Year's Best Science Fiction 1983 (Part 2 in a Series)

2. Next up the volume is "Beyond the Dead Reef" a wooly scuba diving tale by James Tiptree Jr. (the late Alice Sheldon.) As usual with Tiptree, the story is well-written and detailed. There's an environmentalist twist, as a diver is lured nearly to his death by pollutants posing as a girl swimming underwater. Good, but not terribly memorable.

Rating 6.5 of 10

3. Ian Watson- "Slow Birds"

This is a magnificent and haunting story--really a novel packed into 25 pages. In a world somewhat like our own, perhaps in the future, missiles called "slow birds" appear and disappear from the air, moving at a glacial pace and occasionally striking a target and destroying a two mile radius of land, turning it to glass. Within a few hundred years the entire planet will be destroyed.

A boy is strapped to one of these birds and disappears with it. His brother becomes a religious prophet, preaching that the birds are god's judgement. But when the boy reappears some 60 years later, looking no different than when he vanished and telling of another reality where machines wage war on one another and use this world to shunt their missiles to their targets, the prophet cannot handle this new information.

Rating 9.0 of 10

4. Poul Anderson- "Vulcan's Forge"

A researcher on Mercury tries to track down a signal rocket with a very personalized code. This one (by one of SF's true grandmasters) didn't leave a big impression.

Rating 5.5 of 10

5. Howard Waldrop- "Man-Mountain Gentian"

Waldrop is an off beat writer who specializes in short fiction, guaranteeing himself a small but devoted audience. This story of sumo wrestlers with special powers is a treat.

Rating: 7.4 of 10

6. Greg Bear- "Hardfought"

A complicated and dense far future war story by Bear, who made his first big impression on the SF field in 1983 (when his even more famous story "Blood Music" also appeared.) The Senexi, an ancient alien race, has finally run into the expanding human empire and a bitter war ensues. A Senexi named Aryz undertakes a study of humanity, and especially of a soldier named Prufax, with an eye toward communicating with the species.

Rating 7.6 of 10

7. Joe Haldeman- "Manfest Destiny"

A historical fantasy set in the time of the US/Mexican war. There isn't much SF or even Fantasy here, just a visit to a fortune teller--still Haldeman is an interesting writer and in good form here.

Rating 7.0 of 10

8. Avram Davidson- "Full Chicken Richness"

A fairly silly time travel tale of a restaurant with some very rare meat on the menu.

Rating: 5.5 of 10

9. Robert Silverberg- "Multiples"

Silverberg is a hard writer to grapple with. His output puts to shame even such habitual publishers as Stephen King, but it is of generally high quality. Here he takes into the dating rituals of a new type of person, and he handles it deftly--giving us what some SF writers seemingly cannot: a believable relationship story.

Rating 8.1 of 10

Bruce Sterling- Cicada Queen (Year's Best SF #1)

Bruce Sterling was to Cyberpunk as Charles Bernstein was to Language Poetry, or perhaps as Ezra Pound was to Modernist Literature--the movement's chief theorist, booster, architect, propagandist, as well the enemy of the old and worn out. His pseudonymous fanzine Cheap Truth, trashed the SF establishment and promoted a new group of writers who were less concerned with the "sense of wonder" than with technology, socioeconomic critique and femme fatales in mirror shades.

While the most famous of the cyberpunks, William Gibson, set most of his work in a hardboiled near future, Sterling created the Shaper-Mechanist universe, a deep future in which two groups (the gene modifying Shapers and the "post-human" Mechanists) wage a holy and economic war on one another.

"Cicada Queen" is a key story in this world, following a Shaper named Landau as he is initiated into a powerful Mechanist clique and becomes caught up in industrial espionage. Of course the plot is mostly a rack on which Sterling hangs his world-describing coats. The writing is dense, filled with jargon, but also poetic. One of my favorite bits: "...I turned to face my friends, and I was chilled at the raw emotion on their faces. It was as if they had been stripped of skin and watched me with live eyes in slabs of meat."

