Here are my reviews of four more stories from the year 1990 as they appeared in Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection. In last week's article I mentioned my two favorite songs from that year, but late that summer Led Zeppelin's first box set came out and one of Gainesville's radio stations, WRUF/Rock 104 (now airing country and western) played it in its entirety, introducing me to a lot of extraordinary music I hadn't yet heard from this great rock bank, defunct since 1980. The next two years for me would be dominated musically by Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham's catalog of songs. But for now, back to those four stories...
CIBOLA by Connie Willis
A Colorado-based newspaper reporter gets a touchy assignment: interviewing a local woman claiming to know where Coronado's fabled Seven Cities of Cibola are. Apparently in the past, the myth of Cibola had led explorers to the American southwest, but this woman claims it to be right smack in the middle of Colorado...although it's only visible at certain times. A very funny tale this is, with a surprising...well, not all THAT surprising, ending...
WALKING THE MOONS by Jonathan Lethem
Another funny story, this one about a grown disabled man who is engrossed in planet-hopping, at least vicariously through the use of his virtual reality apparatus, as his mother attends to his physical/medical needs. Yet again, here comes a journalist to get his scoop. This story is prescient...written in 1990 but here I am 33 years later "virtually" running marathons while watching recordings of real ones on my widescreen TV...
RAINMAKER COMETH by Ian McDonald
In a part of the American west marked by seven years of drought, a man comes into town carrying an assortment of peculiar gadgets, claiming to be able to bring the "rainmakers". Exactly who the rainmakers are is beyond anyone's ability to believe...a thoroughly brilliant, creative concept you'll want to read this story to discover for yourself...
HOT SKY by Robert Silverberg
In another prescient story...this time much more ominous...about global warming gone wild written years before Al Gore popularized the subject, a ship is out to capture a giant rogue iceberg in the open Pacific Ocean to haul back to water-starved San Francisco. But at the berg's site they receive a distress signal from a boat already there. A great story about the conflicting ethics a captain can face in an emergency, with people's real lives in the balance no matter what his decision is...
Next week I conclude my look at short science fiction from the year 1990...
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