Summary:
David Hartwell’s ‘Best of the Year’ series gets off to a lacklustre start with a volume that contains nothing outstanding but which has two long stories by Robert Silverberg, Hot Times in Magma City, and Gene Wolfe, Ziggurat that, along with William Browning Spencer’s Downloading Midnight, manage to drag up the average. There are also a couple of good stories by Le Guin and Barton, but the rest are of average or worse quality. In particular, the stories by Zelazny, Benford and Sheckley are a lot weaker than you might expect from these writers.
[ISFDB page][Amazon UK/US]

Other reviews:
Gary K. Wolfe, Locus #425, June 1996
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, David G. Hartwell

Fiction:
Think Like a Dinosaur • novelette by James Patrick Kelly ∗
Wonders of the Invisible World • short story by Patricia A. McKillip ∗∗
Hot Times in Magma City • novella by Robert Silverberg ∗∗∗+
Gossamer • short story by Stephen Baxter ∗∗
A Worm in the Well • novelette by Gregory Benford ∗
Downloading Midnight • novelette by William Browning Spencer ∗∗∗+
For White Hill • novella by Joe Haldeman ∗∗
In Saturn Time • short story by William Barton ∗∗∗
Coming of Age in Karhide • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin ∗∗∗
The Three Descents of Jeremy Baker • short story by Roger Zelazny ∗∗
Evolution • novelette by Nancy Kress ∗∗+
The Day the Aliens Came • short story by Robert Sheckley –
Microbe • short story by Joan Slonczewski ∗∗
The Ziggurat • novella by Gene Wolfe ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Introduction: Science Fiction Is Alive and Well • essay by David G. Hartwell
Story introductions • by David G. Hartwell

_____________________

(All the stories below have previously been published on my sfshortstories.com blog—if you have read them there, skim down to the three dots to get the summary and other information.)

This anthology leads off with Think Like A Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s SF, June 1995), which begins with the return of Kamala Shastri to Tuulen station, a matter transmitter installation in lunar orbit, after three years on the alien planet Gend. The story then flashes back to the period when she first arrived on the station to go outbound.
In a data dump start (you are pelted with information in the first few pages, which is not unusual for a Gardner Dozois’ Asimov’s SF story) the narrator Michael meets her on her initial arrival at the station, and we get a stream of detail about both her, the space station, and the future they inhabit. The one essential piece of information is that humanity now has limited access to the Galaxy courtesy of the Hanen, an alien race of dinosaur-like creatures who operate the station’s matter transmitter.
However, before Kamala can make her “superluminal transmission” (matter transmission jump) to Gend, one of the “dinos” called Silloin tells them that there will be a short delay because of technical problems. Michael decides to distract Kamala by launching into a “Tell me a secret . . .” routine with her that results in further data dumps that provide details of both their childhoods: he tells her about the time he swapped the crosses on the graves of two of his teachers who died in an accident (later switching then back), then Kamala starts telling him a story about an old lady she visited when she was a child, before being interrupted by Silloin, who informs them that the matter transmitter is now serviceable.
In the main part of the story we then discover, as Kamala is getting ready for the transfer, that the matter transmitter works by copying bodies and duplicating them at the destination station. However, to satisfy a nebulously explained concept of balance and “harmony,” the original bodies have to be destroyed. And that is Michael’s main purpose on the station—to press the button that will destroy Kamala’s original body after her duplicate is created on Gend (I can’t remember if there is a reason why this can’t be done automatically, or by the dinos).
Of course (spoiler) there is the inevitable problem, and Michael retrieves a screaming Kamala from the sending booth after what seems like an unsuccessful transmission—it is apparent that the process is a highly traumatic event for the original—only for Silloin to later find that the duplication process at Gend has been successful. This means there are now two copies of Kamala in the universe.
The dinos subsequently get in a flap about the conservation of harmony, etc., eventually threatening Michael with Earth’s expulsion from the transmission network if he doesn’t destroy the original Kamala. After some to-ing and fro-ing (during which the dinos reproach Michael for his “baby” thinking, and look like they may kill Kamala themselves), Michael forces Kamala into an airlock, and spaces her in a graphic scene:

I heard the whoosh of escaping air and thought that was it; the body had been ejected into space. I had actually turned away when thumping started, frantic, like the beat of a racing heart. She must have found something to hold onto. Thump, thump, thump! It was too much. I sagged against the inner door—thump, thump—slid down it, laughing. Turns out that if you empty the lungs, it is possible to survive exposure to space for at least a minute, maybe two. I thought it was funny. Thump! Hilarious, actually. I had tried my best for her—risked my career—and this was how she repaid me? As I laid my cheek against the door, the thumps started to weaken. There were just a few centimeters between us, the difference between life and death. Now she knew all about balancing the equation. I was laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe. Just like the meat behind the door. Die already, you weepy bitch.
I don’t know how long it took. The thumping slowed. Stopped. And then I was a hero. I had preserved harmony, kept our link to the stars open. I chuckled with pride; I could think like a dinosaur.  p. 25-26

This last section obviously makes this story one that references Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations (that’s if you define “references” as “conduct an ill-informed and partisan attack”).¹ If this isn’t about the Godwin story, then what we are left with is misogynistic torture porn.
Even before this attempted takedown of the Godwin I didn’t much care for this piece. I’ve already mentioned the data dump start—who wants to hack their way through that when they start a story?—and the “Tell me a story” digressions—although I think I can see the need for these to pad the piece out (that said, you would think these might contribute something tangible to the story, e.g. Kamala could do with being a more sympathetic character).
The story has other problems too, including the Dino’s nebulous and hand-wavey comments about “harmony” and “balance,” which set up an unconvincing Trolley Problem (kill Kamala or something worse might happen). There are also science explanations that would shame a 1930’s pulp:

Whatever went wrong with Kamala’s migration that morning, there was nothing J could have done. The dinos tell me that the quantum nondemoliton sensor array is able to circumvent Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle by measuring spacetime’s most crogglingly small quantities without collapsing the wave/particle duality. How small? They say that no one can ever “see” anything that’s only 1.62 x 10^-31 centimeters long, because at that size, space and time come apart. Time ceases to exist and space becomes a random probablistic foam, sort of like quantum spit. We humans call this the Planck-Wheeler length. There’s a Planck-Wheeler time, too: 10^-45 of a second. If something happens and something else happens and the two events are separated by an interval of a mere 10^-45 of a second, it is impossible to say which came first. It was all dino to me—and that’s just the scanning. The Hanen use different tech to create artificial wormholes, hold them open with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, pass the superluminal signal through and then assemble the migrator from elementary particles at the destination.  p. 15-16

Thank you, Professor—do you have any equations to go with that?
I thought this a poorly put together piece, and was later horrified to find that (a) not only everyone else on my group read raved about it² but (b) that it won a Hugo award too (and was a Nebula finalist). It seems that all you need to do to woo voters is produce a story with space stations, dinosaurs, and self-referential genre content.
∗ (Mediocre). 7,800 words.

