Brian Attebery, Idaho State University

Theodore Sturgeon, "Tandy's Story"

Theodore Sturgeon often invented convincing and genuinely strange aliens; he also wrote well and unsentimentally about children. In this story, those two strengths are combined. The primary setting is earth, in the near past rather than the near future. The scale of the events is so small that the reader can imagine a world in which they have already taken place without anyone noticing, yet the implications are large.

Sturgeon introduces the story with a narrative device that could be merely clever in other hands: a catalogue of the key elements of the plot, each phrased like a puzzle to be solved later in the story. The introduction also sets the story's tone: a blend of bemusement, humor, and wonder. SF stories often aim at invoking wonder through descriptions of alien landscapes or vast expanses of time, but in "Tandy's Story" the wonder comes primarily through the contemplation of Tandy and the other children. Their point of view, glimpsed but never fully absorbed by the narrator father, allows the story's primary novum to slip in among all the other mysteries of a child's world. Tandy's tyrannical brownie resembles many an imaginary playmate; this one happens not to be imaginary but an alien entity.

The focus adopted by Sturgeon in this story allows him to comment indirectly on a great many social and psychological foibles, along with ideas like causality, coincidence, and belief. Despite being as intricately plotted as a Sherlock Holmes mystery, the story never seems to be pushing toward a goal but rather taking a pleasant and digressive ramble through the woods. The ending, which unites alien and child in one symbiotic whole, resolves both the science fictional plot and the child's emotional difficulties.
 

Clifford Simak, "Over the River and Through the Woods"

In this quietly effective story, Simak uses a peaceful rural setting in the past to comment on the trend toward a very unpeaceful, non-rural future. That future appears only in the form of a few documents and in the two children who are refugees from its horrors. The irony here is that children usually represent a bridge from past to future and a hope for a better world to come.

Simak is a writer for whom place and character are usually more important than plot. In this case, though, there is no clear distinction among the three. The woman Ellen Forbes is part of the Wisconsin setting; equally, the setting is part of her, for we get to know it almost entirely through her perceptions and expectations. The plot concerns a disruption in the flow of her life, a dislocation from the customs, family connections, and even medical necessities of her time and place. She, no less than the children, is displaced. At the end of the story she stands as a mediator between past and future, putting her in a position remarkably like that of the reader.
 

R. A. Lafferty, "Nine Hundred Grandmothers"

R. A. Lafferty's stories are generally as unnerving and original as Cordwainer Smith's but funnier, and this is one of his funniest. It begins with a critique of every macho spaceman that ever swaggered through a spaceport, and moves through a parody of colonial exploitation to an inverted mystical vision.

Ceran Swicegood is initially appealing, mostly in contrast to his shipmates. They are not only caught up in phony masculinity but also ignore everything strange except what might make a profit. Ceran at least listens to the natives, and he has an apparently unselfish goal, to find out the origins of life. But he turns out to be greedy in his own way; is a scholar who ransacks tribal myths any better than an adventurer who steals their treasures?

The humor of the Proavitoi ancestors is not unlike the response of many tribal peoples to the earnest literal-mindedness of anthropologists. It is not easy for people with a Judeo-Christian background to see how the sacred can also be humorous, how the creator can be a clown and an incompetent like Coyote and still represent something profound. Ceran certainly fails to make the connection, and thereby fails his trial and greatly adds to the merriment of the innumerable tiny Proavitoi ancestors. After that, what is there for him to do but go back and accept the terms of his own culture?
 

Sonya Dorman Hess, "When I Was Miss Dow"

"When I Was Miss Dow" thoroughly estranges our notions of gender, humanity, and identity. Narrated by an alien who is briefly a woman, it makes the conventional feminine viewpoint seem more bizarre than the androgynous alien one and emphasizes the degree to which all such identities are culturally imposed.

The story portrays two cultures intermingling without ever gaining much understanding of one another. Only the narrator, who was Miss Dow, seems to bridge the cultural gap, and that is partly because she comes to understand that the same gap exists within the human species between men and women, and within the divided selves of individual humans.

