Here are my reactions to four more short stories appearing in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual Collection, spotlighting the editor's picks from the year 1991. In only University of Florida head football coach Steve Spurrier's second year there, with Shane Matthews as quarterback, they won the Southeastern Conference championship in 1991 with a perfect league record, unexpected losses to Syracuse and Notre Dame keeping them from national title hopes that year. The Gators had "won" the SEC back in 1984 but scandals involving then-coach Charley Pell forced them to vacate the title. Spurrier would go on to win six total conference championships during his twelve-year tenure at UF...pretty impressive! But back to those stories...
POGROM by James Patrick Kelly
In a dystopian, decaying near future, society is sharply divided between the fearful and insulated elderly generation and disadvantaged, often violent youth. Ruth, one of those elderly, embarks on a tense and terrifying trip across the city to visit her friend Matt, a teacher who was recently severely beaten by a young gang. This story is applicable to many situations today, I'm afraid to say. Especially when folks overreact in scenarios calling for cool-headedness and restraint...
THE MOAT by Greg Egan
A multi-layered story set in Australia when rising sea levels are submerging entire Pacific islands and sending their inhabitants to Australia as widespread popular sentiment weighs in against accepting them. Weave this narrative in with the notion of a special, secret human genetic strain that guarantees immortality from disease, and you have a somewhat disjointed tale that points the accusing finger at the superwealthy elite for manipulating the ignorant masses against the refugees...while they have their own genetic "moat" against all of them...
VOICES by Jack Dunn
This story has more of a Ray Bradbury feel to it as boys in a small town discuss what happens at death and one of them says the dead had spoken to him. To test this, they sneak into a funeral home where a boy they didn't know from another town was lying. What happens when they try to reach him...you can read it to find out. But I've a feeling that the author was presenting his own ideas about death in this very readable and compelling story...
FOAM by Brian W. Aldiss
In the near future, an academic is researching old churches is in Hungary where he is beset by a former colleague who claims that the previous ten years of his memory was wiped clean (FOAM: free of all memory) and that he was going to a Budapest clinic that promised restoration...but would his friend help him out by going to fill in some gaps to the past. The narrator complies, realizing too late after the fact that this was a setup and that he, too, now had vast memory gaps. The story mixes this narrative in with ongoing commentary on the decline of organized Christianity and an ongoing war between Russia and the West. It's all good reading but I couldn't fit these three threads together into a coherent pattern...
Next week I conclude my look at the year 1991 in short science fiction...
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