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The late Terry Carr's selection of the best SF stories of 1985
Terry Carr's selection of the Best SF stories of 1985 is not quite up to the previous year's collection but is still a reminder of what an excellent anthologist he was, and how many good stories were around. The collection opens with the Nebula award winning "Sailing to Byzantium" by Robert Silverberg, in which a man from our time awakens in the distant future, falls in love with a beautiful woman and is taken on a tour of the utopia he has awoken in. As the story progresses, he begins to question his place in the world around him, and discovers that not everything is as it seems. A wonderful story, one of the very best of the decade, let alone the year. Identity and reality also feature in John Crowley's fine "Snow," about a husband who has recorded his wife's life on a tiny spy-device, and is reduced to waching it after she dies. The reader is taken to Spain in 1964, in "A Spanish Lesson," by Lucius Shepherd. A young American who has dropped out becomes entangled with a strange couple who are also visiting the remote Spanish village he is living in, and discovers that the brother are not what they appear to be. Highly recommended. "Flying Saucer Rock n Roll" by Howard Waldrop is another story set in the past, in the year following, but in a New York whose teenagers are struggling to cope with the end of the doo-wop era, and the musical invasion of the American music charts by the Beatles. Waldrop brings his usual off-beat style to another terrific story. Other highlights include "Shanidar," an early story by bestselling author David Zindell, "Praxis," Karen Joy Fowler's first short-story sale, which again examines identity and reality in a far future when theatre has gone interactive, told from the viewpoint of a family's governess, on an outing to a play, and "A Gift from the GreyLanders," a slightly dated but no less chilling story by Michael Bishop, which -- like the Crowley, Shepherd, Tiptree and Waldrop stories -- was a Nebula Award finalist. The collection ends with James Tiptree, jr's "The Only Neat Thing To Do," which at first seems to be an evocation of Golden-Age SF of the 1950's. But veteran Tiptree watchers will know that things are seldom as they seem, and the story examines themes common to other Tiptree stories such as "A Momentary Taste of Being," and before long the story's subject-matter darkens while still retaining a bright-and-breezy tone. Tiptree died soon afterwards, and the story's poignancy is added to by the fate of it's author.
The copyright of the article The Year's Best SF #15 in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish The Year's Best SF #15 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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