The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991)

A very enjoyable read - a lot of stories about nuclear holocausts, world ending dystopians. Its interesting to see how things such as the internet and other communication devices are portrayed her - in 1990 these things were on the horizon, but no idea about just how integral this is in a future society.

Mr. Boy - James Patrick Kelly - an odd story about the haves, and the have nots - Also a bit creepy.

The Shobies' Story - Ursula K. Le Guin. I've read this in a few different anthologies, an intersting story a device that allows instantaneous travels. A nice story.

The Caress - Greg Egan. How far would a person go for his art? This wasn't a favorite in this volume.

A Braver Thing - Charles Sheffield. When is an idea stolen? If you can find the diamond in the ruff that the crazy person wrote, refined it to make it yours, is it stolen?

We See Things Differently - Bruce Sterling. This story is timely. But, I didn't really enjoy it.

And the Angels Sing - Kate Wilhem. We see what we want to see. Even if it kills us.

Past Magic - Ian R. MacLeod. A sad story about a lost child, a man lost in the present, able to bring back the past.

Bears Discover Fire - Terry Bisson. My favorite short story ever- love the bears, and the grandma, a wonderful, deep, great story.

The All-Consuming - Lucious Shepard and Robert Frazier. How do you experience something? What does it mean to consume?

Personal Silence - Molly Gloss. A sad story about a man trying to fight a war, in his own way.

Invaders - John Kessel. An odd story, about conquerors.

The Cairene Purse - Michael Moorcock. In a changing world, nothing is quite what it seems.

The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured his Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk. A rather odd story about a future, populated by talking animals, and de-volved humans. Its about innocence, love, devotion, also about doing right.

Tower of Babel - Ted Chiang. A well written story about the building a tower to God, How long would it be? The traveling is just as interesting as getting to the top.

The Death Artist - Alexander Jablokov. I'm not sure if I like this one. The ending was just a bit too sudden for me. A story about death, about relationships.

The First Since Ancient Persia - John Brunner. There is a price for everything. I found the story a bit uneven - with a slow build up, then a big bang in the last page.

Inertia - Nancy Kress. What is worth to have peace in the world?

Learning to Be Me - Greg Egan. I found this story very disconcerting - well written, very thought provoking.

Cibola - Connie Willis. A fable, a myth brought to life. I liked this story.

Walking the Moons - Jonathan Lethem. What is the point of doing something? Does it matter if you are sad, man living with his mom?

Ranmaker Cometh - Ian McDonald. Wish for something, you just might get it.

Hot Sky - Robert Silverbert. A mean lean story about a world hot with global warming. Human Nature is at work here.

Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates - Pat Murphy. Another story with a nuclear bomb. This time life is created.

The Hemingway Hoax - Joe Haldeman. This story is well written, very intelligent, a fun read, but I don't get the ending. ( )

This is one of the better of Gardner Dozois’s annual collections. He had very strong story selections during his tenure as editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and this collection draws heavily from stories published in Asimov’s. The Eighth Annual Collection highlighting the year 1990 has 25 stories, plus Dozois’s annual “Summation”. I won’t try to summarize or critique every story in the volume. Most of them are pretty good, with an occasional dud.

The leadoff story is a novella by James Patrick Kelly, “Mr. Boy”. I think this story had a bigger impact on me nearly 20 years ago when I first read it. Not quite so cutting edge now, but still pretty good.

One of the stories that really touched me was Kate Wilhelm’s “And the Angels Sing”. A small town newspaper editor on the Oregon coast finds something unusual along the roadside on the way home from work in the midst of a powerful rainstorm. His first thought was that it was a local girl, but the body by the side of the road turns out to be an alien. He enlists the aide of a colleague from the paper. This “first contact” story is extremely well written and touching, in many ways.

“The Cairene Purse” is an excellent near future dystopian novella set in Egypt. Michael Moorcock really tells an atmospheric exotic story with this one. A man sets on a trail to find his sister, who he has not heard from in a year. She is an archeologist, but, as he discovers slowly, she was more than that. The journey to find her is filled with snippets of interesting characters. This near future Egypt is suffering from severe climatic change and environmental decay. It is oddly nostalgic for the past decades, and is a mish-mash of many peoples.

Lucius Shepard was writing some terrific short fiction in the late 80’s. The one included here, “The All-Consuming” co-written with Robert Frazier, had some of the typical bizarre near future elements of a Shepard story but it was slow and didn’t do much for me.

Some other great stories in this collection are Joe Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax” and Terry Bison’s “Bears Discover Fire”. Bears took both a Hugo and a Nebula for best short story. I think it is one of my all-time favorite short stories. It is terrific. “The Hemingway Hoax” likewise took both the Hugo and Nebula for best novella. On the downside, of the duds in this collection, the worst of them was “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks …”by DAFYDD aB HUGH which was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula. It gets points for trying something different, but it just didn’t work for me.

“Personal Silence” by Molly Glass touched me, even though it is a sad story of a near future sliding into dystopia with a seemingly endless third world war. Set primarily on the tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, we share a short time in the life of a man who is walking around the globe for peace, and when he must stop at land’s end to build a boat, we find him interacting with the inhabitants of the sparsely settled area.

