Today it's time to once again check out some of the 1994 short stories appearing in Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction Twelfth Annual Collection. In April of that year, sadly, grunge rock star Kurt Cobain killed himself at the peak of his band Nirvana's popularity. I was and still am a fan of this genre, and Cobain's death deeply saddened me. Later that summer, the Atlanta-based alternative group R.E.M. (I'm also a fan) released their studio album Monster, one of my favorites of theirs. It features a deep track titled Let Me In. Band frontman Michael Stipe, who would befriend Cobain's widow Courtney Love, wrote the lyrics in tribute of the fallen star. But enough sadness...back to the stories...
THE HOLE IN THE HOLE by Terry Bisson
This is one of my favorite types of sci-fi stories, where there is a special, hidden passageway linking our world to another, be it in space or time. Here a modest lawyer in a big city needs a special part to repair his car and runs across such a portal behind a ramshackle junkyard. The place it leads to it is literally out of this world. There's an interesting character in his story, the lawyer's academic friend Wilson Wu, who it seems is almost as mysterious as the portal itself with his deep knowledge and expertise in so many diverse fields. A very funny tale...
PARIS IN JUNE by Pat Cadigan
A "man"...at least the story seems to start out that way, is an itinerant, homeless hustler who collects experiences in Paris (and June, of course) and transfers them to the Creators, apparently some alien race that from time-to-time whisks down in the sky to sweep up his thoughts. Since he's telling the story, it's a bit cryptic as to what is really going on. But he does come across a "woman" who he recognizes as another creation like himself, only that she has asserted her own independence. Frankly, I didn't get this story...
FLOWERING MANDRAKE by George Turner
Capella is a first-magnitude star in the northern constellation Auriga. In this story it is the system of two different intelligent life forms on two planets, constantly in bitter warfare against one another: the Greens and the Reds. One of the Greens is the sole survivor of his blasted spaceship and drifts for centuries in his escape pod until he encounters Earth sometime in our not-so-distant future when we've begun to mine the asteroids. When he is gradually introduced to life on Earth through images projected inside his pod and sees a picture of a human, the truth about the nature of the Greens and Reds becomes clear. This was a brilliant story that expanded the baseness of human nature to include so-called "intelligent" life elsewhere in the cosmos...
Next week: more from 1994...
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