Below are my reactions to two more 1995 stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois-edited anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection. In 1995 my musical interests...all of it rock...was divided between exploring old classic albums for hidden treasures in their deep tracks and listening to rock radio. With the latter my focus was on grunge, specifically the group Soundgarden and their 1994 album Superunknown. I came to be interested in it because an obscure Gainesville radio station on 1390 kHz was playing all six Doors studio albums from beginning to end, and I was happily listening to all of it. But suddenly they began to play the Soundgarden album...I was miffed but then realized that this was pretty cool, too. I liked all the tracks on it, a rarity for me, and my "song of the year" for '95 was track #2, My Wave, still a personal favorite. But back to those stories...
THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN FUTURE by Allen Steele
The embracing of one's childhood fictional idol is taken to extreme here with the recounting of the narrator, a space worker trying to get to a better world, as he experiences his frustrations dealing with an incompetent spaceship captain obsessed with the hero figure Captain Future, to the point where he insists on being addressed as such by everyone. A life-and-death crisis threatens the ship, and how does "Captain Future" (and the narrator) handle it? A funny...and ultimately sad...tale...
THE LINCOLN TRAIN by Maureen F. McHugh
In this alternative history story, what if, instead of President Abraham Lincoln being assassinated at the close of the American Civil War in April 1865, he had only been seriously wounded to the point that, while alive, he was virtually a vegetable, unable to carry out his presidential duties? Lincoln wanted reconciliation toward the defeated South, and his vice-president Andrew Johnson, a compromise Democrat on the 1964 election ticket who in our reality would succeed Lincoln upon his death, constitutionally (at the time) had no legal claim to the presidency (since in this universe Lincoln still lived). Instead, Secretary of State William Seward, a staunch Radical Republican, takes the reins of power and former slave-owners are brutally herded off onto trains, uprooted from their homes and sent off to Oklahoma to starve. A young woman from a slave-holding family is caught up in it all and receives coldness and ostracism from all, even those trying to help her survive her ordeal...
Next week: more from 1995...
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