Today I begin my look at the year 1990 in short science fiction, as presented in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection. At the time I was in my fourth year at the Gainesville post office, working the late night/early morning shift processing mail on the LSM (letter sorting machine) and FSM (flat sorting machine). Since then, pretty much everything has been automatized, but I was fortunate to be able to work during the last years of "mechanization". Yet even in 1990 an OCR (optical character reader) was installed in our already overcrowded downtown facility....we wouldn't move to the newly built warehouse-size building near I-75 until June, 1991. Anyway, here are my thoughts about the first three stories in the Dozois anthology...
MR. BOY by James Patrick Kelly
It is the year 2096 and the filthy rich are beyond filthy as they flaunt their wealth and alter their own genes to cut back to their youth, as the protagonist Peter, "Mr. Boy", goes from 25 to 10 years physical age. Or drastically alter their bodies' structure and appearance: Peter's friend Stenni resembles a dinosaur and his own mother the Statue of Liberty...inside which he himself lives! The rich kids still interact...just like today...with the unrich, the "stiffs" (like us) who age normally: Peter is so sensitive to them that he can smell the "stink" in their age. But he encounters a teenage "stiff" girl Tree who introduces him to a side of life his pampered existence has shielded him from. In the process he confronts an adversary in the form of a software bot trying to reprogram his own robot servant. Written from the spoiled rich kid's perspective, it reminded me of another privileged, snotty rich kid I went to college with and who constantly reminded everyone around him of his perceived superiority...ugh...
THE SHOBIES' STORY by Ursula K. Le Guin
In a humanity many thousands of years into the future, people have dispersed into space, settling worlds many light-years away and genetically changing to the point where offspring can become both male and female at the same time. But travel is still barred from going past the speed of light, slowing things down considerably and presenting a strong barrier between star systems. That is until now, when a new method is invented that seems to transcend physics and delves into the metaphysical world of relationships and consciousness. A close-knit group of ten people ranging from adults to little children have been selected to test the new method, and their cohesion...and its shortfalls...are starkly exposed when they make the instantaneous jump to a planet far, far away...
THE CARESS by Charles Sheffield
A police investigator in 2060 discovers a woman murdered in her home...and then goes into the basement to find, to his horror and amazement, a comatose woman...or is she a leopard: human head on a cat's body. His efforts to solve the murder and explain this bizarre entity lead him to an old painting and what is behind it all. The notion of being so rich and powerful as to be untouchable by the law is a theme here...as, sadly, we're already seeing around us...
Next week I continue with the next science fiction short stories from 1990...
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