zoes_human's review against another edition
4.0
I love this anthology series. If you're on the prowl to find some new sci-fi authors or simply enjoy short fiction, this is an excellent place to turn. If you're deeply interested in what's happening in the industry itself, the summation at the beginning gives a nice overview of the past year including other sources for short work. A word of advice if you care about spoilers or allowing stories to unveil themselves in their own time, read the introductory paragraphs after you finish the story.
arswearingen's review
4.0
There were a lot of really interesting and well done short stories in this collection. There were also a few that I skipped because they weren’t my cup of tea. Found some new authors I’d like to read more from in the future.
elusivity's review against another edition
3.0
A typical collection, some decent stories, a few excellent ones. More than anything, this is a glimpse of the fears and dreams and preoccupations from 3 decades past, some of which can't help but seem quaint, and others, remain relevant even today.
Nevertheless, due to that very disconnection, I found much of this collection a chore to go through.
YMMV.
THE JAGUAR HUNTER - Lucius Shepard
3 STARS
A native Indian man sent to kill a magical jaguar, who turns out to be a beautiful woman of his tribe and also guardian to another world he fears yet yearns to go.
Hmm. I'm conflicted as to how I feel about this one. On the one hand, this is lyrical and beautifully crafted, a man caught between myths of his culture and the greed of the new world. And yet, as I read this, I cannot stop thinking this is such a MAN story. Of course death would appear as a beautiful, seductive woman who insta-love/want him, who is mysterious, unfathomable, and will lead him to either death or ultimate freedom. Hmf.
DOGFIGHT - Michael Swanwick & William Gibson
4 STARS
A thief finds new fascination with a neuro-driven combat game, becomes determined to play against a top player. In his drive to do, he alienates everyone, crosses boundaries, destroys his opponent utterly, and ends up with empty victory.
Raw feelings in this one. An old, much-written story in new clothes, and one especially designed for nerds and geeks. A good read.
FERMI & FROST - Frederik Pohl
2 STARS
Realistic imagination of how the world might end in nuclear holocaust.
Written in the 60s, and shows. Has not aged well. Nowadays reads as melodramatic and lacking in finesse.
GREEN DAYS IN BRUNEI - Bruce Sterling
SKIPPED
Found this one difficult to absorb, couldn't read more than a couple of pages.
SNOW - John Crowley
3.5 STARS
Precursor to the current 24/7 selfie-culture, a flying WASP records a person for 8,000 hours, but replays in random access. A man views footage from his dead wife as video slowly degrades.
Memory is more than footage. Our human minds provides enhancement, significance, and discards the meaningless quotidian. Recordings can never describe a person; our internal narratives create and recreate each of us anew, with every iteration.
THE FRINGE - Orson Scott Card
4 STARS
In a post-apocalyptic, food-scarce society that has fallen back upon farming to survive, a teacher with cerebral palsy whistleblows on farmers in the small community hoarding a portion of their produce for black market sale. 3 of his students threw him into a crick to die, and with much hardship, he survived, yet did not reveal the students names.
Perspective from a complicated, difficult-to-like but morally upright man, who must deal with his own envy of those who are physically healthy, feels a calling to educate and preserve civilization, yet glimpses the ultimate pointlessness of it all.
THE LAKE WAS FULL OF ARTIFICIAL THINGS - Karen Joy Fowler
3 STARS
Woman go through therapy, re-living recreated (from her memories) scenario to relieve the life-long guilt of a long-ago relationship. Somehow the therapy is intruding into her waking life..
Workmanlike.
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM - Robert Silverberg
4 STARS
A 20th century man found himself living in 50th century, companion to a woman Gioia. They travel through the fanciful recreations of historical cities, and he slowly comes to realize the truth of what he is, and the world.
Deceptively simple, a slowly-unwinding mystery full of heart. I disagree with the conclusion, however. She -- that specific iteration of her -- would be dead, no matter how accurately she is reconstructed, and that to the reconstructed her and others she might as well be alive.
SOLSTICE - James Patrick Kely
2 STARS
A lonely, twisted man creates a daughter/clone 25 years younger, raises her and makes her his lover and daughter and possessive, all amidst the background of high-tech artisanal drugs and, for some reason, the Stonehenge.
Ugh. Self-indulgent.