Like David R. Bunch, Sonya Dorman Hess is a poet, and like him, she uses the estranged settings of science fiction to explore language and the ways it shapes perception. "When I Was Miss Dow" is full of variations on normal language, including dead metaphors brought to life by the alien context. For instance, when the narrator refers to "the shape I'm in," we are forced to reevaluate "shape," "in," and even "I."
 

James Tiptree, Jr., "The Women Men Don't See"

Alice Sheldon adopted not only a masculine pen name but also a convincingly masculine narrative persona for this study of non-communication between the sexes. Don Fenton is not a particularly macho man, but he is nonetheless unable to see past his and his culture's preconceptions about women. Ruth Parsons and her daughter are nothing more to him than a "double female blur" at the beginning of the story; and, it could be argued, at the end as well.

Though no typical SF novum enters the story until the aliens appear near the end, from the very beginning there is a sense of strangeness that is linked to the setting. The Yucatan coastal region of Quintana Roo is described in terms of paradoxes: fertile yet uninhabitable; featureless but beautiful; neither land nor water; ancient and timeless. It is a setting that flattens out distinctions, removing the advantages to which Don, the Anglo-American male, is accustomed, but rewarding the patient competence of Ruth.

Against this backdrop, Don and Ruth are both revealed to be other than what Don initially believes. Don has identified Ruth (with her connivance) as a member of the host of anonymous, middle-aged functionaries that keep business and government offices running smoothly. Her words and actions throughout the story reveal her, and perhaps her entire tribe, to be something much more interesting and alarming. Don believes himself to be amiable, competent, in charge. By the end of the story, he is none of those things. His behavior simply reinforces Ruth's decision to choose the unknown alien over the known.
 

Fritz Leiber, "The Winter Flies"

Here is an SF story with aliens, a spaceship, and a daring rescue in space. It is also the story of three ordinary people spending an evening in their own living room. These two contradictory narratives come together in the perceptions of the three people, who are all engaged in activities that circumvent reality in one way or another. Gottfried is drinking; he is just at the point where deliberate imagining crosses over into alcoholic hallucination. Jane is sketching, free-associating on paper. Their son Heinie is playing spaceman. The story implies that their three imagined realms have enough reality to impinge on one another, so that Gott's phantoms can slip into Jane's drawing and imperil Heinie.

The science fiction megatext plays a role in all three reveries. Heinie is enacting a classic space opera. Jane draws roads through space and hears messages from machines. Gottfried invokes fantastic international conspiracies and uses mysterious rays to create and uncreate his phantoms. In the end, it is only by working with the SF conventions that govern their daydreams that Gottfried is able to save Heinie from the Void, which is no less real and dangerous for having been called up in play.
 

Poul Anderson, "Kyrie"

"Kyrie" combines careful scientific extrapolation with a highly romantic tale of heroic sacrifice and doomed love. Poul Anderson frames the story with an opening scene in which Eloise Waggoner has become a nameless nun among the sisters of St. Martha. The rest of the story explains her retreat.

Several important novums help establish the estranged universe in which the story takes place. It is far enough in the future that there is permanent settlement on the moon. Ships travel between stars by means of some sort of hyperspace jump. At least one non-human intelligent race exists, the Aurigeans. Human telepaths like Eloise can communicate with them. Most of this information is part of the standard SF megatext, but the Aurigeans themselves, living plasma vortices, are quite distinctive. The real focus of the story is Eloise's relationship with Lucifer and, through her mediation, the glimpse of time and space as they might be seen by a creature made of light.
 

Vonda N. McIntyre, "The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn"

One of the strategies used by SF writers is to take a daydream, like talking to dragons or flying, and pin it down. If there were dragons, would they be likely to be herbivorous or would they need a concentrated energy source like meat? What sort of digestion could tolerate occasional gouts of flame? Would they have hollow bones, like birds? Vonda McIntyre's story includes both flying and something like dragons, and both are carefully worked out in biological terms.

