The Year's Best Science Fiction 17 (Stories from 1999) Reviewing pages 383-625
Charles Sheffield's "Phallicide" (Science Fiction Age September 1999) is set in southern Utah, an area I've visited. The setting includes St. George where my wife went to college and a fictional town called Bryceville.
The story walks a fine line as far as promoting negative stereotypes. Although The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) banned polygamy over 110 years ago, an alarming number of people still ignorantly believe that Mormons practice it. Mormons make up close to 70% of Utah's population and 90% of southern Utah's. There are polygamist groups in Utah and elsewhere who ARE NOT Mormons. Sheffield does establish that the polygamist group lives in and controls Bryceville and that it regards St. George as the outside world. Still, there are many readers who will see that the story is about polygamists in Utah and who will ignorantly assume it's about Mormons. It would have been better if Sheffield had clearly spelled out the difference.
"Phallicide" is narrated by Dr. Rachel Stafford, a brilliant scientist in her late 20s who also belongs to a polygamist sect, The Blessed Order. In her early teens she won a science contest in a fashion that showed so much genius, that a pharmaceutical company negotiated a deal with the Order for putting Stafford through school and then putting her in charge of a lab in St. George. She's supposed to be sharing everything with the company, but she secretly works on projects requested by the Order's leadership. While in her early teens, Stafford had a daughter, Naomi, and the Order's leadership uses Naomi for leverage over Stafford.
When Stafford learns that a man in his 60s, the son of the Sect's Prophet, intends to marry Naomi, now 13, she devises a plan to rescue Naomi and sabotage the Order.
At times it seems like Sheffield just saw a Dateline Special about modern polygamists, and is regurgitating the message, but in the end "Phallicide"'s message is ambiguous.
Walter Jon Williams's "Daddy's World" (Not of Woman Born, ed. Constance Ash) starts off in a surrealistic fashion, until we learn the true nature of Jamie, the main character, and the world he lives in. It's almost a Garden of Eden like story where a Golden Age is destroyed by forbidden knowledge.
I don't know Williams's intent, but I suspect we're supposed to see Jamie's father, who tries to preserve his son's innocence and keep his family together, as a bad guy. It's hard to see it that way though, since Jamie was happy and enjoying life until he learned the truth. Afterward, he was angry, miserable, and depressed.
You could read this story as a struggle between a child and a parent who doesn't want the child to grow up. Of course, we all need to grow up and achieve independence from our parents eventually.
Or maybe the story is attacking the traditional family, consisting of a mother, a father and their children. References to "normal family life" come across as patronizing, sarcastic, disparaging, or chilling depending on the character's viewpoint and the context. In modern culture we get this attitude, "Gee, some awful stuff happens in some families, and no relationship between spouses, siblings, parents, and children is 100% harmonious all the time. Therefore all families are dysfunctional." It's like, "Since no one is like the Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver, let's just be disillusioned about families and scrap the whole concept."
Throughout human history, there have been all kinds of family arrangements. There are situations where single parents raise kids, grandparents raise grandchildren, aunts and uncles raise nieces and nephews. There have been step parents, foster parents etc., etc. In recent centuries there have been orphanages. There have been couples who don't have children. Lately though, the media goes out of its way to attack the set-up where a mother and father raise their children. Sometimes the relentless crusade gets tiresome.
Kim Stanley Robinson's "A Martian Romance" (Asimov's October/November 1999) takes place on a Mars that's an alternate vision of the Mars from Robinson's series about terraforming Mars. In this story, terraforming appears to have failed. Is all hope really lost though? Robinson wrote this story is the present tense, and the prose is beautiful.
Tanith Lee's "The Sky-Green Blues" (Interzone April 1999) feels like it's set in colonial south-east Asia during Japan's World War II invasions. It actually takes place on an alien world at war. The main character travels there to interview a great writer only to learn the true extent of his talent.
Hal Clement's "Exchange Rate" (Absolute Magnitude Winter 1999) displays a few rough patches early on when Clement has characters tell each other things they already know in order to explain things to the reader. Clement's storytelling and characterization soon won me over though as he develops a mystery, resolves it, and then leads us through the reaction and final resolution. The story tells about the interaction between a group of humans stationed on a planet with an extremely inhospitable environment and their interaction with the intelligent alien life form they meet there. Given the miscommunication and misunderstanding between human and alien throughout the story, I was disappointed that the humans didn't emphasize the issue in the debate among themselves leading to the resolution.
