Here is another installment of my weekly review of science fiction short stories I have just read. I am currently going at a crawling pace through the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual Collection, featuring his picks from the year 1991. This was the year that my workplace moved to its new location in far southwestern Gainesville: still there...as a matter of fact I'm sitting in their employee parking lot right now typing this. I've enjoyed my work over the years...definitely a plus in my life with lots of good people around me as well. But as I usually say at this juncture, back to those stories...
THE DARK by Karen Joy Fowler
A very curious story this is, weaving together three improbable narratives: a missing little boy in Yosemite National Park, the cyclic rises and falls of the plague over the centuries, and tunnel fighting during the Vietnam War. Yet it works well in this tale worth rereading...
MARNIE Ian MacLeod
A man with a singular, horrible event in his past keeps coming back within his body from the future (presumably with the aid of a time machine) to avert the tragic event...but can't seem to get past himself as the time draws near. To me this story shows just how much folks go through their daily lives on autopilot, usually reacting without thinking to what happens around them. And also, that it's our own inner resistance keeping us from change, not always that which we think the world imposes on us...
A TIP ON A TURTLE by Robert Silverberg
A woman taking a vacation break following the breakup of her marriage finds on a tropical resort romance...and turtle races in the pool as a mysterious man she's attracted to has a gift for picking the winners. It's all about the gift of foresight...or is it a curse?
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ÜBERMENSCH! by Kim Newman
What if Superman didn't crash land as a little child in Kansas, but rather in Bavaria, Germany during Hitler's rise? This story is an exercise in speculation on that "what if" premise, peculiar since, after all, there was no Superman to begin with from which to create an alternative "history"...or is this just a spoof of the whole alternative history subgenre? Read it for yourself and get back to me...
Next week I will continue discussing short sci-fi from 1991...
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