The aliens in the story may be closer to winged panthers than dragons: since the whole story is told from their point of view, and they do not bother to describe their own species, we can only guess what they look like. What we know is how they think and feel. This is an aggressive, adventurous species that has used its own winged form as a model for interstellar sailing ships. The journey between stars has caused a gradual change in their culture and psychology, has tamed them, in a sense. Only the old one, whose point of view we share, remembers the former way of life and the savagery that may be needed if they are ever to cease their journey.
 

Joe Haldeman, "The Private War of Private Jacob"

The Vietnam War was a powerful presence in American SF of the 1970s. For Joe Haldeman, who fought in the war, it functions as a metaphor for many kinds of conflict. Private Jacob's is a war distilled to its essence: an unending sequence of battles with no outside reference points. This is a war with no cause, no beginning or end, no distinction between the combatants, no loved ones left at home, no periods of rest and recuperation. There is only a succession of men and of weapons, and when one man dies or one weapon becomes obsolete, the next one exactly replaces him or it. The end of the story implies that there is no real distinction between the men and the weapons, either.
 

Eleanor Arnason, "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons"

The title of this story and its first sentence seem to be hopelessly at odds. One names a figure out of the broadest kind of space opera; the other depicts a figure completely excluded from classic SF. Or rather, almost completely excluded: the "silver-haired maiden lady" might never appear in pulp SF, but she could and did help create the form. By giving us both the SF story and the story of its creation, Eleanor Arnason comments on the ways fiction can reflect, compensate for, and criticize reality.

This can be read as a parody of the worst SF, with its stereotyped characters and endless chases across exotic alien landscapes. Yet the characters begin to come to life about the time they begin to slip out of the author's control, and the hackneyed situations give rise to surprising ones. The story becomes more than the circumstances of its creation: it takes in the tea-drinking author and her wish-fulfillments and the disintegrating urban environment around her and transforms them.

Barry N. Malzberg, "Making It All the Way into the Future on Gaxton Falls of the Red Planet"

This story is a study in estrangement. It takes an average American town and puts it on Mars, as a sort of historical theme park. In that context, everything that would otherwise be merely realistic description of a town like Gaxton Falls becomes unfamiliar and surprising. Then, about the time the reader has become accustomed to the basic premise, it shifts. Mars may not be Mars, simulation may be reality, the narrator may not be who he thinks he is.

One of the displays in the reconstructed town is the iconoclast, something that people of 2115 evidently consider to have been a standard fixture in American cities. The icons this iconoclast wishes to demolish are the icons of SF: especially that of the spaceship. He attempts to deny the iconic value of the rocket, its power to suggest adventure and hope and danger and the spread of knowledge.

The iconoclast denies not only the value of the icon but its very existence. He offers an alternative version of the historical megatext, one in which there is no space travel, no Gaxton Falls of the Red Planet. The belief in those things may only be an illusion programmed into the narrator, just as he believes the iconoclast to have been programmed:

Ursula K. Le Guin, "The New Atlantis"

This story is really three interwoven stories. One is a portrait of a dystopian future. The second is an eerie tale about lost continents rising from the sea. The third is the connection between the other two: Belle, the narrator of the dystopian sections, has formed an extra-sensory link with the undersea world. This link expresses itself through dreams, messages that slip into ordinary conversations, and music.

The future that Belle and her husband Simon live in is a totalitarian state disguised as a democracy. Advertising slogans and government euphemisms thinly veil a state apparatus that polices people's behavior and thoughts. The intellectual underground, like that of Stalinist Russia, continues to communicate through Sammy's-dot (the Russian samizdat, or hectograph) publications, but its ability to effect change is nil. The government, or rather the hybrid government-business, is kept in power by shortage. Food, fuel, medicine, and individual liberty are severely rationed.

The story of the raising of Atlantis is told in a different typeface, different style, different personal pronoun (plural), and by the end, different tenses (present and future) from the sections narrated by Belle. It conveys the experience of the dead or suspended or unborn population of the undersea city as they gradually move from the ocean depths to the surface and simultaneously from non-being to consciousness. They grow progressively freer as Belie and her friends are hemmed in.