•

Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia A. McKillip (Full Spectrum #5, 1995) begins arrestingly with a “angel” (a time-traveller) visiting a man called Mather:

I am the angel sent to Cotton Mather. It took me some time to get his attention. He lay on the floor with his eyes closed; he prayed fervently, sometimes murmuring, sometimes shouting. Apparently the household was used to it. I heard footsteps pass his study door; a woman—his wife Abigail?—called to someone: “If your throat is no better tomorrow, we’ll have Phillip pee in a cup for you to gargle.” From the way the house smelled, Phillip didn’t bother much with cups.  p. 30 (Best Science Fiction of the Year, David Hartwell)

The angel records Mather’s comments for the researcher she works for before returning to her own cyberpunk future, and her child. There she contemplates the dreadful past she has returned from, and agonises about the fact that she didn’t change anything for the better (although her employer reminds her that if she did she would have been left there). When she watches her kid play a VR game later on, she sees the image of a trapped angel.
This gets off to a good start but doesn’t subsequently go anywhere. A notion, not a story.
∗∗ (Average). 3,850 words.

•

Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg (Omni Online, May 1995) starts in a Los Angeles recovery house where an ex-addict, Mattison, is monitoring a screen for volcanoes and lava outbreaks in the local area:

The whole idea of the Citizens Service House is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have “volunteered” to do community service—any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service even while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.
What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course.  p. 51

When there is a particularly serious eruption, Mattison’s team is sent by Volcano Central to support the local lava control teams in Pasadena. En route we get a description of this near-future LA:

The rains have made everything green, though. The hills are pure emerald, except where some humongous bougainvillea vine is setting off a gigantic blast of purple or orange. Because the prevailing winds this time of year blow from west to east, there’s no coating of volcanic ash or other pyroclastic crap to be seen in this part of town, nor can you smell any of the noxious gases that the million fumaroles of the Zone are putting forth; all such garbage gets carried the other way, turning the world black and nauseating from San Gabriel out to San Berdoo and Riverside.
What you can see, though, is the distant plume of smoke that rises from the summit of Mount Pomona, which is what the main cone seems to have been named. The mountain itself, which straddles two freeways, obliterating both and a good deal more besides, in a little place called City of Industry just southwest of Pomona proper, isn’t visible, not from here—it’s only a couple of thousand feet high, after six months of building itself up out of its own accumulation of ejected debris. But the column of steam and fine ash that emerges from it is maybe five times higher than that, and can be seen far and wide all over the Basin, except perhaps in West L.A. and Santa Monica, where none of this can be seen or smelled and all they know of the whole volcano thing, probably, is what they read in the Times or see on the television news.  p. 58

After the team successfully complete their task (which, basically, involves hosing down the lava flow so it forms a crust that dams what is behind it) they get sent to another job—but not until they demand, and get, a break:

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. “I sure wouldn’t mind a beer right now,” Evans says, and Hawks says, “Why don’t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you’re wishing things up? Don’t cost no more than beer, if it’s just wishes.”
“I never liked champagne,” Paul Foust says. “For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.” He smacks his lips. “I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut—”
“Knock it off,” says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.
“You never stop wanting it,” Foust tells him.
“Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don’t you think I know that? Knock it off.”
“Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?” Marty Cobos asks.
“And how about needles, too?” says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. “Let’s talk about needles too.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,” Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer. “What do you need to play around with my head for?”
“Why, did you have some kind of habit?” Mary Maude asks him sweetly.  p. 71

En route to the second job we see more scenes of volcanic Armageddon and, at one point, the crew pass something that looks like an Aztec sacrifice taking place at an intersection. Finally, at the second job (spoiler), there is a climactic scene that involves a moment of peril for one of this dysfunctional crew, and a chance of redemption for another.
This is a very readable and entertaining story, with a neat idea (albeit not an especially SFnal one) as well as characters that are both colourful and snarky. It’s a pretty good piece, and one I’d have for my “Year’s Best,” too. That said, the story feels like it is a bit longer than it needs to be (perhaps because of the vulcanology material, some of which feels like it comes straight from a very interesting holiday in Iceland), and the characters of the addicts are a bit too similar.
I note in passing that this doesn’t read like a Silverberg’s work at all, and felt more like one of those Marc Laidlaw & Rudy Rucker stories I’ve read recently.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 20,100 words.

•

Gossamer by Stephen Baxter (Science Fiction Age, November 1995) has a good opening hook that sees a two woman spaceship prematurely come out of a wormhole near Pluto and crash-land on the planet. During their approach, Lvov, the scientist of the two, has a brief (and story telegraphing) vision of a web between Pluto and one of its moons, Charon.
Both of the women survive the crash although the ship is wrecked, and Cobh the pilot tells Lvov that it’ll be twenty days or so before they are rescued, and that it won’t be via the wormhole (there is some handwavium here about the wormhole anomaly that spat them out of hyperspace).
The central section of the story then sees Lvov exploring the surface of Pluto and, as she flies along, we get some personal backstory. There is also further discussion between the pair (Cobh is off doing something else) about the unstable wormhole. Then Lvov finds what looks like eggs in a burrow:

Everywhere she found the inert bodies of snowflakes, or evidence of their presence: eggs, lidded burrows. She found no other life forms—or, more likely, she told herself, she wasn’t equipped to recognize any others.
She was drawn back to Christy, the sub-Charon point, where the topography was at its most complex and interesting, and where the greatest density of flakes was to be found. It was as if, she thought, the flakes had gathered here, yearning for the huge, inaccessible moon above them. But what could the flakes possible want of Charon? What did it mean for them?  p. 129

