Not quite finished with the year 1993 in sci-fi short stories...but approaching it...I continue today with some more from Garder Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection. As with a long span during this era, I was involved with making long lists of things and memorizing them, later reviewing and expanding upon them. The fact that I had an on-the-surface tedious job in which I could go for long stretches of time in personal reflection made this feasible...I think this exercise strengthened me in later years. But as I like to say, back to those stories...
LIESERL by Stephen Baxter
This story starts from the end and then presents the narrative leading up to it as a young woman finds herself comfortably deep beneath the sun's surface, genetically modified to withstand the extreme conditions. Sounds impossible, but the author somehow makes you believe it anyway...today's scientific advances in this area may not end up so accomplished, but they're getting to the point of being scary...
FLASHBACK by Dan Simmons
I'm currently reading Stephen King's 2011 novel 11/22/63 for the umpteenth time, and this novella from eighteen years earlier, set in a dystopian 2018 America quite different from the way it turned out, presents a dual-interesting perspective on looking back in the time, and also trying to project the future. In Flashback, flashbacks are addictive, digitally directed drugs that send the user to a specific moment in the past for a set...usually brief...period of time, and then back again. One elederly man keeps reliving up close the final minutes as a Secret Service agent before the John F. Kennedy assassination 55 years earlier, trying in vain to change the outcome as time ironically, repeatedly, keeps running out on him. Similar dramas with flashback are going on with his daughter and her teenage son. What kind of digital drugs are we addicted to in our time? A worthwhile reading...I've read Simmons before, and he's one of the better writers of our time...
A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN FLORIDA by William Browning Spencer
A brief tale of how a dysfunctional, native rural Floridian family spends their Christmas time with their own traditions, straight out of the Stephen King playbook. A retired elderly couple from the colder north like the Florida warmth but miss the holiday ambiance associated with their former harsher winters. The wife misreads a nearby family's celebration of Christmas, imputing innocent good will to very sinister goings-on. Sad, and in a way, funny, too...
Next week I conclude my look at 1993 in "short" science fiction with two stories, one of them a rather lengthy novella...
No comments:
Post a Comment