The story never explains the connection between the undersea world and the near future dystopia. We do not know if the raising of Atlantis is dependent on Simon's invention or if he might have gotten the idea from them. The ending suggests, but does not explicitly state, that the promised meeting of the two worlds is aborted by the loss of people like Simon and Belie.
 

Harlan Ellison, "Strange Wine"

The story of Willis Kaw invites a number of interpretations that it then denies. One can think of these rejected interpretations as alternative versions of the story which the author invites the reader to compare with the actual text. One is the story of a man suffering from some sort of paranoid delusion: this view is explicitly offered by the psychiatrist. A second is Willis Kaw's own belief, that he is an exile from a better world. The third is the interpretation authorized by the story's ending: that Willis was both right and wrong. He was right in his belief that he was from another world, but wrong in his evaluation of both worlds. Each of these alternatives accounts for everything described in the story (up to the ending). The first would be required by a realistic framework. The second suggests a typical plotline of earlier SF. The third is both a compromise between and a commentary on the others.
 

John Varley, "Lollipop and the Tar Baby"

There are probably no other SF stories in which one of the characters is a black hole. John Varley incorporates a number of SF conventions as background information, or megatext, for this story: cloning, bioengineering, prospectors in space, even slingshot maneuvers through gravity wells. However, his way of presenting the information is distinctive, and the story told within the megatext incorporates a number of surprises.

Presenting the reader with cultural and technological information that the characters should already know is a trap for unwary SF writers. Varley here demonstrates his wariness both by justifying Xanthia's need for explanation and by making the explanations themselves advance characterization and plot. For instance, Zoe's embarrassed attempt to explain black holes, which is compared to "stories of sex" told to "earlier generations," indicates something about Zoe and about her relationship to Xanthia. The black hole's answers to Xanthia's questions are not only evasive but also, because it communicates through gravity waves, are the mechanism by which it sneaks up on her ship.
 

Katherine MacLean, "Night-Rise"

The setting and atmosphere of this story anticipate those of cyberpunk: an overcrowded, Asianized, violent world in which the wealthy use technology to indulge strange tastes, the poor sift through their leavings and prey on one another, and the electronic media repackage the whole thing in ersatz glamor. In MacLean's story, the Asian influence is Indian (cyberpunk relies on Japan and China), and the medium is an old-fashioned tabloid newspaper, but the future is confronted with the same mixture of despair and exhilaration that characterizes William Gibson's novels.

Tom Barlan's is the voice that reports on the violence of the street to those who are sheltered from it. His ability to anticipate key events verges on clairvoyance, seeing with the mind, except that the closer sensory analogy is not sight but smelling the first stages of decay. Tom Barlan spends his life along several literal and figurative thresholds, including national boundaries, the borderline between wealth and poverty, and the edge of unconsciousness. From this liminal position, he senses the birth of a cult and perhaps a god. In the end, he sacrifices himself to this newborn Dark Christ or Anti-Krishna.
 

Edward Bryant, "Precession"

This story begins approximately where Philip K. Dick's "Frozen Journey" leaves off: with a character whose reality has become entirely unstable and unpredictable. Time is improbably speeded up, people's experiences do not jibe with one another, names and identifies shift. Instead of explanation, the story offers contrast. The second part of the story describes a condition of stability that we might have accepted as a realistic portrait if it were not framed as a mere flashback between two surrealistic segments. These make its predictability and logic seem tenuous and temporary.

No explanation is offered for the instability, although there are suggestions that what has happened is not a change in the physical universe but in Cal's, or humanity's, ability to perceive order and sequence within it. Throughout the story, Cal interacts with a woman whose name is some variation on Elizabeth. Yet it is not clear that Elspeth, Liz, Beth, and so on are really the same person at all. With each narrative shift—the equivalent of the kind of cinematic cut called a dissolve—the woman's appearance changes enough to suggest not a single lover but a series of nearly interchangeable women in whom Cal seeks reassurance and stability. Finally, she or they fade away, leaving him alone with entropy.