When the pair realise that they may have discovered alien life there is a discussion about what they should do—if they signal Earth then the rescue will be called off as any rocket exhaust will damage the environment. Lvov (spoiler) feels strongly that if they have to die to preserve the Plutonian ecosystem then so be it and, when she realises that Cobh has figured out another way to get them home, she sends a message to Earth about her discovery.
The final part of the story has the pair going to the wormhole on Cobh’s salvaged and modified GUTdrive, the (presumably not ecosystem destroying) heat of which activates the Pluto-Charon ecosystem: the burrows open, the eggs hatch, and an interplanetary web forms between Pluto and its moon. Then the drive activates, and causes a distorted space wave which flicks the pair to Earth (or something like that).
This is a well enough put together story (apart from the telegraphing, which is repeated again later on), and it has a good sense-of-wonder finale—the problem is, though, that the piece as a whole does not convince. Part of the reason is the exotic ecosystem, which is interesting but rather far-fetched, and the other thing is Cobh’s rather unlikely invention of a new type of space drive amid the wreckage of their ship (this rather smacks of Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, and cobbling together a star-drive out of a six-pack of used beer cans). There is also the minor problem (in practical if not narrative terms) of being trapped in your suit for twenty odd days, with no discussion of how you are going to eat or go to the toilet.
Normally, you can get away with one fantastic thing in a story; two or three is pushing it. Too far-fetched.
∗∗ (Average.) 6,100 words.

•

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford (Analog, November 1995) starts—not entirely clearly—with a female astronaut called Claire piloting her spaceship near the Sun’s corona in an attempt to survey a transiting black hole. The story then flashbacks to Mercury where a high-tech bailiff serves her, and we get back story about her debts, the imminent repossession of her specially outfitted ore-carrying spaceship, etc. All of which eventually leads her to accept a contract from SolWatch to undertake the hazardous job outlined in the first section.
This set up forms the first third of the story, and the rest of the piece continues in a similarly plodding vein:

Using her high-speed feed, Erma explained. Claire listened, barely keeping up. In the fifteen billion years since the wormhole was born, odds were that one end of the worm ate more matter than the other. If one end got stuck inside a star, it swallowed huge masses. Locally, it got more massive.
But the matter that poured through the mass-gaining end spewed out the other end. Locally, that looked as though the mass-spewing one was losing mass. Space-time around it curved oppositely than it did around the end that swallowed.
“So it looks like a negative mass?”
IT MUST. THUS IT REPULSES MATTER. JUST AS THE OTHER END ACTS LIKE A POSITIVE, ORDINARY MASS AND ATTRACTS MATTER.
“Why didn’t it shoot out from the Sun, then?”
IT WOULD, AND BE LOST IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE. BUT THE MAGNETIC ARCH HOLDS IT.
“How come we know it’s got negative mass? All I saw was—”
Erma popped an image into the wall screen.
NEGATIVE MASS ACTS AS A DIVERGING LENS, FOR LIGHT PASSING NEARBY. THAT WAS WHY IT APPEARED TO SHRINK AS WE FLEW OVER IT.
Ordinary matter focused light, Claire knew, like a converging lens. In a glance she saw that a negative ended wormhole refracted light oppositely. Incoming beams were shoved aside, leaving a dark tunnel downstream. They had flown across that tunnel, swooping down into it so that the apparent size of the wormhole got smaller.  p. 150

The extensive explanations in this piece (there is an accompanying diagram) caused my eyes to glaze over, and the unengaging dramas that Claire is subjected to did not provide any relief. The ship AI is also mildly irritating, as well as possibly homicidal—at one point Claire asks about the peak gravity on an approach, whereupon the AI tells her “27.6 gravities”—death for a human. You would have thought that it might have said so earlier, or perhaps it takes a relaxed view of Asimov’s First Law (the part about not letting humans come to harm through inaction).
In the final pages of the story (spoiler) she manages to capture the black hole and sell the rights for a huge amount of money, more than enough to clear her debts.
In some respects this is a typical dull Analog story, with lots of speculative science substituting for anything of interest.
∗ (Mediocre). 8,300 words.

•

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer (Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, December 1995) is a noir detective/cyberpunk mashup that starts with Captain Armageddon, a hologram from a virtual reality show called American Midnight, going amok on the “Highway”. Initially Marty, the narrator, hires a young hacker called Bloom to go in and delete the “ghosts” but several days pass and nothing happens. This leads him to go and check on Bloom, who he finds floating in a tank and wired up to VR. Marty’s subsequent exchange with the VR technician supervising Bloom gives a taste of the strangeness of this future world and the wit of the story:

Techs always tell you everything is under control. That’s what this one said.
“Save it for a gawker’s tour,” I told her. “I’ve been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You’re fine, and then you’re dead.”
“This is poor personal interaction,” the tech said. “You are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image.”
I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.
I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I’d have another civility demerit in my file.  p. 173

Later Marty has an unsuccessful date with Gloria, an event that shows us another aspect of this strange future world (his relationship is subject to a tangle of restrictive contracts and conditions which, presumably, satirise what actually goes on in real life). After this he goes into the VR Highway to find Bloom, buying information from a tout in the under-Highway which eventually leads him to Bloom, who he finds talking to a woman in a bar in a seedy part of the Bin:

The woman looked at me. She was a guy named Jim Havana, a gossip leak for the Harmonium tabloids. Havana always projected a woman on the Highway. In the Big R he was a bald suit, a white, dead-fish kind of guy with a sickly sheen of excess fat and sweat. Down here, Havana was a stocky fem—you might have guessed trans—with dated cosmetics and a big thicket of black hair. She was an improvement, but only by comparison to the upside version.
“This is wonderful,” Havana said, glaring at Bloom. “I said private, remember?
“It’s good to see you,” Bloom said to me.
“Don’t let me interfere with this reunion. I’m out of here,” Havana said. “I don’t need a crowd right now, you know?” Havana shook her curls and stood up. She headed toward the door.
“Wait,” Bloom said. He got up and ran after her.
I followed.
The street was wet and low-res, every highlight skewed. The shimmering asphalt buckled as I ran. An odor like oily, burning rags lingered in the V. Bloom and Havana were ahead of me, both moving fast.
I heard Havana scream.
Something detached from the shadows, rising wildly from an unthought alley full of cast-off formulae, dirty bulletin skreeds, trashed fantasies. An angry clot of flies hovered over the form. It roared—the famous roar of Defiance, rallying cry of Captain Armageddon!  pp. 178-179

