Arthur W. Saha (1923–1999)

I've read several of these World's Best SF anthologies from the 80s in the last couple of years, and this is definitely the best of them so far. Just a really solid collection, featuring meaty. well-written stories with lots of good world building, all of which have aged remarkably well. Even the weakest stories are interesting, and the best of them are great.

Some brief comments on the individual stories:

"Permafrost" by Roger Zelazny: On a planet where winter lasts for fifty years, a man show more returns to the site of an expedition where things went very wrong for him a very long time ago. An interesting story set on an interestingly alien world, with a nicely creepy ending. But, while Zelazny is a very good prose stylist, it almost feels like he's trying a little too hard in places here.

"Timerider" by Doris Egan: The story of a woman whose job is to travel through time to observe, or to snatch away objects or people. I liked this one a lot, not least because it somehow manages to use a lot of very familiar elements without the story itself ever feeling the least bit tired or clichéd. My one complaint is that, even though it's a good-sized story, it ends before it feels quite finished, and left me thinking that it might work even better as a novel.

"Pretty Boy Crossover" by Pat Cadigan. A sharp, well-written little piece set in a world where hip, young, pretty boys have the chance to be hip, young, and pretty forever, possibly at the expense of their souls. The editor's note refers to it as "cyberpunk" (albeit with some snarky bemusement about what that term even means), and I suppose it is, but, unlike a lot of cyberpunk, it does not feel at all dated, shallowness and exploitation having sadly not yet gone out of style.

"R & R" by Lucius Shepard: A soldier fighting a near-future war in Guatemala takes some leave in a small, squalid town and contemplates desertion in this dark, oddly mystical, very literary-feeling novella about the insanity of war. Seems a bit long to be included in a collection like this, but I'm not complaining, because it's darned good.

"Lo, How an Oak E'er Blooming" by Suzette Haden Elgin: A woman commands an oak tree to burst into miraculous bloom in the middle of winter. It does. Scientists are baffled, and the Establishment is not pleased. It's a decent little satiric metaphor of a story, but some grumpy part of me wants to complain that it's fantasy, not science fiction. Although I think I'd care less about that if the sheer stupidity of the editor's note preceding it, embracing examples of utter bunkum that supposedly "confound conservative scientists," hadn't resulted in me feeling rather hostile when I started it.

"Dream in a Bottle" by Jerry Meredith and D. E. Smirl: A spaceship is run by disembodied brains who live in fantasy worlds, controlling the ship with the actions they take in their dreams. It's a potentially interesting (albeit logically pretty ridiculous) idea, but the execution is only OK. There's more of an old-fashioned SF feel to this one than in the previous stories, I think, with less carefully crafted prose and more exposition. It's also not quite as cleverly twisty as it seems to think it is.

"Into Gold" by Tanith Lee: A marvelously creative variation on a familiar fairy tale, set not long after the fall of Rome. As with the oak tree story, this one is clearly fantasy, rather than science fiction, but by this point I was back to my usual disinclination to quibble about genre definitions. Which is fortunate, because the important thing here is that it's really, really good.

"The Lions Are Asleep This Night" by Harold Waldrop: A glimpse into an alternate history where mammoths still roam an unpopulated North America and European colonialism in Africa never fully took. It's an odd little story, and one I'm not sure has any point beyond, "Hey, look, I made a world where white people didn't screw everybody else over!" Which is probably a worthwhile exercise, but it didn't work for me nearly as well as most of the other stories here, I'm afraid. Although it does have the advantage of featuring a bookish kid as a protagonist, which always holds some appeal for me.

"Against Babylon" by Robert Silverberg. Aliens land in California, accidentally set it on fire, and come between a slightly xenophobic firefighter and his hippie-chick wife. Not Silverberg's best, by any means, but the way it takes a very human angle on what otherwise feels like a B-movie scenario is interesting.

"Strangers on Paradise" by Damon Knight: A writer working on a biography comes to the planet Paradise, where everything is beautiful, there is no disease, and happy immortality is looking like a very real future possibility. Of course, you can't help but spend the entire story tensely waiting for the other shoe to drop... and I found it surprisingly effective when it did. show less

In my mind I think of the 80's as a really good time for science fiction so I found myself pretty disappointed with the ten stories chosen by the editor to represent the best of 1983 (The collection is assembled in 1984 with 1983 stories). There were only two stories to have my attention: "Homefaring" by Robert Silverberg and "The Harvest of Wolves" by Mary Gentle. I'd read Gentle's story a long time ago - short but well done, and memorable. The Silverberg story answers that timeless show more question of the far future: What if giant lobsters inherited the earth? Much better than it sounds! Greg Bear's short story "Blood Music" opens the collection. I had read it when it was new, but my memory of it was better than the story strikes me now. It was innovative for the time it was written. A couple stories in here are pretty poor. I'd avoid this collection, except that the novella "Homefaring" is such a good story and it was Nebula nominated as well. A 4-5 star gem amongst the dreck. sigh. show less