DUKE PASQUALE'S RING - Avram Davidson
SKIPPED
No idea what the heck this one is about. Obtuse, cryptic writing style.
MORE THAN THE SUM OF HIS PARTS - Joe Haldeman
3.5 STARS
Cyborg limbs demonstrate the principle that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Diary of an engineer is injured while working in space, and installed with cybernetics, which smoothly transitioned from utter joy at his acquired power to casual disregard of other humans and becoming an evil mastermind.
The ending is either cliched or a clever twist, I can't decide -- hinting strongly that, although the previous evil has been subdued, the current "hero" moves toward that same fate..
OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS - Nancy Kress
2.5 STARS
Small town diner meeting with friendly alien, reflecting small-minded sides of humanity.
SIDE EFFECTS - Walter Jon Williams
NO RATING
Irresponsible doctors and pharmacology industry personnel, prescribing random drugs to poor people, with random side effects.
I confess to wildly skimming through this one. Very anti-Greed-Is-Me 80s vibe. Essentially skipped.
THE ONLY NEAT THING TO DO - James Tiptree, Jr.
3.5 STARS
The tone of a 60s YA adventure story yet dark subject matter. A young girl goes secretly adventuring out into space and encounters an equally-young alien whose lifestyle is to takeover the brain of host animals and forming a single symbiosis. As time passes in their journey toward the alien's home world, they slowly come to realize that this strange symbiosis is fatal to humans, and both sacrifices themselves by diving into the nearest sun.
A lovely, straight forward story that started out slow, but culminate to describe a lovely but doomed friendship between two very goodhearted young creatures.
DINNER IN AUDOGHAST - Bruce Sterling
3.5 STARS
Audoghast is a rich African empire in the 1000s. A rich man dines sumptuously with 3 friends and beauteous courtesans, and a prophet telling total truth of Africa's eventual destruction and fall of the Arabian world.
Describing what could have been 1 night out of the 1001 Nights. Those who live in luxurious now could never recognize truth, when it is so unpalatable.
UNDER SIEGE - George R. R. Martin
4 STARS
In an unknown apocalyptic future, a deformed mutant with time traveling abilities is part of a governmental, last-ditch project that sends his mind back in history, into that of a Finnish Colonel in the 1800s, trying to influence history to avert their nuclear-disaster future. He ends up flouting the suggestions to send the historical figure on a suicide mission, kills his future body, and lives a long life slightly-merged with the Colonel, changing the future in his own way.
Twisted and strange and poignant. A reminder that GRR Martin is indeed a good writer.
FLYING SAUCER ROCK & ROLL - Howard Waldrop
SKIPPED
A SPANISH LESSON - Lucius Shepard
3.5 STARS
Pseudo-biographical. Young Lucius in the 60s spent sometime by the beaches in Costa del Sol, living hedonistic expat lifestyle, until a pair of brother and sisters came. They are small, strange-looking, identical, and behaved strangely. Lucius gets close to them, and discovers that they are clones, and escaped from another universe -- dystopic, totalitarian, horrifying, utterly controlled by an undead Hitler and his legion of shadows. They escaped to this universe through an interdimensional tunnel, which they are trying close to stop potential capture. During the night they chose to close the tunnel, humans interfered, causing the brother to self-sacrifice by stepping back into the tunnel to lead enemies away. Lucius, from a sense of guilt, takes a nearly-silent sister to a Tibetan Buddhist nunnery, and upon leaving her there, has a realization about American sense of voyeurism over other people's pain and yet not truly willing to help.
Was doing great as a slowly-unraveling story for 3/4 of the way. The glimpse of alien world is fantastically grim and cruel, a Third Reich from a fevered nightmare. The moralizing, at the end however, I could have done without -- even the narrator himself said that this moralizing after a story's climax are said to be a weakness of his, even as he went on to say in this instance it was justified. Hm. It wasn't justified.
ROADSIDE RESCUE - Pat Cadigan
2.5 STAR
Earth and alien encounter. An Earth man with car troubles got picked up by an alien and his Earth employee, who scares him because the alien enjoys the sound of frightened people.
Straight-forward.