Bloom fires an encrypted burst that destroys the creature, but we later find that this doesn’t fix the Highway’s problems. The rest of the story sees further adventures that eventually (spoiler) lead to Captain Armageddon’s sidekick and sex star, Zera Terminal; Bloom’s subsequent relationship with her; and how the source for her character (the human that was “mapped” as a starting point) was “raped”. This latter event refers, I think (this is the story’s weakest point), to the illegal mapping of a nine year old child as the source for Zera Terminal:

You’ve seen her, those big eyes and the fullness of her mouth. Her features are almost too lush for the chiseled oval of her face, but somehow it works, probably because of the innocence. This is a woman, you think, who trusts. This is a woman who finds everything new and good.
There is usually some chill to a holo, some glint of the non-human intelligence that runs the programs. Zera almost transcended that. There was a human here, lodged in that sweet, surprised voice, that gawky grace, that wow in her eyes.
It came down to a single quality, always rare, rarer in a land of artifice: Innocence.  p. 187

This is quite a convoluted (and at times dark) story, and it is occasionally hard to work out what is going on (it would have benefited from another draft). On the other hand it is engrossing, and convincingly depicts both of its colourful worlds, the real and the virtual. This latter effect is partly achieved by a skilful use of altered social customs, and also by an extensive invented vocabulary (“Highway,” “Big R,” “go flat,” etc.), none of which the author explains to the readers but leaves to be understood from context or repeated use.
I’m not sure it’s an entirely successful story, but its mix of ambition and what it does achieve makes it my second favourite story in the Hartwell volume so far.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 9,000 words.

•

For White Hill by Joe Haldeman (Far Futures, edited by Gregory Benford, 1995) opens with the (unnamed) narrator stating that he is writing this memoir in English, a language from “an ancient land of Earth.” In the story’s leisurely opening chapters we find that he and a woman called White Hill are part of a group of twenty-nine artists that has gone to Earth to take part in a competition to design and build a commemorative artwork that will serve as a reminder, after the Earth is reterraformed, of the devastation caused by the Fwyndri. This alien race, with whom humanity are still at war, released a nanoplague on Earth which turned most plant and animal DNA into dust.
All this background information is given in little snippets though, and initially the story is mainly concerned with the developing relationship between the two characters, their sexual attraction, and the differing sexual mores of their two cultures (although, to be honest, they seem pretty much like an ordinary 20^th Century couple²). There is also quite a lot of discussion about art as they wander around their base in Amazonia (and this is the kind of thing you would find in endless 1970’s artist colony stories):

She scraped at the edge of the sill with a piece of rubble. “It’s funny: earth, air, fire, and water. You’re earth and fire, and I’m the other two.”
I have used water, of course. The Gaudi is framed by water. But it was an interesting observation. “What do you do, I mean for a living? Is it related to your water and air?”
“No. Except insofar as everything is related.” There are no artists on Seldene, in the sense of doing it for a living. Everybody indulges in some sort of art or music, as part of “wholeness,” but a person who only did art would be considered a parasite. I was not comfortable there. She faced me, leaning. “I work at the Northport Mental Health Center. Cognitive science, a combination of research and . . . is there a word here? Jaturnary. ‘Empathetic therapy,’ I guess.”  p. 215 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

White Hill’s occupation surfaces again at the end of the story.
After a couple chapters of these two mostly just talking to each other, the story finally gets going when they get a visitor who helps them plan their travel itinerary, at which point the story changes from an extended conversation into a travelogue. They go to Giza and the pyramids, and then by airship to Rome (which is now encircled by a wall of bones collected by the local monks). Then they learn they have to go back to Amazonia because “the war is back.”
At this point the story changes direction completely, and the pair return to discover that the Fwyndri have tampered with the sun’s internal processes and that it will become progressively hotter—eventually turning into a red giant. Earth will become increasingly uninhabitable and, when the sun finally expands, destroyed. The couple also learn that there is no way off-planet as all ships have been requisitioned (and ships from elsewhere will take too long to arrive). The pair decide to stay in Amazonia and continue with their work. They eventually sleep together.
The rest of the story charts their developing relationship and their projects. While they work on these latter, terraforming machines cool the Earth so much that snow ends up covering what was originally a desert. Then, when they are caught in one of the storms that frequently occur, White Hill is badly injured—she loses and eye and suffers serious facial injuries—and the narrator has to tend to her until she heals enough to undertake a “purge” and re-enter the safe underground areas for surgery.
After a couple more chapters about her recovery and their relationship, there is another right angle plot turn, which has him come back to find she has left to do “Jaturnary” work for a hundred people who are going off in a spaceship to cold sleep through the expansion of the sun. There is a place for him, but he knows that the therapy she will provide to keep the cold-sleepers sane will eradicate her personality (no, me neither), so he does not go.
If this synopsis seems all over the place, it is because the story is little more than a collection of deus ex machina plot developments (which are there because, I believe, the story is handily based on Shakespeare’s 18^th sonnet³). There is also a considerable amount of flab here (there is endless chatter about the couple’s relationship), and a kitchen sink full of SF furniture (aliens, nano-plagues, exploding suns, cold-sleep, etc.) All in all, it struck me as very much the kind of story you would expect to see in a collection edited by another writer (which it was) and where, I suspect, the brief was, “write what you want!”
There are parts of this that are readable enough, but it is a mess, and average at best.
∗∗ (Average). 16,600 words.