Phyllis Gotlieb, "Tauf Aleph"

Zohar ben Reuven Begelman is the tauf of this story: the end of the line, the last Jew in the universe. But the story goes from taufto aleph, to a new beginning. Because of Begelman's request, the robot 0/G5/842 is sent to the world of Tau Ceti IV; because of the robot's intervention, the native Cnidori become the first of a new line of what we must call chosen people.

Gotlieb balances humor and pathos, appropriately enough for a story that is equally the story of a death and of a rebirth. She also balances Jewish law, which can be demanding and uncompromising, with Jewish folk tradition, which expresses the need for accommodation and acceptance. The central figure in the story is Og the robot, or golem, which obeys its orders by exceeding them. Like many SF robots, this one tests our definitions of such notions as humanity and the soul.
 

Carol Emshwiller, "The Start of the End of the World"

A good way to approach this story might be to think of it as a continuation, almost a decade later, of Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See." The same elements are here: the relationship of the sexes, a disaffected middle-aged woman, aliens, sly humor, everything but the male observer of the earlier story (and his absence indicates something about the change in SF and in American society between 1973 and 1981). Emshwiller's heroine, like Tiptree's, casts her lot with the aliens. This time, however, she goes a step further, declaring her independence even from the rescuers who are only a different set of masters.

Much of the fun (and of the difficulty) in the story is the distinctive narrative voice. Sometimes recording events, sometimes free-associating, always viewing things from unexpected angles, the narrator takes us for a giddy ride. However, even when the story sounds most improvised, it turns out to be connected in ways that sometimes become evident only after we have finished it. Klimp and the other aliens manage both to comment on human failings and to demonstrate them. Their invasion, subverted by the women they counted on as passive allies, turns out to be a revolution in world view as much as in politics, although, as the story points out, everything is political, even world views and cats.
 

Greg Bear, "Schrodinger's Plague"

"Schrodinger's cat" is the name of a famous thought experiment: that is, a demonstration in story form of a scientific hypothesis for which practical or ethical considerations will not allow actual experimentation. "Schrodinger's Plague" is also a thought experiment, an elaboration of the cat scenario. Both imaginary experiments serve to make subatomic processes more comprehensible by bringing them up to human scale. Both are also vivid illustrations of the role of the observer in determining the outcome of an event. To observe, they say, is to intervene. In Greg Bear's story, the outcome of that intervention will decide the fate of humankind. The story could be read as a parable for all scientific activity.

Howard Waldrop, "...the World, as We Know It"

Among end of the world stories, this one is almost comforting, because the catastrophe is caused by something that modern science has rejected. Phlogiston is the essence of the element fire, the substance released in the form of flame by any burning object. Like the ether that was believed necessary to fill all space, it was once taken for granted but is now merely a historical curiosity. Waldrop's story takes place just as, in our scientific history, observations forced scientists to replace the phlogiston explanation of fire with the idea of fire as a chemical reaction between the burning substance and the newly discovered oxygen. In the history of the world of the story, the opposite occurs: the existence of phlogiston is confirmed, and the substance is isolated, resulting in holocaust.

Waldrop has fun with his distorted historical setting, mingling references to real people and events with fictional characters like Natty Bumppo, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking. Not all is humorous, however. The flight of passenger pigeons reminds us of some of the results of the spirit of discovery in our own universe, and the role of the black slaves reminds us of the economic and social realities underlying the Enlightenment.
 

Octavia Butler, "Speech Sounds"

In this story, Octavia Butler sets up a thought experiment along the following lines: What if there were a disease that killed some people but left the survivors stripped of their ability to produce and process language? What would we be without the one thing that most clearly differentiates humans from other animals? Butler does not let us contemplate the experiment from a safe distance. Instead, she plunges us right into a nightmare.