Geoff Ryman's "Everywhere" (Interzone February 1999) shows a Utopian future through the spectrum of a grandson's relationship with his grandfather. We get an appreciation of the wonders and the progress made and simultaneously see those same wonders accepted as just a plain old part of everyday life.
Mike Resnick's "Hothouse Flowers" (Asimov's October/November 1999) shows a nursing home in the future when lifespans have expanded greatly, but quality of life hasn't kept pace. In someways, it presents an exaggerated version (the exaggeration being that someone is over 150 years old instead of 98, and there's a huge percentage of patients in vegetative states) of situations that arise today. Oh, and in this future euthanasia is banned. One patient attempts to bait an attendant into ignoring his training to preserve life at all costs.
Resnick sets up a situation that only shows the ill-effects of not allowing euthanasia. It doesn't allow for considering the danger that voluntary mercy killings might lead to some "voluntary" killings which aren't so voluntary after all. A look at the plight of the old and infirm today offers chilling possibilities. After all, how many of the elderly in a nursing home are really there voluntarily?
Sean Williams's "Evermore" (Altair #4) takes place on a space probe containing artificial intelligences which are the recreated consciousnesses (engrams) of various brilliant people. An accident has crippled the probe, sending it far off course. A thousand years have passed with no sign of rescue. The engrams confront the possibility of altering their own programing so they can change, adapt, and resolve their problem rather than remain stagnant, unable to drift too far from their originals.
Robert Grossbach's "Of Scorned Women and Casual Loops" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction January 1999) involves a detective questioning a scientist about not totally unforeseen side effects of time travel. Even though the title mentions loops, the actual side effect isn't a time loop, a paradox, or an alternate reality. It's a problem I don't remember ever seeing in a time travel story before. Just when I thought I'd seen it all, someone comes up with a new twist.
The book's final story also involves time travel. Kage Baker's "Son Observe the Time" (Asimov's May 1999) superficially reminds me of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season." (It appeared in 1946 under the pseudonym "Lawrence O'Donnell.") Where "Vintage Season" is about time tourists who visit a city and interact with people whom they are forbidden to warn just prior to a disaster, "Son Observe the Time" is about a cyborg sent with other cyborgs to San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake. The cyborgs are humans augmented by machinery and they still have emotions and morals. The company which turned them into cyborgs sends them to places just prior to disasters to recover artistic, scientific, and historical treasures which were lost in the disaster, so that the company will be able to display the items in future museums and exhibitions. Like Kuttner and Moore's tourists, Baker's cyborgs can't save the people with whom they interact - - well, they can't save most of them. They can save children who match the physical requirements for becoming cyborgs and working for the company. As cyborgs they become virtually immortal.
The main character, a cyborg named Victor, represses his true feelings and motives. He's dishonest with others and himself. Perhaps it's his way of dealing with people he knows are doomed and with situations he finds morally difficult.
Disguised as a day laborer, he pretends to befriend (at least he tells himself he's only pretending) a fellow day laborer named Francis O'Neil. While Victor is forbidden from helping O'Neil, his wife, and two of his three children, he discovers that O'Neil's son, Donal, meets the requirements for transformation.
Victor's attempt to rescue the boy leads him to confront some troubling aspects of the company he works for.
This is the first volume of Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction which I've read. In Part I of this review, I said the format reminded me the most of Datlow and Windling's volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Although, in retrospect it also reminds me of anthologies like The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. I noted that Dozois's year in review was shorter than Windling and Datlow's (I've yet to read the volumes published after Windling stepped down), but I found it more readable.
I also noticed that Dozois's stories selections came from less diverse sources. If someone had subscribed to about three of the better known science fiction magazines in 1999, they already would've had most of the stories here.
They're good SF stories though and all worthy of preservation in book form. I liked that Dozois favored classically structured stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. The occasional literary experiment is fine, but sometimes there's a few too many of those in Windling and Datlow's volumes along with too many vague and inconclusive endings. That sort of thing can be refreshing when it's a change of pace, but it gets annoying after awhile.
Combining the 625 Arabic numeral pages with the 53 Roman numeral pages of the year in review section, this book comes to 678 pages of material. I read it straight through. While I love Windling and Datlow's collections, I get bored part way through, and I usually put them aside for a few months a time or two before I get interested in finishing them. That wasn't a problem here. Even though I didn't agree with the messages of some stories, I found them thought provoking, and I enjoyed reading them all.
No comments:
Post a Comment