•

In Saturn Time by William Barton (Amazing Stories: The Anthology, edited by Kim Mohan, 1995) is set in an alternate world where there was an extended Apollo program. The story starts with the narrator, Nick Jensen, and his commander on a 1974 Apollo 21 rover mission beyond the lunar daylight terminator line. In a dark crater they find hard white rock (frozen water?) under a thin film of black matter.
The rest of the story telescopes forward at roughly four year intervals, and each time deploys an event vignette: Jensen is in orbit with the 1977 Apollo 29 when the Russians land on the Moon; in 1980 he is with President Udall, Vice President Mondale, and California Governor (and the next Democratic President after Udall) Jerry Brown, watching an (enhanced ) Saturn 5M lifting a moon base station; then, in 1984, he is on a mission taking a seventy-year-old Walter Cronkite to the Moon:

And, sitting there on the pad, just as T minus thirty seconds was called, [Cronkite had] chuckled softly and said, “This kinda reminds me of Paris . . .”
Uh. Paris.
“Sure. I went in with the Airborne. Jumped with them, carrying a goddamn typewriter . . .”
Then, sitting on the Extended LM’s floor, as required, face far below the level of the window while the engine rumbled and we dropped toward touchdown, he’d whipped out a kid’s folding cardboard periscope, the kind of thing you could still buy for 98 cents, holding it up so he could see out. That won us over, a kind of guileless astronautical ingenuity, like smuggling a ham sandwich onto the first space flight.  p. 273

There are various other events: Jensen is the first man on Mars; a partly reusable Saturn 5R is launched; Jupiter’s moon Callisto is orbited, etc.
This is a well enough done piece but it’s really just a techo- fantasy for thwarted space geeks, and one that exists in a world that is completely devoid of any sense of realpolitik (there is no explanation as to why the voters would happily spend the colossal amount of money needed to fund an Apollo program on steroids, and the piece also posits the election of four Democratic Presidents succession).
For dreamers.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5900 words.

•

Coming of Age in Karhide by Ursula K. Le Guin (New Legends, edited by Greg Bear & Martin H. Greenberg, 1995) is one of her ‘Hainish’ stories, the most famous example of which is The Left Hand of Darkness. This story also takes place on the world of Gethen, a.k.a Winter, and, after some accomplished and elegant scene setting, the piece soon becomes a coming-of-age story about of one of the children of this planet, Sov Thade Tage em Ereb. Because Sov is an androgynous Gethenian, the process of growing up involves, in part, a fascination with the concept of “kemmer,” the periods after adolescence when Gethenians change into males or females to reproduce:

No, I hadn’t thought much about kemmer before. What would be the use? Until we come of age we have no gender and no sexuality, our hormones don’t give us any trouble at all. And in a city Hearth we never see adults in kemmer. They kiss and go. Where’s Maba? In the kemmerhouse, love, now eat your porridge. When’s Maba coming back? Soon, love. And in a couple of days Maba comes back, looking sleepy and shiny and refreshed and exhausted. Is it like having a bath, Maba? Yes, a bit, love, and what have you been up to while I was away?  p. 290

Eventually Sov ages enough to show the first signs of kemmer, which involves temporary physical changes and some discomfort, something Sov later discusses with a friend called Sether, who is going through the same thing:

We did not look at each other. Very gradually, unnoticeably, I was slowing my pace till we were going along side by side at an easy walk.
“Sometimes do you feel like your tits are on fire?” I asked without knowing that I was going to say anything.
Sether nodded.
After a while, Sether said, “Listen, does your pisser get. . . .”
I nodded.
“It must be what the Aliens look like,” Sether said with revulsion. “This, this thing sticking out, it gets so big . . . it gets in the way.”
We exchanged and compared symptoms for a mile or so. It was a relief to talk about it, to find company in misery, but it was also frightening to hear our misery confirmed by the other. Sether burst out, “I’ll tell you what I hate, what I really hate about it—it’s dehumanizing. To get jerked around like that by your own body, to lose control, I can’t stand the idea. Of being just a sex machine. And everybody just turns into something to have sex with. You know that people in kemmer go crazy and die if there isn’t anybody else in kemmer? That they’ll even attack people in somer? Their own mothers?”
“They can’t,” I said, shocked.
“Yes they can.”  p. 295

After a brief visit to the Fastness, which appears to be some spiritual seat of higher learning (and where Sov learns how to “untrance” and sing), the remainder of the story follows Sov’s first visit to the kemmerhouse. We see how the Gethenian sexual change is triggered (Sov becomes a female after being exposed to the male pheromones of one of the cooks at her Hearth), and learn of the various lovers she takes afterwards.
This a very well written piece (there is so much textual detail that it almost feels like a tapestry) but the story is ultimately little more than an extended alien biology lesson (although the kemmer process will be of interest to those that have read The Left Hand of Darkness).
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,950 words.

•

The Three Descents of Jeremy Baker by Roger Zelazny (F&SF, July 1995) begins with the Raven, a spaceship whose crew includes Jeremy Baker, coming out of “extracurricular space” when its Warton-Purg drive fails. This failure occurs in the vicinity of a black hole, so the tidal forces soon destroy the ship, and Barton is the only one to survive (he happened to be testing his EVA suit at the time).
The rest of the longer first chapter has him drift towards the black hole where he then encounters an energy being called Nik:

“Who—What are you?” Jeremy asked.
“I’m a Fleep,” came the answer. “I’m that flickering patch of light you were wondering about a while back.”
“You live around here?”
“I have for a long while, Jeremy. It’s easy if you’re an energy being with a lot of psi powers.”
“That’s how we’re conversing?”
“Yes. I installed a telepathic function in your mind while I had you unconscious.”
“Why aren’t I being stretched into miles of spaghetti right now?”
“I created an antigravity field between you and the black hole. They cancel.”
“Why’d you help me?”
“It’s good to have someone new to talk to. Sometimes I get bored with my fellow Fleep.”  p. 311

Nik goes on to tell Jeremy that the Fleep are conducting experiments on the black hole with the aim of reversing time. Then, after modifying Jeremy somewhat, Nik sends him back to before the destruction of the Raven, where Jeremy attempts to rescue the ship but fails.
Another Fleep called Vik sends him back for yet another go, but this also fails, and the chapter closes with Jeremy contemplating his doom.
The second section has Jeremy inside the black hole with Nik discussing various singularity related matters (information loss, energy conservation, etc.).
The third section then has them end up in a “cornucopia”—an information store created by Nik—after the black hole explodes. Nik creates a visual library metaphor for all the information that is inside the cornucopia, and they and the other books begin to get acquainted.
This gets off to a pretty good start—the breezy, flip style is entertaining— but the middle and ending morphs into pseudo-scientific musing about the properties of black holes.
∗∗ (Average). 2,400 words.

•

Evolution by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s SF, October 1995) begins with an edgy conversation between two mothers over a garden fence about a hospital doctor who has been murdered.