It is not obvious at first that the world Butler is describing is estranged to the degree it is. There are still buses, familiar place names, young hoodlums, potholes on streets. Only gradually does the strange behavior of the characters add up to a drastically altered world. In this world of frustration, loneliness, and violence, some people seem to be sinking to ape level or below. In such a situation, the struggle to remain human and civilized—as Valerie Rye and the man she knows as Obsidian are struggling to do—is truly heroic.
 

Kim Stanley Robinson, "The Lucky Strike"

Like Howard Waldrop's "...the World as we Know't," this is historical fiction set in an alternate world, where history takes a different turn. Unlike Waldrop, Robinson does not alter the laws of science to differentiate his fictional world from our own. Indeed, it is difficult to tell that this is not a conventional World War II story until the reader catches onto the identity of Colonel Tibbets and the airplane that in our history was called Enola Gay. Tibbetts's accidental death sets off a chain of circumstances resulting in the non-bombing of Hiroshima. The bomber aboard the renamed Lucky Strike chooses to destroy a forest instead of a city and changes history as few individuals (besides SF writers) ever have the power to do. Hiroshima's inhabitants live on, and the nuclear arms race is defused before it properly begins.

It is a happy ending for everyone except Frank January, the hero and traitor. But, of course, it is all a fiction, and the more convincingly the narrative recreates the period and setting, the more the reader is reminded that the world did not go that way. Ours was not a lucky strike but an unlucky home run.
 

Robert Sheckley, "The Life of Anybody"

Though one of the shortest stories in this anthology, this is not necessarily the simplest. Robert Sheckley manages to satirize television and its addicts without giving present reality more than the tiniest nudge toward estrangement. It is not hard to imagine a show like the one described here, or that people would find such an invasion of privacy acceptable and even desirable. The idea that their lives would then be reviewed by critics is a little more of a stretch.

Karen Joy Fowler, "The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things"

The lake of the title might well be memory, dream, the past, death, or the collective unconscious: it is whatever Miranda touches when she decides to make contact with her long-dead lover Daniel. Whatever it is, it is more than the simple brain wave stimulation that begins the process. Though Dr. Matsui insists that everything in Miranda's experience is something Miranda herself brings to it, the conversations with Daniel argue otherwise.

Miranda's sessions can be read as a metaphor for, among other things, fiction. Writers, too, find themselves evoking scenes they could not have witnessed and uncovering secrets they were never privy to. Their artificial things—characters and settings and incidents—enter into the reader's memories to mingle with the knowledge and desire and regret already present.
 

John Crowley, "Snow"

The novum in this story is a device that is an extrapolated version of today's video cameras—if those cameras could be made smaller, more automatic, and able to record a whole lifetime as easily as a wedding or a birthday party. Crowley further extrapolates, probably accurately, that the devices would be the property only of the rich and that their primary use would be to try to hold onto what cannot be held: the past, the dead.

What makes the novum more than mere extrapolation is the idea that encoding the past as information makes it subject to the laws that govern the storage and use of information. The narrator finds that the past, even if it is embalmed electronically, continues to recede, to grow stiller and chillier like a snowy landscape. Extrapolation evolves into metaphor, and the snow of the title becomes a physical law, like the red shift that colors departing suns.

Pat Murphy, "His Vegetable Wife"

This story invites an allegorical reading from the title onward, but the concreteness of its details resists reduction to a single message. Taking the "Vegetable" out of the title, it is the story of "His Wife," of woman defined as an adjunct to and property of man. So it is, but taking "vegetable" out of the story takes away the sensuous texture of its imagery and the strangeness that arises from the combination of plant and human characteristics.

Until the end, the reader never enters into the vegetable wife's consciousness—indeed, we do not know if she is conscious. The reader does enter into Fynn's point of view all too often, though seeing through his eyes does not encourage trusting or empathizing with a man who takes pleasure in "hacking down" grass. The narrator explicitly judges Fynn through word choices like "hacking": this is not a neutral, camera-eye narration. Fynn's death at the end is clearly a just reward; the way it is presented, it could even be termed a form of inadvertent suicide.
 

