Weekly Short Stories: 1990 Science Fiction, Part 7

Below are my final reviews from 1990 science fiction short stories and novellas appearing in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eight Annual Collection.  Can you guess which book I'm starting next week?  How'd you know...The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual Collection!  But first I have to finish up with 1990...

WHITE CITY by Lewis Shiner

This is a speculative, fanciful tale about the electrical technology pioneer Nikola Tesla...and a demonstration he publicly performs aimed to dazzle everyone.  And dazzle it does, just as Tesla planned.  What is unplanned are the people's reactions...

LOVE AND SEX AMONG THE INVERTEBRATES by Pat Murphy

In a dying world poisoned by nuclear holocaust radiation, a woman has designed a special robot that will "survive" the impending extinction of organic life on Earth, including her own.  But can it reproduce?  With a twisted sense of humor, she "solves" the problem.  Funny and very sad at the same time...

THE HEMINGWAY HOAX by Joe Haldeman

A critically acclaimed, muddled mess of a novella this is, touching upon the often-tortuous topics of time travel, alternate worlds and questions of identity, mixing them all up until at the end you don't know which way is up. John Baird, an English professor with a penchant for writing, is approached by a con artist to forge Ernest Hemingway's early lost works.  This leads to a Hemingway look-alike...or is it Hemingway's ghost...materializing and killing Baird in various horrible ways while the con man is elsewhere sleeping with Baird's wife.  The rationale for the killings is that Baird's hoax will somehow lead to the end of the world...but to the ghost's astonishment, the writer keeps surviving them all until...until I don't know what the hell happens at the end.  If you're going to write about these topics, you'd better establish some ground rules about them beforehand to prevent everything from descending into chaos.  I did learn a bit about Ernest Hemingway, though...

Next week: that next book as Gardner's sci-fi anthology series moves to the year 1991...