Once again it's time for me to post my reaction to short stories I've recently read. I'm currently going through the Gardner Dozois-edited anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fourteenth Annual Collection, featuring his picks from 1995. If I ever write a tell-all personal memoir, this particular year would stand out as one of the times that formulated my rather cynical opinion of people in general and the phoniness of the term "community" whenever I hear it bandied about as something that I should seek with others...but a tell-all personal memoir isn't what I'm about, which is most probably the best for all (including myself)...
CASTING AT PEGASUS by Mary Rosenblum
In a future of decline and decay, an abandoned airport is the site of a young woman's attempt at her art, which is luminous kite-flying: her project is to frame the constellation Pegasus in the night sky. She has to avoid the night watchman and others...a subplot is her falling out with her roommate, another is her new friendship with a homeless young outcast who is looking for the aliens to swoop down and take them away to a better life. A lot to cover in a short tale, one full of whimsy and unfulfilled dreams...
LOOKING FOR KELLY DAHL by Dan Simmons
A man, dismissed from his middle school teaching largely because of drinking following his son's death and his wife's leaving, finds himself a few years later confronted in a life and death struggle for survival against a woman who at age eleven was a former student of his. Complicating matters is that their Colorado landscape and surroundings keep changing drastically, from one eon to another. This tale reminded me of the 1959 William Tenn story The Malted Milk Monster (click the title to read my review), but the association doesn't appear until near its ending, although the story by Simmons seemed deeper...
THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR by James Patrick Kelly
It turns out dinosaurs did not die out some 65 million years ago after all. No, they have advanced space ships and have traveled the cosmos through their instantaneous transport system, which resembles the "beaming" in Star Trek. I've always held that just making an exact copy of someone in another location doesn't mean that person's self and identity was transferred...this story sides with that take and then extends it to its logical (and horrifying) conclusion...
Next week I'll be out of town, but should resume this weekly Wednesday feature after I get back...
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