Nancy Kress, "Out of All Them Bright Stars"

When SF stories are told in first person, they generally seem to have been written down by the narrating character or drawn directly from the character's train of thought. This story, however, is a representation of the character's speech. It is colloquial speech, sometimes non-standard in its grammar, with occasional false starts and self-interruptions of the sort that characterize unedited conversation. The style is an important part of the story, because it helps establish the personality of the narrator. She is both ordinary—a waitress in a truck stop—and extraordinary-someone whose empathy and decency extend even to an ugly blue alien.

The brief contact between Sally, the waitress, and John, the alien, is undercut by the bullying of Charlie, the dithering of Kathy, and the officiousness of the government men. It is, however, a surprising moment of hope and tenderness, all the more tragic for having no chance of a follow-up.
 

James Patrick Kelly, "Rat"

This story emphasizes the punk half of cyberpunk (for the cyber half, see Candace Jane Dorsey's "(Learning About) Machine Sex"). It takes place in a decaying society in which only scavengers like Rat can prosper. Rat is a criminal, a drug runner and murderer. He is selfish, amoral, vindictive. Yet the reader gets caught up in his plight and begins to empathize with him for two reasons. One is that stories do that to us: putting even a despicable character in the role of protagonist and filtering events through that character's perceptions automatically slants our responses toward that character, even against our moral judgment. The way the story is set up seduces us into rooting for Rat to get home, to outwit his pursuers, to make his score. The other reason is that Rat is not a person but an animal, literally a rat, and everything he does is consistent with rat behavior: stealing, hiding, killing, surviving. Once we get a sense of his appearance-furry, twenty-six inches high—he takes on something of the disarming quality of Mickey Mouse or the animals in The Wind in the Willows.
 

Connie Willis, "Schwarzschild Radius"

Connie Willis's intricate and devastating story combines physics, history, war, and memory, all intersecting in the tale of Karl Schwarzschild, the man who worked out the equations that describe certain phenomena surrounding a black hole. Schwarzschild was, as the story says, a Jewish astronomer who volunteered to serve in the German Army in World War I, using his mathematical skills to solve ballistics problems. While at the Russian front, he wrote the papers that gave his name to the Schwarzschild radius; he also contracted pemphigus, an autoimmune disease resulting in skin eruptions, and died soon after being invalided away from the front.

The story is constructed around a set of resemblances: the craters caused by Schwarzschild's disease and those caused by Russian shells, the red light of the aurora borealis and that escaping from a black hole, the Schwarzschild radius and a war zone as barriers to the flow of information, the collapse of a star and the collapse of society in wartime. The language the narrator uses continually crosses from one of these contexts to another, as when he expressed his fear that if his colleague Muller were to approach the front, "I do not think he would be able to pull himself away." Even the narrator's name is such a crossover, for Rottschieben means "red shift." That is no more unlikely a coincidence than the fact that a man whose name means "black shield" should concern himself with the boundary around a black hole.

The story that generates these interconnected words and images is itself multi-layered. At one level, it is the story of a historian studying the history of science; at another, it is the story of what happened in the trenches and the reason Rottschieben cannot communicate the experience to his interviewer. A disease that is not pemphigus has contaminated him. Like Schwarzschild's body, he is at war with himself, and no information will reach the rest of the universe.
 

Eileen Gunn, "Stable Strategies for Middle Management"

Like John Patrick Kelly's "Rat," this story is based on a common comparison between people and animals. Instead of focusing on the rats in the sewer, though, Eileen Gunn takes a look at the workers in the corporate hive.

Combining scientific and sociological extrapolation, Gunn proposes a near future in which people will be able to tailor their bodies through bioengineering. Though most research in bioengineering currently focuses on changing germ cells, resulting in altered offspring, it is also theoretically possible to make changes in body cells, resulting in the acquisition of new characteristics by existing organisms. Some of those new characteristics might indeed come from insects, though it is unlikely that those of us outside of corporate management will desire the ability to suck blood or bite off heads.