The Market here clearly extrapolates from the early '80s heroic era of capitalism, with its coked-up stock traders and junk bonds. But it still reflects reality 27 years later:

"Odd how these financial institutions tend to drift from their original purpose. In a way, the Market itself has made a sort of Prigoginic leap. On its face, it's a commercial tool, but it's become a game of conventions and confidences. We Cicadas eat, breathe and sleep rumors, so the Market is a perfect expression of our zeitgeist."

"Yes," I said. "Frail, mannered, and based on practically nothing tangible."

Rating: 8 of 10.0

The Year's Best Science Fiction Series

This is first post in a series reviewing the stories published in the Gardner Dozois-edited series of anthologies called the Year's Best Science Fiction. Beginning in 1984, Dozois--then editor of Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine as well as countless themed anthologies--began publishing these weighty surveys of short fiction. At a time when the SF novel market began favoring bloated trilogies, movie & TV tie-ins and military space opera, Dozois (following in the footsteps of the groundbreaking IASFM editor Sheila Murphy) was keeping the flame of tight, focused storytelling alive in the genre. He either discovered or fostered the careers of many writers who went on to fame: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Swanwick, Connie Willis, Orson Scott Card, etc.

I probably would have given up on SF as kid stuff, had I not begun reading IASFM and these anthologies at a crucial point in my teen years. Writers like John Kessel and Lucius Shepard were not just great genre practitioners, but literary stylists--certainly the equal of the mundane authors in that other anthology series Best American Short Stories.

Dozois snagged the lion's share of great stories of IASFM, but these anthologies allowed him to also present tales that had been sold to competing magazines like Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog & Omni, as well as from smaller publications.

The introductions to each volume are overviews of the entire SF field--including novels, movies & TV. These can be slightly depressing as it always seems that SF magazines are folding and publishing houses cutting back.

When the first volume came out, in 1984, SF was already entering a sort of renaissance, with energetic new writers publishing their most intense work, usually in short form. Many of these writers appear in the very first volume:
Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop, Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Pat Cadigan, Dan Simmons, John Kessel, Kim Stanley Robinson. Alongside them are writers whose careers began a decade or more earlier--James Tiptree Jr., Avram Davidson, Gene Wolfe--as well as a few grandmasters from the golden and silver ages--Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg.

It will be interesting to revisit the stories in these anthologies, and to read the many, many of them I never got around to. Also, I look forward to following the series into the 1990s and 2000s when I was not following SF very closely.

Next up: The first story in the first anthology-- "Cicada Queen" by Bruce Sterling.

Into the Fire by Richard Laymon

Richard Laymon: was he a skilled shockmeister or he was just channeling a demented teenage boy with a permanent boner? After reading three of his books I'm still torn. In the Dark was a great horror tale about a creepy game that ends up going way beyond creepy. The book had a female viewpoint character, something Laymon may have done well to stick with because when his main characters were male, as in Island, the focus became so crudely sexual that Beavis & Butthead would find it a bit much. Not that I'm a puritan, but when a character is being chased by a madman and all he's thinking about is boobies, it strains believability.

Into the Fire has two main characters, one male and one female, and is thus a mixed bag. The two storylines don't merge until late in the book, so it almost feels as though you're reading two novels: One, the story of Pamela, a woman who is kidnapped by a psycho only to be saved by a man named Sharpe who drives a bus full of mannequins and taken to a tiny town where bad people find their way into the cafe's hamburgers. The other, the story of Norman, a college kid who pics up the wrong hitchhikers and ends up going along on a multi-state murder spree.

Both stories start off with a lot of promise and suspense, but Norman's eventually becomes ridiculous--mostly because of his obsession with female body parts. When Norman is first forced into giving a ride to an Elvis emulating sociopath (who is suspiciously reminiscent of the Kid from The Stand) I was pretty intrigued. But by the end I was tired of these characters and waiting for the one interesting figure--the strange avenging angel named Sharpe, to show up and blow everyone away.

Rating: 3.5 of 10

Welcome to the Overnight. This blog is a place for my careless and undercooked thoughts on the books I'm reading. My focus here is on genre fiction--mostly Horror and SF, but sometimes Crime as well.