Today I finish my look at the year 1989 in short science fiction as it appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection. I have enjoyed reading through these stories, although it's very clear how much better some are than others. A lot of it, as far as I am concerned, has to do with whether the author lays out a clear narrative in plain language or tries to be "literary" or "cute" and muddle up the narrative enough to where the reader spends too much time and effort just trying to figure out what's going on. There's a good mix of these two extremes with the following four stories...
JUST ANOTHER PERFECT DAY by John Varley
A victim of a motorcycle accident in 1989 now suffers from a short-term memory impairment that has him forgetting the previous day's events upon falling asleep, having to start all over again each time. He wakes up again and encounters a note he wrote to himself to guide and inform him along his clean-slate new day, and there's some disquieting "new" news...
THE LOCH MOOSE MONSTER by Janet Kagan
A quirky little yarn about settlers on a distant world where scientists can seed...through plants...different forms of genetically modified animal life. There's rumored to be a mysterious, monstrous creature in a lake, but from the title you might guess what form it takes...
THE ODD OLD BIRD by Avram Davidson
This story of Archaeopteryx, the first bird...being discovered in the present, or at least a couple of centuries ago, seemed strangely derivative to me, to the point where I accurately anticipated the punchline ending as it were all a twisted joke to be slowly revealed. These kinds of stories either work or not...knowing in advance how it would end kind of ruined it for me since I read something very similar in a previous anthology...
GREAT WORK OF TIME by John Crowley
Crowley takes time travel fiction to its frustrating and paradoxical extremes in this novella as a man is caught time-traveling between the years 1983 and 1883, while a secret organization whose aim is to prevent the collapse of the British Empire takes advantage of the time machine to subtly manipulate history, using the protagonist as point man to effect the most pivotal change of all. But there is a grave cost to all this tinkering with time, causing me to wonder whether Stephen King read this story and may have used some of its ideas in his great 2011 novel 11/22/63, although he claims he first thought of the story back in 1971: maybe King has a time machine, too...
Next time (I plan to a week off from this blog) I move on to the year 1990 as I continue to discuss science fiction short stories...
No comments:
Post a Comment