PAPER DRAGONS - James P. Blaylock
3 STARS
Magical Realism story of a strange California, where the narrator lives a normal life where giant worms eats his tomato plants, with one neighbor fanatic about the migration of giant, even car-sized, crabs that caused some destruction in the neighborhood, destroying a pseudo-living semi-mechanic semi-living paper dragon of another neighbor, who spends a year unsuccessfully rebuilding something similar.
A famous story, and one I recognize as being well-written. I always find it difficult to understand Magical Realism, though, where the protagonist always go about their flat, "normal" everyday lives even as wild fantastic things pass before their eyes.
MAGAZINE SECTION - R. A. Lafferty
3 STARS
A man writes seemingly-fantastical stories for Sunday Magazines, and increasingly finding himself out of a job because people could no longer believe them, despite their truths.
THE WAR AT HOME - Lewis Shiner
2.5 STARS
People who have never gone to Nam are racked by vivid hallucinations /memories of all its trauma. One man's descent into a PTSD that is not his own.
Very short story. Perhaps vivid, but Nam as a subject ... feels very distant to me. This story did not age well.
ROCKABYE BABY - S. C. Sykes
4 STARS
A man broke his neck and becomes a paraplegic, loses all his former life, yet in the process became drawn to reading, learning, and found his artistic talent. And then, he encountered an experimental treatment that would enable him to regrow all his limbs, yet at the same time would wipe clean all his memories. A paraplegic friend had taken that choice, became healthy yet intensely miserable, and eventually killed himself. The man himself, facing that same choice, hesitates, hesitates... yet finally decides to take the same plunge.
Another story of man trapped inside a husk of a body. Vivid illustration of a dilemma -- what constitutes a person if not all the memories and emotions and experiences? Without that, we are nothing. And yet, who's to say in that situation, most of us wouldn't make the same choice.
GREEN MARS - Kim Stanley Robinson
4 STARS
Roger, a member of the Red party, having quit his government position and in a depression over his failures to prevent Mars from being turned into another Earth. He becomes part of a team to climb Olympic Mons. Climb requires close attention to the here-and-now, a kind of physical meditation, and in the process, Roger begins to recognize the beauty of Mars, which remains regardless whether it is covered with Earth flora and fauna. He also reunites with Eileen, who was his lover hundreds of years in past, who tells him some of the philosophy she is reading. He comes to learn that one's past need not be immutable, a burden, but that life forces us to constantly re-evaluate the past, thereby changing it. At the end, he learns to love this new Mars.
I now understand why this series is so popular. It is written with the focus that mainstream literary novels have, examining the details and concerns of human life, written in vivid, present-focused prose, yet set in a fantastic new world, in the near future with some believable projected new technology. An interesting story.
Nevertheless, due to that very disconnection, I found much of this collection a chore to go through.
YMMV.
Spoiler
THE JAGUAR HUNTER - Lucius Shepard
3 STARS
A native Indian man sent to kill a magical jaguar, who turns out to be a beautiful woman of his tribe and also guardian to another world he fears yet yearns to go.
Hmm. I'm conflicted as to how I feel about this one. On the one hand, this is lyrical and beautifully crafted, a man caught between myths of his culture and the greed of the new world. And yet, as I read this, I cannot stop thinking this is such a MAN story. Of course death would appear as a beautiful, seductive woman who insta-love/want him, who is mysterious, unfathomable, and will lead him to either death or ultimate freedom. Hmf.
DOGFIGHT - Michael Swanwick & William Gibson
4 STARS
A thief finds new fascination with a neuro-driven combat game, becomes determined to play against a top player. In his drive to do, he alienates everyone, crosses boundaries, destroys his opponent utterly, and ends up with empty victory.
Raw feelings in this one. An old, much-written story in new clothes, and one especially designed for nerds and geeks. A good read.
FERMI & FROST - Frederik Pohl
2 STARS
Realistic imagination of how the world might end in nuclear holocaust.
Written in the 60s, and shows. Has not aged well. Nowadays reads as melodramatic and lacking in finesse.
GREEN DAYS IN BRUNEI - Bruce Sterling
SKIPPED
Found this one difficult to absorb, couldn't read more than a couple of pages.
SNOW - John Crowley
3.5 STARS
Precursor to the current 24/7 selfie-culture, a flying WASP records a person for 8,000 hours, but replays in random access. A man views footage from his dead wife as video slowly degrades.
