1981 - Year in SF&F: Reviews

THE WONDER TIMELINE: SF&F RETROSPECTIVE Read other issues here ---------------------------------------------- William Gibson "Hinterlands" © OMNI, Oct 1981 Burning Chrome, 1986 --short story : 1982 Locus /21 --/ third place sf story --/ wonder award --/ style award --/ idea award --/ adventure award A winner. This story stands well above standard SF fare, as it combines the blockbuster qualities of the best pulp-style space adventure with fringe culture sensibilities (such as collecting alien garbage artifacts on a huge space station and trying to make a sense out of them). It has great visual intensity and a smooth writing style. I had a blast reading it in 1987, comparing it in my mind with such works as Pohl's "Gateway", Strugatskie's "Roadside Picnic", and generally squeaking in delight after every other paragraph. Cool stuff. Contact with aliens is shown as a totally incomprehensible event, prone to drive possible "artifact prospectors" nuts. As one such Gold Rush character says in this story: "The contact with 'superior' civilization is something that you don't wish on your worst enemy" review: 2-Sep-06 (read in 1987) ---------------------------------------------- William Gibson "Johnny Mnemonic" (Molly Millions series) © OMNI, May 1981 Burning Chrome, 1986 --short story : 1982 Nebula --novelette : 1982 Locus /20 --/ fourth place sf story --/ wonder award --/ style award Instant classic. Take the cereal bytes of hard-crunched computer code, add the honeyed milk of your imagination, and... smother it all in mustard. Yuk. Take the miracle digestion pill of a writer's incredible way with words - and you'll discover that you can eat it for breakfast after all. However, I found it worth reading only once, as it loses something on re-reading. Of course, they made it into a movie, with Keanu Reaves wisely cast as a fumbling hacker lost in the mazes of an Asian metropolis. The movie did not do it for me, but this story already has all the elements of Gibson's and the Matrix world: a spooky mega-bridge, looming over the city as its own mini-universe, a circle of shimmering monitors, aquatic bio-engineered freaks, and the perennial questions of "what reality is" and "who stole my hard drive". Not bad. review: 31-Aug-06 (read in 1997) 3D virtual navigation, as imagined in 1986 (Click to enlarge) ---------------------------------------------- William Gibson "The Gernsback Continuum" © Universe # 11, 1981 Burning Chrome, 1986 --short story : 1982 Locus /24 --/ third place sf story --/ wonder award --/ idea award --/ emotion award This is a story which needed to be written long time ago - a hymn to "retro-future", gone but fondly remembered. The futuristic images from the thirties and forties illustrations paint the kind of future that will never be - at least stylistically speaking. Streamlined buildings and rocketlike flying cars, imperial architecture, art-deco and gothic elements splashed with chrome and served on a grandiose scale - when we look at these illustrations from the early pulps (or various "Futurama" photos from the Fifties) we feel some deep strange longing rise up inside us. A desire for such retro-future to occur in reality, against all odds of technology and logic; a future somehow more exquisite and noble than the one we see ahead of us. This wish is fulfilled in this story. Due to some quirk in the continuum, the cumulative dream of the Gernsbeck era (or rather the Thirties' concept designs) comes to life and starts to haunt our present for real... Somebody should make an animated masterpiece based on this. The movie "Sky Captain" came close, but it hardly matches the pomp and scale of the original "fever dreams" of fantastic art Michelangelos. review: 2-Sep-06 (read in 1989) ---------------------------------------------- William Gibson "The Belonging Kind" (with John Shirley) © Shadows # 4, Charles L. Grant, 1981 Burning Chrome, 1986 --/ fourth place sf story --/ wonder award --/ idea award Exploring a different landscape here: that of an estranged human soul among a senseless social scene, the alienation vs. adaptability of our beleaguered "self" in a cold urban environment. It does not have a typical Gibson setting (such as "Sprawl", where most of his novels and stories take place) It is also perhaps William Gibson's only venture into the horror genre (guided by the capable John Shirley, who is certainly not a stranger to the murky and weird literary underground). It tells of a strange transformation from human to... something else. A guy meets a girl in a bar, follows her to another bar, and notices that along the way, she has morphed into someone completely different. It turns out to be the "adaptability" technique of a a weird alien kind, but very useful in our society, making our guy obsessed with it and desiring it above anything else. review: 2-Sep-06 (read in 1989) ---------------------------------------------- William Gibson "New Rose Hotel" © OMNI, 1981 Burning Chrome, 1986 --short story : 1985 Locus /19 --/ fourth place sf story --/ wonder award --/ style award Corporate espionage, international crime, the lure of a technological frontier and dark premonitions of technology's ultimate failure - all that makes for a good "noir fiction" experience. I would even trace Gibson's edgy narrative style to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Robert Leslie Bellem. It's fascinating to follow the laconic murderous remarks of haunted characters to their over-the-top action conclusions, and to revel in a convoluted, grand (but often scandalously absurd) plot. review: 2-Sep-06 (read in 1987) ---------------------------------------------- Return to the Wonder Timeline

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