It's Wednesday, and so once again here I am discussing short science fiction from 1990 as it appeared in Gardner Dozois' excellent anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection. In the summer of that year, nothing in the international news seemed to indicate trouble...in fact, the Soviets had withdrawn from its invasion of Afghanistan and there was a blooming of freedom, democracy and independence in a number of Eastern European countries. Then, it seemed suddenly, Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein instigated a conflict with oil-rich neighboring Kuwait and invaded it, setting off a chain reaction of alliances, culminating in the United States and several allies, with at least the tacit support of usual adversaries Iran and Syria, amassing troops in Saudi Arabia near occupied Kuwait's border in Operation Desert Shield...to be changed the following January to Desert Storm when the fighting began. There had been a lot of debate in Congress as to whether to authorize action, but the measures to support President Bush (the original one) eventually passed. Well, back to these own tense times of ours today and my reactions to three more stories...
THE ALL-CONSUMING by Robert Frazier
In a rural Central America of the near future, where the economy sucks and the nearby jungle is a morass of pollution and extremely dangerous, toxic and utterly gross mutated life forms, a man arrives with a lot of money to lure a local man, whose outlook on life has turned cynical because of his past unjust treatment, to provide him with the jungle to eat...and he will eat anything! The vivid imagery in this story is brilliant and completely disturbing...not for the queasy or weak at heart. Yet can I say that it resolves itself equally brilliantly? Totally impossible, but fun to speculate about...
PERSONAL SILENCE by Molly Gloss
In a nightmare future of perpetual world war...and I mean covering the whole planet...a pacifist journalist literally mutilated from his travel experiences writes about his one-man planet-crossing from different locales, to be serialized in an overseas paper. He is now in Miffle, Washington...a nondescript little town on the tip of the state's northwest peninsula...as he decides to build a boat to take him to Vancouver a few miles north. The man letting him camp on his property has a daughter, and she carries with her a disturbing prophecy about herself and the war. This is more than about plot or characters, rather instead a mood piece about how it might all go down if the fools at the top aren't careful with their lethal toys and egos: in that sense it's scary seeing some of them doing essentially the same kinds of things today...
INVADERS by John Kessel
This satirical tale jumps between three areas: Pizzaro's Spanish invasion of the Incan Empire in 1532, a "soft" invasion of cocaine-dependent aliens in the near-future bringing with them all sorts of panaceas for humanity's problems...and the author essaying out his thoughts on the fictional genre of science fiction. A light-hearted story about how time travel into the past might be possible...but I saw the Christopher Pine Star Trek movie a few years ago and already know about it...
Next week I continue with reviews of sci-fi tales from 1990...
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