Also notable in the collection were Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon”, Alexander Jablokov’s “The Death Artist, Greg Egan’s “Learning To Be Me” and Robert Silverberg’s “Hot Sky”. “Tower of Babylon” by Chiang was his first published story (in OMNI magazine) and one of the best in the book. It won the Nebula in 1991 for best novelette. It runs only 20 and a half pages though. The story follows a young man, Hillalum, who is part of a group of miners summoned to climb the Tower of Babylon to dig through the vault of heaven. His months long journey up the tower is intriguing, well thought out, and very fun to read. The enjoyment here is with both the journey to the top, and the endpoint. Jablokov’s “The Death Artist” imagines our world sometime in the far future inhabited by “The Bound”, people like you and me who live out their lives in one body, and some near immortals called Incarnates. The story focuses on one of the Incarnates, Elam. The Incarnates entertain themselves creating these elaborate death experiences which others watch using cloned bodies that they temporarily inhabit via some ancient and no longer understood technology. We experience several stories within stories as we follow Elam in various incarnations and his death within those.

Greg Egan had two stories in this collection. “The Caress” didn’t grab me, maybe it was a little too warped, but I found “Learning To Be Me’ much more interesting. It seems that many stories have covered the idea of transferring oneself into a computer or network intelligence, but this one is thoughtful and better than most I think. The idea is that one has a sort of crystal embedded in one's skull that captures your life as your organic brain does through the years, learns as you learn, and is trained to learn to be you. At some future point, you "switch" and your organic brain is excavated and your dual crystal brain takes over. It is a bit of a horror story frankly.

Robert Silverberg’s “Hot Sky”, another highlight of the issue, is set in the future after the earth has warmed up and a ship’s captain goes fishing for icebergs to bring fresh water to San Francisco. Pat Murphy's short piece "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates" was also excellent. After the bombs have dropped a dying scientist labors to create new life to carry on. 4+ stars for this collection. ( )

Book Description: New York, NY, U.S.A.: St. Martin's Press, 1991. Soft Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. Very nice book and in excellent condition. The pages are crisp and clean, and the binding is very secure.

Of all the Year’s Best S.F. collection’s by Gardner Dozois, this one might be my favorite so far. There weren’t any stories that just blew me away, but there were only a couple I hated and I quite liked quite a bit. Best stories: "Bears Discover Fire", "Tower of Babylon", and "Learning to Be Me".

(detailed review of the stories on my blog) ( )

Book publishing numbers up again, according to Dozois. He points out one interesting statistic - 57% of new SF books were part of a series or something like that, as opposed to original.

This volume too is up from the last one, making it to 3.70, so with the usual long summary and recommended reading list bonus points, a solid 4.5 on its now.

Three standout stories, too.

Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Mr. Boy - James Patrick Kelly
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Shobies' Story - Ursula K. Le Guin
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Caress - Greg Egan
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : A Braver Thing - Charles Sheffield
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : We See Things Differently - Bruce Sterling
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : And the Angels Sing - Kate Wilhelm
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Past Magic - Ian R. MacLeod
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Bears Discover Fire - Terry Bisson
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The All-Consuming - Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Personal Silence - Molly Gloss
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Invaders - John Kessel
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Cairene Purse - Michael Moorcock
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk - Dafydd ab Hugh
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Tower of Babylon - Ted Chiang
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Death Artist - Alexander Jablokov
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The First Since Ancient Persia - John Brunner
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Inertia - Nancy Kress
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Learning to Be Me - Greg Egan
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Cibola - Connie Willis
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Walking the Moons - Jonathan Lethem
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Rainmaker Cometh - Ian McDonald
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Hot Sky - Robert Silverberg
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : White City - Lewis Shiner
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates - Pat Murphy
Year's Best Science Fiction 08 : The Hemingway Hoax - Joe W. Haldeman

Not wanting to grow up attitude certainly isn't helped by mum's mechanical approach to parenting.

3.5 out of 5

Look, it's full of stars.

3 out of 5

An enhanced policeman gets entangled in a billionaire's bizarre Dr Moreau creations as art and save the child schemes.

4 out of 5

Black bagged mate's Nobel notebook space travel cribbing award speech shocker.

4 out of 5

Downtrodden rock tour coke killer.

4 out of 5

Alien escapee local journalism.

4 out of 5

Nailing the ex for cloning.

3.5 out of 5

Hibernatin's a big ol' waste of time.

4 out of 5

Deadly deviant dishes means fungus faced diner's chef leavetaking.

4 out of 5

Boat builder death story.

3.5 out of 5

Alien Flash of conquistador history waffle.

3 out of 5

Sister's alien lovechild leaving lethality.

4 out of 5

Plague Dogs leveler love.

4.5 out of 5

Built like a brick lighthouse tunnelway to heaven.

3.5 out of 5

Please kill the real me, I deserve it.

3.5 out of 5

No Xerxes, no Spartans, no kids.

4 out of 5

Quarantine lack of collapse restraint.

4.5 out of 5

A man learns to come to terms with the Jewel or Ndoli device - which is also mentioned in Border Guards, and has a bit of a different reaction with a glitch to others.

3 out of 5

Sunshine city time.

3.5 out of 5

Virtually stuck here, by Jove.

3 out of 5

Seven year drought breaker stranger sighting.

3 out of 5

Berg SOS mutiny seeya.

4 out of 5

Big night light.

4 out of 5

Radiation rooted robomum.

3 out of 5

Multiple serial murder mayhem over Ernie's multiversal missing manuscript mania.

4.5 out of 5

4.5 out of 5

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2008/06/years-best-science-fiction-08th-annual.htm... ( )