Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 13

Today I finally reach the end of my look at the year 1998 in the genre of short science fiction, presented in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection.  I say "short", although several of this series' stories are actually of novella length, including the one I'm reviewing below...

THE SUMMER ISLES by Ian R. MacLeod

Here is an alternate history tale, set in England, an England that lost World War I instead of Germany, enduring the sanctions, international humiliation and rise of fascism in its politics.  Set in 1940, it looks as if England's fascist (called "Modernist" here) prime minister John Arthur is about to go to war against his old European rivals, a mirror of what Hitler in Germany did in "our" reality.  The story's narrator is an Oxford professor, Griffin Brooke, who knows all about Arthur and his mysterious past. The fascist movement in Britain is also bent on scapegoating groups like Jews and homosexuals.  With the former, whole families are secretly swept away, to supposedly live out their lives away from everyone else on the Summer Isles north of Scotland...but what's really happening? And with the homosexuals...count Griffin Brooke among their number...the ones without Brooke's social standing are sent to the Isle of Man for conversion treatment.  This novella hops back and forth in time, and paints a bleak picture of how a fascist movement gains momentum through populism and scapegoating other groups for the people's problems.  It also suggests that fascist governments can vary to the degree that their brutality and oppression are exercised, depending on the already existing social institutions.  I am concerned about the future of my country in the face of a rising populist fascist movement...it's almost as if I'm living out a highly improbable alternate history with this current regime being happily voted into power by a plurality of the electorate with all the information they had, doing so with eyes wide open...

Next week I'll be starting on a new book featuring science fiction stories from the year 1999...