It's Wednesday, and once again time for my look at years gone by in the realm of short science fiction, specifically 1994 with the source-book being The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Edition and edited by the late Gardner Dozois, a sci-fi writer in his own right. One of these days I'm going to have to check out a collection of Dozois' works, seeing that perhaps he might have felt it a bit presumptious to include any of them in his series: I bet some of them are pretty good. But for now, let's look at the next three stories in the '94 anthology...
ASYLUM by Katherine Kerr
In the near future, a feminist social activist and author is visiting her friend in an England, which is fighting a drastically rising sea level due to global warning, when a right-wing military-backed coup overthrows the American government and institutes martial law. Sometimes science fiction tries to predict the future and is comically off the mark. This story, on the other hand, is chilling in its spot-on portrayal of a world beset by climate change (remember, it was written in 1994) and how a core element (which I call the "rabble") of any nation's population sees authoritarian, strong-arm rule as a virtue to support. And here comes 2024, right around the corner...
RED ELVIS by Walter Jon Williams
This is a brief alternative history tale of the rock n' roll phenomenon Presley...the author takes his birth as the only survivor of identical twins as the premise for sending it into a direction markedly different (and in ways not so different) from what really happened. In the process the reader gets a sense of what life was like back in the fifties and sixties...
CALIFORNIA DREAMER by Mary Rosenbaum
A cataclysmic earthquake on the American pacific coast has sent large sections of California into the sea...including San Francisco. A woman survivor, a refugee herself from the carnage a few hundred miles away, is beset with grief as she knows her dear friend of many years is likely one of the casualties. But then a little girl enters her life, claiming as her own mother a woman whose credentials don't match up right. This is a psychological story about grief and creating a new personal "reality" to cope with it...
Next week I continue looking at the year 1994 in science fiction...
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