For some reason, I've always been a bit suspicious of "year's best" sci-fi anthologies.  So much so, in fact, that I am fairly certain that I have never actually read one.  I can't really explain or justify this.  Is the cynic in me simply unable to believe that there were ten truly worthy sci-fi stories published in one year?  Especially if that year is 1987?  That doesn't really make any sense now that I think about it.  Anyway, a couple years ago, I ended up getting a set of year's show more best anthologies for 1983, 1987, 1989, 1998, and 2000 basically for free.  So, here I am, ready to give the science fiction of 1987 a try.

I'm going to try an arbitrary metric this time out: thumbs up means the story feels like it belongs in a "year's best" book, thumbs down means it most definitely does not, and thumbs sideways means I'm essentially neutral on the issue.

"The Pardoner's Tale" by Robert Silverberg
In the future, aliens have taken over the world, occupying the cities.  Our main character is a pardoner, who hacks the systems to let people get out of the cities, in exchange for tons of money.  He's a bit of a smug protagonist, but this was a decent little story, with a few good ideas.  Thumbs sideways.

"Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy
A man transplants the brain of his dead daughter into a chimpanzee, but when he himself dies, she's left alone in the world.  An okay presmise livened by very immersive writing-- Murphy explores the perspective of Rachel better than I would have thought possible.  The only thing more confusing than being a teenager is being a teenager in a body you clearly weren't made for.  Sad and depressing, but in the right ways.  The ending is great.  Thumbs sideways.

"America" by Orson Scott Card
There's a frame story here about a collapsing America in the far future, being invaded by long-dispossessed inhabitants of Latin America.  This isn't so interesting.  It frames, however, an essentially not-sf tale about a boy goes to a remote native village in Brazil with his father on medical missionary work.  I liked this story a lot, even if the story occasionally did dance into essentializing the natives as possessors of "magical" truths.  I was intrigued enough that I'd like to read Folk of the Fringe, which collects all of Card's stories set in this millieu.  Thumbs up.

"Crying in the Rain" by Tanith Lee
Yet another postapocalyptic story.  I would say that we weren't very positive about the future in 1987, but by all accounts, we're not very positive now, either.  A haunting story about what a mother has to do to give her daughter a better life in this bleak future.  Thumbs up.

"The Sun Spider" by Lucius Shepard
This was, without a doubt, my favorite story in the book.  There's a complex relationship between a strange scientist and his wife, some interesting sci-fi stuff, great worldbuilding, lyrical writing.  I was not expecting something this good when I picked up the book, and certainly not from an author I've never even heard of.  Wollheim's introduction indicates that Shepard usually writes about "near-future wars in backwards lands," which is disappointing, as I'd love to read more gorgeous space stuff from here.  Thumbs up, for sure.

"Angel" by Pat Cadigan
I never even figured out what was going on here.  I'm sure I could have, but nothing made me care enough to want to.  Thumbs down. 

"Forever Yours, Anna" by Kate Wilhelm
A handwriting expert named Gordon has to find a woman named Anna, wanted in connection with an experiment gone wrong.  It has a very neat idea, but does not do much with it.  Thumbs sideways. 

"Second Going" by James Tiptree, Jr.
Aliens come to the Earth, but turn out to be rather different than anyone expected.  Their telepathy gives them extraordinary abilities to prevent problems, but what proves really intriguing is their gods.  A pretty good story, borderline, but ultimately thumbs sideways. 

"Dinosaurs" by Walter Jon Williams
This was my other favorite story in the book, about humans of the future who have subdivided their functions into different specializations-- and are utterly unable to communicate fully with members of species who haven't.  Humanity's terraformers are destroying the planets of intelligent races, but because the terraformers weren't designed with human intelligence, there's no good way to get them to stop.  So naturally those intelligent races declare war... but it's a war they can never win.  Great ideas, and great writing.  Thumbs up. 

"All Fall Down" by Don Sakers
Apparently I read this story but I don't remember a thing about it.  Thumbs down.

That's not that bad.  Only two stories that I flat out didn't like.  There were perhaps more thumbs sideways stories than one might wish (four), but that's equaled by the number of very good stories, two of which I thought were excellent.  I look forward to discovering what the best sci-fi stories of 1989 were whenever I get there.