Memory is more than footage. Our human minds provides enhancement, significance, and discards the meaningless quotidian. Recordings can never describe a person; our internal narratives create and recreate each of us anew, with every iteration.
THE FRINGE - Orson Scott Card
4 STARS
In a post-apocalyptic, food-scarce society that has fallen back upon farming to survive, a teacher with cerebral palsy whistleblows on farmers in the small community hoarding a portion of their produce for black market sale. 3 of his students threw him into a crick to die, and with much hardship, he survived, yet did not reveal the students names.
Perspective from a complicated, difficult-to-like but morally upright man, who must deal with his own envy of those who are physically healthy, feels a calling to educate and preserve civilization, yet glimpses the ultimate pointlessness of it all.
THE LAKE WAS FULL OF ARTIFICIAL THINGS - Karen Joy Fowler
3 STARS
Woman go through therapy, re-living recreated (from her memories) scenario to relieve the life-long guilt of a long-ago relationship. Somehow the therapy is intruding into her waking life..
Workmanlike.
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM - Robert Silverberg
4 STARS
A 20th century man found himself living in 50th century, companion to a woman Gioia. They travel through the fanciful recreations of historical cities, and he slowly comes to realize the truth of what he is, and the world.
Deceptively simple, a slowly-unwinding mystery full of heart. I disagree with the conclusion, however. She -- that specific iteration of her -- would be dead, no matter how accurately she is reconstructed, and that to the reconstructed her and others she might as well be alive.
SOLSTICE - James Patrick Kely
2 STARS
A lonely, twisted man creates a daughter/clone 25 years younger, raises her and makes her his lover and daughter and possessive, all amidst the background of high-tech artisanal drugs and, for some reason, the Stonehenge.
Ugh. Self-indulgent.
DUKE PASQUALE'S RING - Avram Davidson
SKIPPED
No idea what the heck this one is about. Obtuse, cryptic writing style.
MORE THAN THE SUM OF HIS PARTS - Joe Haldeman
3.5 STARS
Cyborg limbs demonstrate the principle that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Diary of an engineer is injured while working in space, and installed with cybernetics, which smoothly transitioned from utter joy at his acquired power to casual disregard of other humans and becoming an evil mastermind.
The ending is either cliched or a clever twist, I can't decide -- hinting strongly that, although the previous evil has been subdued, the current "hero" moves toward that same fate..
OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS - Nancy Kress
2.5 STARS
Small town diner meeting with friendly alien, reflecting small-minded sides of humanity.
SIDE EFFECTS - Walter Jon Williams
NO RATING
Irresponsible doctors and pharmacology industry personnel, prescribing random drugs to poor people, with random side effects.
I confess to wildly skimming through this one. Very anti-Greed-Is-Me 80s vibe. Essentially skipped.
THE ONLY NEAT THING TO DO - James Tiptree, Jr.
3.5 STARS
The tone of a 60s YA adventure story yet dark subject matter. A young girl goes secretly adventuring out into space and encounters an equally-young alien whose lifestyle is to takeover the brain of host animals and forming a single symbiosis. As time passes in their journey toward the alien's home world, they slowly come to realize that this strange symbiosis is fatal to humans, and both sacrifices themselves by diving into the nearest sun.
A lovely, straight forward story that started out slow, but culminate to describe a lovely but doomed friendship between two very goodhearted young creatures.
DINNER IN AUDOGHAST - Bruce Sterling
3.5 STARS
Audoghast is a rich African empire in the 1000s. A rich man dines sumptuously with 3 friends and beauteous courtesans, and a prophet telling total truth of Africa's eventual destruction and fall of the Arabian world.
Describing what could have been 1 night out of the 1001 Nights. Those who live in luxurious now could never recognize truth, when it is so unpalatable.
UNDER SIEGE - George R. R. Martin
4 STARS
In an unknown apocalyptic future, a deformed mutant with time traveling abilities is part of a governmental, last-ditch project that sends his mind back in history, into that of a Finnish Colonel in the 1800s, trying to influence history to avert their nuclear-disaster future. He ends up flouting the suggestions to send the historical figure on a suicide mission, kills his future body, and lives a long life slightly-merged with the Colonel, changing the future in his own way.
Twisted and strange and poignant. A reminder that GRR Martin is indeed a good writer.
