And so once again I am discussing some short fiction from 1991 as it appeared in the Gardener Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual Collection. My life that year was dominated by work and family. With work, my employer that year opened the floodgates for overtime...at least for those requesting it, and I was among the ones on the list. With family, it was Melissa, me, and our infant son Will...and four if you include our little poodle Taffy. Life was sometimes tiring, sometimes trying, but ultimately rewarding. But enough about my life, let's talk about the lives of people who never existed except in their authors' imagination...
A WALK IN THE SUN by Geoffrey A. Landis
This is a great "old school" hard science fiction story, reminiscent of Robert Heinlein's classics, dealing with an emergency on the moon. An astronaut is the only survivor of her craft's crash landing there, and to beat the odds with her dwindling supplies and the setting sun threatening her solar powered energy supply, Trish sets out in the moon's low gravity to keep up with it...the "ultra" in ultra-long racing, both to keep up with the sun and last until her rescuers can reach her...
FRAGMENTS OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA by Ian McDonald
The title does little to explain this harrowing tale of a young Jewish woman who meets a young pre-World War I Hitler, undergoes a "ratty" experience at a mysterious Vienna nightclub and ultimately hides with her family from the Nazi persecution. Very compelling and historically interesting...
ANGELS IN LOVE by Kathe Koja
More of the genre of horror short fiction I would expect from Stephen King, a woman hears strange sounds coming from the apartment next door...she thinks it's lovemaking with something mysterious but whatever, it's keeping her awake when she's already having trouble sleeping at night. One day she has an opportunity to see what's really going on...not for the squeamish...
EYEWALL by Rick Shelley
On a distant planet dominated by mostly ocean with very frequent super-hurricanes, a meteorologist and his team are sent from an Earth recently devastated by a strong series of hurricanes to test methods of controlling them, using this planet's storms as test subjects. The people stationed there, including a Japanese staffer strongly against ever using atomic explosions for any reason, are cold to their presence...especially when they discover that the researchers' plan to detonate a fusion hydrogen bomb in the eye of one hurricane. To discuss the ethics of this adequately I would need to take up more writing space, but let's just say that I'm not totally on board with where the author was leading here...
Next week: more sci-fi from '91...
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