There's no table of contents in this book, by the way.  Who does that?  Also, Wollheim writes little paragraph-long introductions to each story.  He needs to not do that.  When they aren't disposable, they give away parts of the story! show less

I read the 1983 and 1984 volumes of this series not long ago, having picked them up along with this 1988 installment at a library sale a while back, and I'm finding it interesting to compare them. Both the '83 and the '84 versions had a mixture of two very different kinds of SF stories. On one hand, there were a smattering of very old school-style works, with scientific ideas (or, occasionally, adventure plots) taking firm precedence over character and prose, and on the other were stories show more with more of a literary sensibility, ones that were more inclined to be emotionally evocative and maybe a little experimental. Although that's something of a false dichotomy, of course; a lot of the stories actually come somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum. Well, I don't know whether it's a statistical fluke, an indicator of a trend in the history of SF, or simply a result of the editor's evolving tastes, but this installment features only the more soft/literary/experimental stuff and some of those in-between kinds of stories, with none of that real old school SF sensibility at all. Which, honestly, is fine by me. I like good classic SF as much as the next geek, but I just didn't think the examples in those previous volumes were all that great; they often had a stale, backwards-looking feel about them. With this batch, even the ones I didn't care for that much were reasonably well-written, free of clunky exposition, and at least trying to do something creative.

A breakdown of the specific stories:

"The Pardoner's Tale" by Robert Silverberg: The story of a computer hacker who alters people's records for a fee, in a world that's been occupied by aliens. It's decently written, in a breezy sort of way, and I kind of like the way the lightly sketched worldbuilding deliberately leaves a lot to the imagination. But it's very slight, and the vaguely cyberpunky elements feel almost quaint now. (Hey, remember when "megabyte" was an impressive-sounding word?)

"Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy: A scientist imprints the memories and personality of his dead teenage daughter onto a chimpanzee. Then he dies, and the chimp is sent to a primate research facility. The result is a quiet, understated little story about identity and adolescence and the fuzzy dividing line between humans and animals.

"America" by Orson Scott Card: A strange story about a repressed and rather sanctimonious Mormon kid, a middle aged Indian woman from the Brazilian rainforest, prophetic dreams, some kind of mystical force or god, and a ruler destined to reclaim the Americas from the Europeans. Well-written, but it's debatable whether it's more science fiction or fantasy, and there's something about it that makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable, and not in a good way. Although that may have as much or more to do with what I know of Card and the fact that I sort of expect to dislike any political or religious statement he might be making than with anything inherent in the story itself. It's really hard to say.

"Crying in the Rain" by Tanith Lee: A quietly disturbing little story about everyday life -- short, sad, limited everyday life -- in a world so contaminated by poison and radioactivity that even walking in the rain is deadly.

"The Sun Spider" by Lucius Shepard: The story of a scientist obsessed with the idea of finding life on the sun, and his wife, and... well, I'm honestly not entirely sure. It was interesting, taking ideas that could have been handled in a pulpy fashion and doing something much more complicated with them, but ultimately it was a little too abstract, and I had difficulty connecting with it.

"Angel" by Pat Cadigan: The story of an alien exiled to Earth, and the humans he bonds with, in his strange, alien way. The basic concept has an almost too-familiar sort of feel to it; the idea of a creature who is in some way beyond human who comes among us and has a profound effect on the people he encounters is older than science fiction itself. But the execution isn't bad.

"Forever Yours, Anna" by Kate Wilhelm: A graphologist is asked to analyze the handwriting on some letters, and discovers an unexpected connection with the letter-writer. A very short story with a Twilight Zone-ish twist ending that works better than it really ought to.

"Second Going" by James Tiptree, Jr.: Humanity encounters some seemingly friendly aliens, and discovers that they've also brought their gods along to Earth with them. Kind of an odd story, and far from Tiptree's best, but, like most Tiptree stories, it's weirdly thought-provoking.

"Dinosaurs" by Walter Jon Williams: A nicely chilling glimpse of the far-future descendents of humanity, who are much, much more alien than the aliens they're trying to have diplomatic relations with. This one is definitely my favorite of the anthology. It's disturbing in some subtle and effective ways.

"All Fall Down" by Don Sakers: Humanity is suffering from a devastating plague, and a race of sentient trees debates whether or not to help. This is actually a sequel to a story that was included in the 1984 volume. That wasn't one of my favorites in that collection, and I can't say I felt any happier with this one. There's just something about the wise, mystical, "like, totally in touch with the natural harmony of the universe, man!" alien tree people that rubs me the wrong way.

Rating: I'm going to give this one a slightly generous 4/5. Even if there aren't that many stand-outs, it's a worthwhile collection, overall. show less