Somebody shot and killed Dr. Bennett behind the Food Mart on April Street!” Ceci Moore says breathlessly as I take the washing off the line.
I stand with a pair of Jack’s boxer shorts in my hand and stare at her. I don’t like Ceci. Her smirking pushiness, her need to shove her scrawny body into the middle of every situation, even ones she’d be better off leaving alone. She’s been that way since high school. But we’re neighbors; we’re stuck with each other. Dr. Bennett delivered both Sean and Jackie. Slowly I fold the boxer shorts and lay them in my clothesbasket.
“Well, Betty, aren’t you even going to say anything?”
“Have the police arrested anybody?”
“Janie Brunelli says there’s no suspects.” Tom Brunelli is one of Emerton’s police officers. There are only five of them. He has trouble keeping his mouth shut. “Honestly, Betty, you look like there’s a murder in this town every day!”  p. 322

This gritty soap opera feel is maintained throughout much of the rest of the story.
We later find that this crime has occurred in a near-future where widespread drug resistance has caused a partial breakdown of the health system, as well as vigilante resistance against the doctors and hospitals who dare to use the one remaining drug, endozine, that has any anti-bacterial efficacy.
Later on in the story Betty’s son Jackie is linked, by an old high school friend who tries to recruit her to the pro-endozine side, to the vigilantes who are violently opposed to its use. We then find out, when the Betty can’t find her son, that the latter’s biological father is a hospital doctor called Salter (there is also some detail about their estrangement, and how Betty did prison time as a teenager when she shot out the windows of Salter’s house and injured a caretaker—I did say it was soap opera-ish).
When Betty goes to the hospital to see Salter to enlist his help in finding Sean (spoiler) there is an overly compressed scene where the news of endozine’s failure is revealed (the CDC have identified a resistant bacterial strain) and, after a huge data dump about this, (the obviously sick) Salter announces he has a solution—which is another bacteria to attack the resistant one. He gets Betty to fetch a syringe, and injects her, and then they leave the hospital just before it is blown up.
Betty then spreads the protective bacteria to everyone she meets.
This story doesn’t entirely work, mostly because the SFnal substance of it is crammed into the long single scene just described—and not in a particularly reader-friendly way (it’s Jargon Central in some places). And there are also a couple of questions that are not answered. Why did Salter get sick if he had the cure? Why does Betty’s vigilante son end up, at the end of the story, with the woman who tried to recruit Betty? On the other hand, some will appreciate the grittiness of the piece (and perhaps its current relevance), and there is some effective writing:

I drive home, because I can’t think what else to do.
I sit on the couch and reach back in my mind, for that other place, the place I haven’t gone to since I got out of [prison]. The gray granite place that turns you to granite, too, so you can sit and wait for hours, for weeks, for years, without feeling very much. I go into that place, and I become the Elizabeth I was then, when Sean was in foster care someplace and I didn’t know who had him or what they might be doing to him or how I would get him back. I go into the gray granite place to become stone.
And it doesn’t work.  p. 335

∗∗+ (Average to Good). 9,000 words.

•

The Day the Aliens Came by Robert Sheckley (New Legends, edited by Greg Bear & Martin H. Greenberg, 1995) gets off to a quirky start when an alien Synestrian (they appear similar to humans but have faces that look as if they have melted) comes to the writer’s door wanting to buy a story. They come to a deal and, when the writer finishes the story, he takes it to the alien and gets the latter’s notes:

[The] Synester said, “this character you have in here, Alice.”
“Yes, Alice,” I said, though I couldn’t quite remember writing an Alice into the story. Could he be referring to Alsace, the province in France? I decided not to question him. No sense appearing dumb on my own story.
“Now, this Alice,” he said, “she’s the size of a small country, isn’t she?”
He was definitely referring to Alsace, the province in France, and I had lost the moment when I could correct him. “Yes,” I said, “that’s right, just about the size of a small country.”
“Well, then,” he said, “why don’t you have Alice fall in love with a bigger country in the shape of a pretzel?”
“A what?” I said.
“Pretzel,” he said. “It’s a frequently used image in Synestrian popular literature. Synestrians like to read that sort of thing.”
“Do they?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Synestrians like to imagine people in the shape of pretzels. You stick that in, it’ll make it more visual.”
“Visual,” I said, my mind a blank.
“Yes,” he said, “because we gotta consider the movie possibilities.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, remembering that I got sixty percent [of the movie rights].  p. 356

This extract pretty much sums up the quirky, offbeat tone of the story. Unfortunately the following scenes are equally as odd: we learn that his wife is also an alien; a family of Capellans turn up in their house as uninvited guests; the writer’s home is burgled when they are out but the Capellans just watch; the Capellan’s baby is kidnapped and they don’t seem to care; the couple watch a show where a man eats small aliens that congregate on his plate; the couple’s baby arrives before the wife goes into labour; etc.)
This just seems like random, pointless nonsense, and seems typical of what I’ve read of Sheckley’s late period work. I don’t know if he forgot how to write normal stories, or whether he was attempting to write some kind of modernist or post-modernist humour but, either way, it’s not worth your time.
– (Awful). 3,800 words.

•

Microbe by Joan Slonczewski (Analog, August 1995) is one of the author’s ‘Elysium Cycle’ stories, and opens with an exploration team discussing the biochemistry of the alien planet, IP3, that they are orbiting. The team are Andra, a human female; Skyhook, a sentient space shuttle AI; and Pelt, a sentient nanoplast AI who also serves as a protective suit for Andra.
Their discussion, in particular, focuses on the alien cell structure of life on the planet, and they watch as an alien cell splits into three. Unfortunately these discussions (there are more later on in the story) tend to result in writing like this:

“The usual double helix?” asked Skyhook. The double helix is a ladder of DNA nucleotide pairs, always adenine with thymine or guanine with cytosine, for the four different “letters” of the DNA code. When a cell divides to make two cells, the entire helix unzips, then fills in a complementary strand for each daughter cell.  p. 372 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

The second act of the story sees Andra, Pelt and Skyhook exploring the surface, where they discover a herd of strange rolling aliens which are later attacked by a much larger one. Then Pelt starts malfunctioning, and Andra (spoiler) barely makes it back to the shuttle before Pelt shuts down. There is some further discussion about the way that the alien microbes attacked Pelt’s nanoplast structure, and the crew’s solution.
This reads like part science lecture, part story, and has an open ending that suggests it is the first chapter of a novel. I’d have preferred a longer piece that was more of a story, but overall this is okay, I guess.
∗∗ (Average). 4,200 words.

