The Mumpsimus

Since I mentioned Alien Sex earlier this week, I thought I would continue exploring The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection with the story Gardner Dozois chose to reprint from Alien Sex : "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates" by Pat Murphy. The writing and pacing are what distinguish "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates" rather than the central concept, which is for the most part a familiar one derived from the question, "What would you do if you were the last person on Earth?"  Science fiction writers have been working with that premise for a long time.  In this story, the narrator designs and builds robots, and because of her own interests she endows the robots with the capability and desire for sex, reproduction, and, perhaps, love.  They will, she believes, continue the evolution of the species homo . The concept of robots reproducing themselves and replacing humankind isn't a remotely original concept, either, though ...

For my first bit of venturing back into 1990 , two stories offer not only a good place to start, but an interesting pairing: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Shobies Story" (first published in Universe 1 ) and John Kessel's "Invaders" (first published in F&SF , October 1990), both of which were reprinted in Dozois's best-of-the-year anthology . (By the way, in these posts I plan to discuss the entirety of the stories, which means that if you don't like to have plot elements revealed, you should not read here about stories you have not read.) David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have offered a good basic summary of the ideas Le Guin is exploring in her story: "The Shobies' Story" describes a society in which consensus matters more than individual viewpoints. [... It] posits a reality that emerges as the sum of what all the participants say: a meta-narrative, a democratically constructed myth.  Le Guin tells us that the observer is part...

Now that we're living in our second Clarke Year (that is, second year Arthur C. Clarke used as a title for a novel ), I thought it might be fun to glance back at the starts of previous decades.  With that in mind, over the coming weeks and perhaps months, I'll post here some thoughts particularly on SF short fiction from 1990 and 2000, since the stories from those years are what I have easiest access to. To see all posts in the series, just click on the "1990/2000" label. My motivations for this project are partly personal -- 1990 was the apex of my reading of genre fiction, 2000 was a year I read almost no genre fiction.  In 1990, I was 14 and 15 years old, I subscribed to Asimov's and also picked up various copies of F&SF and Science Fiction Age when I could find them, and any money I had with which to buy books went to SF books.  In 2000, I had recently returned to trying to write fiction after some years spent writing plays and screenplays, but the...