FLYING SAUCER ROCK & ROLL - Howard Waldrop
SKIPPED
A SPANISH LESSON - Lucius Shepard
3.5 STARS
Pseudo-biographical. Young Lucius in the 60s spent sometime by the beaches in Costa del Sol, living hedonistic expat lifestyle, until a pair of brother and sisters came. They are small, strange-looking, identical, and behaved strangely. Lucius gets close to them, and discovers that they are clones, and escaped from another universe -- dystopic, totalitarian, horrifying, utterly controlled by an undead Hitler and his legion of shadows. They escaped to this universe through an interdimensional tunnel, which they are trying close to stop potential capture. During the night they chose to close the tunnel, humans interfered, causing the brother to self-sacrifice by stepping back into the tunnel to lead enemies away. Lucius, from a sense of guilt, takes a nearly-silent sister to a Tibetan Buddhist nunnery, and upon leaving her there, has a realization about American sense of voyeurism over other people's pain and yet not truly willing to help.
Was doing great as a slowly-unraveling story for 3/4 of the way. The glimpse of alien world is fantastically grim and cruel, a Third Reich from a fevered nightmare. The moralizing, at the end however, I could have done without -- even the narrator himself said that this moralizing after a story's climax are said to be a weakness of his, even as he went on to say in this instance it was justified. Hm. It wasn't justified.
ROADSIDE RESCUE - Pat Cadigan
2.5 STAR
Earth and alien encounter. An Earth man with car troubles got picked up by an alien and his Earth employee, who scares him because the alien enjoys the sound of frightened people.
Straight-forward.
PAPER DRAGONS - James P. Blaylock
3 STARS
Magical Realism story of a strange California, where the narrator lives a normal life where giant worms eats his tomato plants, with one neighbor fanatic about the migration of giant, even car-sized, crabs that caused some destruction in the neighborhood, destroying a pseudo-living semi-mechanic semi-living paper dragon of another neighbor, who spends a year unsuccessfully rebuilding something similar.
A famous story, and one I recognize as being well-written. I always find it difficult to understand Magical Realism, though, where the protagonist always go about their flat, "normal" everyday lives even as wild fantastic things pass before their eyes.
MAGAZINE SECTION - R. A. Lafferty
3 STARS
A man writes seemingly-fantastical stories for Sunday Magazines, and increasingly finding himself out of a job because people could no longer believe them, despite their truths.
THE WAR AT HOME - Lewis Shiner
2.5 STARS
People who have never gone to Nam are racked by vivid hallucinations /memories of all its trauma. One man's descent into a PTSD that is not his own.
Very short story. Perhaps vivid, but Nam as a subject ... feels very distant to me. This story did not age well.
ROCKABYE BABY - S. C. Sykes
4 STARS
A man broke his neck and becomes a paraplegic, loses all his former life, yet in the process became drawn to reading, learning, and found his artistic talent. And then, he encountered an experimental treatment that would enable him to regrow all his limbs, yet at the same time would wipe clean all his memories. A paraplegic friend had taken that choice, became healthy yet intensely miserable, and eventually killed himself. The man himself, facing that same choice, hesitates, hesitates... yet finally decides to take the same plunge.
Another story of man trapped inside a husk of a body. Vivid illustration of a dilemma -- what constitutes a person if not all the memories and emotions and experiences? Without that, we are nothing. And yet, who's to say in that situation, most of us wouldn't make the same choice.
GREEN MARS - Kim Stanley Robinson
4 STARS
Roger, a member of the Red party, having quit his government position and in a depression over his failures to prevent Mars from being turned into another Earth. He becomes part of a team to climb Olympic Mons. Climb requires close attention to the here-and-now, a kind of physical meditation, and in the process, Roger begins to recognize the beauty of Mars, which remains regardless whether it is covered with Earth flora and fauna. He also reunites with Eileen, who was his lover hundreds of years in past, who tells him some of the philosophy she is reading. He comes to learn that one's past need not be immutable, a burden, but that life forces us to constantly re-evaluate the past, thereby changing it. At the end, he learns to love this new Mars.
I now understand why this series is so popular. It is written with the focus that mainstream literary novels have, examining the details and concerns of human life, written in vivid, present-focused prose, yet set in a fantastic new world, in the near future with some believable projected new technology. An interesting story.
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