•

The Ziggurat by Gene Wolfe (Full Spectrum #5, edited by Tom Dupree, Jennifer Hershey, Janna Silverstein, 1995) wasn’t, given that the last two stories of his I read were Seven American Nights and The Fifth Head of Cerberus, exactly what I was expecting, and the piece initially feels more like something from Stephen King. To that end, the beginning is not only evocative of place—a snowed-in log cabin in the woods—but also of character—Emery is estranged from his wife Jan and is waiting in his cabin for her and their children to arrive, along with the divorce papers she is bringing for him to sign. While he tidies up before their arrival he broods about this, and also thinks about a visiting coyote¹ he has been feeding and trying to tame:

The coyote had gone up on the back porch!
After a second or two he realized he was grinning like a fool, and forced himself to stop and look instead.
There were no tracks. Presumably the coyote had eaten this morning before the snow started, for the bowl was empty, licked clean. The time would come, and soon, when he would touch the rough yellow-gray head, when the coyote would lick his fingers and fall asleep in front of the little fieldstone fireplace in his cabin.  p. 391

While he is outside, Emery also gets the impression he is being watched from the woods, a feeling that is confirmed when he sees a flash of a mirror . . . .
The rest of the first half of the story proceeds at a brisk pace. Emery gets dressed and goes to the area he saw the light, only to look back at his cabin to see he is being burgled. When he shouts at one of the small, dark figures, they raise the rifle they have taken from cabin and shoot. He takes cover. Five minutes later Jan and the three kids arrive, but when Emery hurries back he sees the interlopers have vanished. He decides to keep quiet about what has just happened.
The next part of the story switches temporarily from thriller to family soap opera, with a conversation between Emery and Jan about the details of the their divorce (and an allegation of child abuse by Emery on the twin girls). This culminates in Emery’s refusal to sign the papers, and Jan and the two girls leaving the cabin (unlike the twins, Brook is Emery’s biological son and he stays). Shortly after the mother and daughters exit Emery and Brook hear a scream, and rush outside to see the burglars under the hood of the car, seemingly once again looking for parts (as they did with Emery’s Jeep earlier on). There is a struggle, and a shot is fired: the interlopers flee. After the family regroup, they realise one of the twins, Aileen, is missing.
Emery then drives through the snow towards the lake to see if he can find her, eventually coming upon the burglars, who are dark-skinned and petite young women. They have Aileen, but Emery manages to trade the car for her—although the women don’t speak throughout the exchange—and, after another scuffle during which he is shot (a flesh wound in his side), father and step-daughter walk back to the cabin.
At this point (a third of the way through) the story starts becoming SFnal: Aileen says that she has been in a ziggurat (she later clarifies that it wasn’t actually an ancient terraced structure, it just had the same shape), where she was stripped and examined, shown pictures of things she didn’t recognise, and given food before she slept for a while. Emery is puzzled, and tells her she has only been gone a couple of hours.
When they get back to the cabin domestic hostilities resume as Emery undresses to tend his wound, and the girls are told not to look:

Jan snapped her fingers. “Oil! Oil will soften the dried blood. Wesson Oil. Have you got any?”
Brook pointed at the cabinet above the sink. Emery said, “There’s a bottle of olive oil up there, or there should be.”
“Leen’s peeking,” Brook told Jan, who told Aileen, “Do that again, young lady, and I’ll smack your face!
“Emery, you really ought to make two rooms out of this. This is ridiculous.”
“It was designed for four men,” he explained, “a hunting party, or a fishing party. You women always insist on being included, then complain about what you find when you are.”  p. 425

There is more of this kind of thing:

Privately [Emery] wondered which was worse, a woman who had never learned how to get what she wanted or a woman who had.
“You actually proposed that we patch it up. Then you act like this?” [said Jan.]
“I’m trying to keep things pleasant.”
“Then do it!”
“You mean you want to be courted while you’re divorcing me. That’s what’s usually meant by a friendly divorce, from what I’ve been able to gather.”  p. 426-427

“Emery, you hardly ever answer a direct question. It’s one of the things I dislike most about you.”
“That’s what men say about women,” he protested mildly.
“Women are being diplomatic. Men are rude.”
“I suppose you’re right. What did you ask me?”
“That isn’t the point. The point is that you ignore me until I raise my voice.”  p. 430

Emery finally agrees to take his wife and daughters into town and, for the next part of the story, it is just the two men, Emery and Brook, who are left to deal with any remaining problems back at the cabin. (Apart from a couple of phonecalls, the weather conveniently keeps the local sheriff and the other authorities away.)
As they drive back, Emery does some more pontificating to Brook on the nature of women (“For women, love is [. . .] magic, which is why they frequently use the language of fairy tales when they talk about it.”). Then there is talk of “Brownies” (fairies) and the like, and an information dump where Emery speculates (spoiler) about the women landing the “ziggurat” in the lake; that they are afraid of men and want to leave the area; and a possible time-distortion effect that would explain Aileen’s experience.
They sleep, and when Emery wakes up the next morning he realises Brook isn’t there. When he goes outside to find him he discovers one of the women has killed him with the axe. After he covers the body and puts it by the woodpile, he then calls the undertaker and sheriff. Then he calls the mobile phone in Jan’s car: one of the women answers, and Emery tells her he is going to kill them for what they did to his son.
The last section of the story sees the climactic encounters between Emery and the women, which take place in both the ziggurat/space-time ship (where he fights a woman with an axe) and in the cabin (where the other two ambush him, and he kills one and injures the other.
The final scene has him tending the wounded woman: Emery tells her he us going to burn the ziggurat and that she will just have fit into current day society. While she sleeps he plans a new company which will exploit the time-travellers’ technology. He also determines to make the woman, who he calls Tamar, his new wife. Emery talks to himself while she sleeps, saying that they’ll have a family, and build a house on the lakeside to take advantage of the still functioning time distortion device. She squeezes his hand, and the story ends.
Now the unfortunate thing about reducing this story to a plot summary is that it makes it sound like something that A. E. van Vogt might have cobbled together in one of his wilder moments, and I’d have to concede that at times it does have a whiff of that about it. However, it is a very readable piece. The problem is that is it a mixed bag, and the second half is not as good as the first. Part of this is due to the wild plot, and the way that key information is delivered (apart from the dumping a lot of this in the middle section, I’m not sure that there is a clear mention of a ziggurat in the middle of the lake until he goes into it later on). Then there are the Emery’s actions and his character: the former seem borderline reckless and/or idiotic at times, and he comes over, at best, as a complex character, or, at worst, as having patriarchal, misogynistic, and abuser tendencies. Whichever side you come down on regarding Emery’s character, this is something which threatens to bend the story into a no-man’s land between a dark, mainstream examination of a complicated man, and a highly entertaining SFnal potboiler (or as I found out later, make it a story about the delusions of a madman⁴). At times it’s an uneven mix.
These reservations notwithstanding, it is a fast paced read with some good description and characterisation, and, if you don’t pay too much attention to the bonkers plot, and the distractions of Emery’s character, it’s a pretty good read. I enjoyed it.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good) 27,200 words.

