs has died...how to get rid of the body without arousing suspicion among the surrounding humans? Along the way he accidentally encounters a young woman hiking through the area, and his story is eventually told. Sounds like a fantasy story Tolkien might have dreamed up, but there is a real science fiction angle when space travel enters the picture. A sweet story, well told...
OUR NEURAL CHERNOBYL by Bruce Sterling
A tongue-in-cheek look, from the middle of our current century, at a genetically induced biological disaster as in the 1990s genetic hackers run rampant altering human's DNA through the use of the RNA involved in HIV. If it had just ended messing up a few people's lives it would have been one thing, but the enhanced neural activity and markedly higher intelligence produced through one of the experiments inadvertently crosses species lines, producing the sometimes-comic effects the author seemed to have fun with...
Next week: more from 1988...
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