Mike Resnick, "Kirinyaga"

"Kirinyaga" is one of a series of interrelated stories in which Mike Resnick explores conflicts between Western and traditional world views. The recurring character in these stories, Koriba, makes a number of judgments that some readers have read as the author's own statements. It seems more likely, however, that Koriba is an independent character, not an authorial mouthpiece. He is a troubling combination of wisdom and prejudice, kindness and harshness. The story does not say whether or not he is right, but it shows why he believes what he believes.

Kirinyaga is a small artificial world on which Koriba and his followers have simulated the environment and traditional culture of the Kikuyu tribe, from what is now Kenya. Like SF writers, they must extrapolate from what is known, for much of their former way of life has been lost. It is Koriba's view that nothing that was not part of the old Mount Kirinyaga should be admitted into the world of Kirinyaga, and yet he himself is Western-educated and keeps a computer hidden in his hut.

When Koriba's duties as a mundumuga require him to kill a baby whose mode of birth marks it as a demon, according to Kikuyu belief, outside observers decide to intervene. The result is an ethical thought experiment, a test case for the idea of cultural relativity.

Candas Jane Dorsey, "(Learning About) Machine Sex"

This could be considered a cyberpunk story, meaning that its megatext includes such elements as computer simulations, rock and roll lyrics, trendy journalism, and previous cyberpunk fiction. Like the video games that provide a significant portion of its imagery, cyberpunk has been largely masculine territory until recently. Dorsey's story comments on the relationship between computers and male sexuality.

From the first sentence, the story challenges the reader to examine connections that are usually made unconsciously or treated as a joke, like the phallic qualities of the video-arcade "joy stick." Dorsey's story offers an interesting comparison with Michael Bishop's "The Bob Dylan Tambourine Software & Satori Support Services Consortium, Ltd." In that story, the computer's ability to draw the user into a sort of rapture was interpreted in religious terms; in Dorsey's story, the rapture is sexual. Both experiences turn out to be enormously profitable.
 

Bruce Sterling, "We See Things Differently"

In the next twenty years or so, according to this story, America's domination of the world's economy and culture will be over. The multinational corporations that the United States gave birth to will attack their parent, the Russian empire will evaporate (for slightly different reasons than the ones that seem to be actually operating), and the Arab world will reconsolidate and become the power bloc it was in the Middle Ages. All of this is straight extrapolation, the sort of thing that a sophisticated computer simulation might come up with as a plausible scenario.

What the computer would not come up with is the perspective from which the story views events: that of an individual eyewitness to the American disintegration, who sees it not in terms of global trends but of local conditions like the corruption of customs officers. Furthermore, this particular eyewitness is an outsider, someone who "sees things differently." Everything in the story is estranged not only by being shifted into the future but also by being filtered through a different sense of what culture is, what society should be, and how the individual fits into it.

The observer turns out to be an actor as well, someone who will have a profound impact on the future that lies beyond the future depicted in the story. Sayyid Qutb does not sound like a fanatic, nor does he see himself as one, but he is on a mission that is both murderous and suicidal. If the story is successful in communicating the way he sees things, the reader, too, will be forced to consider that Sayyid's actions, which are intended to prevent an American resurgence, are reasonable and virtuous, granted the assumptions they spring from.

Lisa Goldstein, "Midnight News"

"Midnight News" takes a familiar SF story line, an alien invasion of earth, and provides it with one odd twist and a great deal of convincing detail. The twist is that the aliens have chosen an obscure old woman to decide earth's fate. The extrapolative detail concerns the responses of individuals and institutions—especially the news media— to the situation. From a neglected life in a nursing home, the woman is catapulted into fame, wealth, and power. Her words, her tastes, her history become objects of intense scrutiny as people try to guess what her verdict will be and to figure out ways to make it a favorable one.

The story could almost be a joke, and could have been told that way, but Goldstein chooses instead to treat the situation and the people in it quite seriously (though with a fair bit of satirical bite). Because of the role she is assigned, Helena Johnson turns out to be a touchstone revealing the inner quality of everyone around her. She plays the role very craftily, letting people see only what they expect to see until the final moment of the decision. At that moment, the alien's choice begins to make considerable sense.