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Not all my reviews of the stories in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Volume 1 are as long as the one I did of “The Work of Wolves,” thank Dog. Here are some other stories I liked.
“The Bookstore at the End of America,” Charlie Jane Anders — The US has broken into two countries, California and America, and the First and Last Page bookstore has entrances in both. What I liked about this story is that Anders doesn’t descend into stereotypes; you can understand, if not relate to, people on both sides.
“The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex,” Tobias S. Buckell — Remember those stories where an all-powerful Federated Earth controls the galaxy? This isn’t one of those. Tavi flies alien tourists around Manhattan, giving them real human food and taking them to authentic human experiences. “You have such a beautiful planet,” one of the aliens says, while Tavi tries to filter out the more deadly pollutants, and a mechanic fixes his cab with parts from the ruins of LaGuardia. “So unspoiled, paradisiacal.”
I like this inverted point of view, but I wonder if it’ll become as cliched as the old one. In the meantime, though, John W. Campbell is probably spinning in his grave.
“Contagion’s Eve at the House Noctambulous,” Rich Larson — This is a pretty gruesome tale. The people who own everything have unleashed the Contagion on the other 99%, who they call parasites, and then waited in their bunkers for them to die. When they finally reemerge, though, they find that some of the parasites survived, and these people are immediately enslaved by the leading families. On Contagion’s Eve, we find out the lengths the families will go to to harden the hearts of their children.
The son of one of these families, Burgewick, has a slave for a friend. Coincidentally enough, I just read a story about the son of a white Southern family befriending one of the family’s slaves, and the dynamic between them is very similar. I don’t know if Larson made the connection purposefully, but it sure seems like it.
“As the Last I May Know,” S. L. Huang — A child is implanted with the code to deadly weapons called seres, forcing the president to have to kill her if he wants to launch these weapons. This sounds at first like a cliched philosophical question — how can you order thousands of people killed, if you won’t kill anyone yourself? — but the characters and their reactions to this impossible situation seem real.
“Now Wait for this Week,” Alice Sola Kim — If Philip K. Dick watched “Friends” under the influence of whatever he had in his medicine cabinet that day and then wrote a story, it would be this one. Bonnie relives each week again and again, but she can’t get her friends to understand what’s happening — and even when they do, they forget it when the week starts over. “That was just how Bonnie was,” the friends say, as she gets more and more desperate to explain. But Kim gives the tale a feminist ending, one that Dick, for all his talent, could never have thought of.
Groundhog Day looms over this story like a looming elephant in the room, but it’s never mentioned. I don’t know why; maybe Kim didn’t want the reader to compare the two, but its absence only serves to call attention to it.
Halfway there! I'll do the rest of the stories next time.
Halfway there! I'll do the rest of the stories next time.
