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