•••

The only non-fiction in the volume is Introduction: Science Fiction Is Alive and Well by David G. Hartwell and the Story introductions before every piece.
The Introduction opens by setting the book up as, it would seem, a direct competitor to Dozois, not only commercially but aesthetically:

For decades, until recently, there was usually one or more good year’s best anthologies available in paperback in the SF field. The last ones vanished with the deaths of distinguished editors Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim. There has been a notable gap. This book fills that need.
Furthermore, the existence of more than one year’s best anthology in the SF genre has been good for the field. Volumes which differ in taste or in aesthetic criteria clarify and encourage knowledgeable discourse in the field and about the field. Therefore this book announces itself in opposition to the other extant anthologies.
Here is the problem. Other books have so blurred the boundaries between science fiction and everything else that it is possible for an observer to conclude that SF is dead or dying out. This book declares that science fiction is still alive; is fertile and varied in its excellences. Most important, SF has a separate and distinct identity within fairly clear boundaries exemplified by the contents of this book.  p. ix-x

The rest of the piece covers a few high points of the year: a good one for novellas, and also for Interzone, which Hartwell states published the best speculative fiction of the year (although he uses none of its stories in this volume). Science Fiction Age and Tomorrow are also mentioned (one story from each here) but not Asimov’s SF (I’m beginning to think that Hartwell is not a Dozois fan). Hartwell closes by saying it was “not a notable” year for anthologies (apart from Far Futures, Full Spectrum #5 and New Legends) and that they “made the magazines look good.”

•••

In conclusion, this debut volume struck me as a very mixed bag with no outstanding stories (and one which misses nearly all the Hugo and Nebula short fiction nominees, although that is no guarantee of quality).
I also wasn’t impressed with the running order of the stories: I certainly wouldn’t open with the Kelly story—setting aside my dislike of that piece, it is inward looking (portals, spaceships, dinosaurs), and written in that inbred SFnal jargon that so many genre stories use. Any casual non-SF reader picking up the book and reading the first few pages of that story would wonder what on Earth was going on, and quickly place the book back on the shelf. I would have thought that a ‘Best of the Year’ anthologist would open with the best of their shorter mainstream-ish pieces (the Silverberg would be a good choice if it wasn’t so long), not only to attract casual bookbuyers, but to allow regular SF readers an easy entry in to the book.
There are also other programming decisions I didn’t understand: why would you have the Baxter (which I would suppose people would call “hard SF” but is really a superscience fantasy) followed by the Benford, which is essentially more of the same with rivets?
Last of all, I note that three of the “name” writers here (Benford, Zelazny, and Sheckley) produce some of the weakest work (a characteristic of Hartwell’s volumes I’m told).
Here’s hoping next year is better.  ●

_____________________

Notes:
1. In Kelly’s story the spacing scene (with its “die, you weepy bitch”) and the later “think like a dinosaur” comments suggest that the author thinks Godwin’s story is a misogynistic one.^* This analysis seems to miss the fact that Godwin’s story is a Trolley Problem^** (sometimes you may only have two dreadful choices, pick one) and that the story’s stowaway was specifically an attractive young woman so as to produce the most sympathetic response in the original Astounding readership (who were of the “women and children first into the lifeboats” generation, and would generally have been appalled at the story’s conclusion).^***
If Godwin’s story was meant to be misogynistic it would look entirely different: Barlow would hector Cross about her stupidity, lecture her at great length about the physical limitations of the universe that will result in her death, and the spacing scene would be as explicitly brutal and unpleasant as that in Kelly’s story. None of this happens in the Godwin piece. Instead, Cross is portrayed as sympathetic character (the cheap gypsy sandals, the lost childhood kitten, the final heart-breaking conversation with her brother, etc.) and her death is presented as something that will be devastating to not only her family but to Barlow the pilot. But, ultimately, it is a Trolley Problem, and Barlow has to choose one of the two terrible options.

^* That said, “misogynistic” is a better guess than Cory Doctorow’s ludicrous suggestion in a 2019 Locus article that the story is “a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.”
^** The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter. In the latter clip I suspect most of today’s SF fans would end up on the do-nothing left hand track (where five people are killed instead of one) because they would be too busy wringing their hands (see the recent Hugo winning As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang, this generation’s The Cold Equations, and you’ll see what I mean).
^*** Campbell spoke about the reason a young woman was selected for Godwin’s story in his collected letters. See The Cold Equations review here, footnote 7.

2. These boy-meets-girl love stories clutter up quite a lot of Haldeman’s work, if I recall correctly. I suspect most of them are an idealised version of his own relationship.

3. Shakespeare’s 18^th sonnet is here, along with explanatory notes, if you really must.

4. After posting this review, one of my Facebook group members posted a link to a draft of an article by Marc Armani (a Wolfe scholar) which describes what the story is really about (spoiler): Emery is delusional and has killed/raped the members of his family (or something like that). I wonder what my blood pressure was when I read the line “If we accept that Wolfe might occasionally present delusion as objective narrative fact [. . .] then some aspects of “The Ziggurat” become easier to contextualize.”
I think I am now officially past caring about what this story, or any of Wolfe’s work, is about. But those of you who like walking on quicksand, knock yourself out.
The discussion thread and link to the Armani article are here (although the Armani link may have expired by now—buy the book).  ●