I'm getting closer to the end of the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, which covers the editor's picks of short stories and novellas from the year 1998. I've been doing this more-or less weekly sci-fi review Wednesday series for a few years, starting with stories first published in 1939...I'm planning to eventually bring it all up to the present. But first a couple more from '98...
FREE IN ASVEROTH by Jim Grimsley
On a distant world, the narrator recounts her experience of breaking out of captivity one day with two of her kind, and their struggle against the "two legs" to stay free as they are relentlessly pursued. It's no mystery who those pursuers are, either: human settlers...well, invaders...who have brutally fought the indigenous intelligent life, demeaning them as savages and destroying their society and freedom. No doubt this is a direct analogy to all those times in our "two leg" history when one conquering group regarding itself as "superior" did the same upon encountering another more "primitive" group, such as the American Indians or Australian aborigines. I sincerely hope our flawed humanity will have outgrown this tendency before we settle the cosmos, should that ever occur...
THE DANCING FLOOR by Cherry Wilder
An asteroid has been terraformed and transformed into a paradise, only to be evacuated and abandoned due to mismanagement and overreaction to some life support malfunctions. There are some hangers-on hiding on this tiny artificial world constructed by a wealthy, eccentric magnate, though, and they resist contact and interaction with the "outsiders", which is pretty much everyone else. And they especially despise the androids sent to their world. The "Dancing Floor" in the story's title is the main reason one of the visiting team's members is there: it seems of alien construction, although its function is a mystery. Here's a tale that leads the reader in one direction with secondary characters inserted in the plot, only to find those secondary characters at the end to be of primary significance. My only problem with this short story was trying to keep up with the many named characters the author introduced: finally I just wrote each new name down as they appeared...
Next week I'll hopefully get around to reviewing the final tale in this anthology, once again appearing to be one of those long, drawn-out novellas of which Dozois was so fond...
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