Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Read Online Free PDF

wooden spoon passes through muscle and bone like the wash of a candle flame). Advanced science, magical realism or plain magic? “In the Valley the distinction [between fact and fiction] is gradual and messy.” This lends every tale an eerie, uncanny feel, while an unusual earthiness anchors even a child’s perception. North Owl, journeying from home for the first time, comes to “Granny’s Twat,” a town “between the spread legs of the Mountain.” Such frankness in a spiritually rich and sexually candid people is startling, and displays the Kesh with no need for editorializing, using with cool panache a familiar method from the sf toolkit that literary tourists (John Clute calls their slumming “charabanc sci-fi”) never quite master.
    The tale’s tragedy is that “What is seen with one eye has no depth. The sorrow of my parents’ life is that they could see with one eye only.” Willow and Kills are literally incomprehensible to each other. When their daughter follows her father, renamed by him Ayatyu, she is trapped in a society akin to crusader Christianity, or warrior Islam, or any other hierarchical monolith. Women are pets or dirt, in effect, and embrace their lot. The Condor call themselves Dayao, a blistering homonym of Tao. Ayatyu marries, bears a daughter. As the mad ambitions of the Dayao One spiral into self-destructive ruin, her father aids her escape. And in time, with age, she writes these beautiful, calming memories.
    Can the generous, communal way of life in the Valley speak to us? An Archival message cited by Stone Telling suggests it might:
     
In leaving progress to the machines, in letting technology go forward on its own terms and selecting from it… is it possible that in thus opting not to move “forward” or not only “forward,” these people did in fact succeed in living in human history, with energy, liberty, and grace?
     
    [1] In Dancing at the Edge of the World, London: Gollancz, 1989, pp. 169-70.
     

5
    James Morrow

This Is the Way the World Ends (1985)

     
    PLANNING THERMONUCLEAR WAR and its aftermath, Mutually Assured Destruction, used to be called, euphemistically but chillingly, “thinking about the unthinkable.” Science fiction has often thought about the unthinkable, all too often with unthinkable relish. By contrast, This is the Way the World Ends is like a punch in the mouth by the Angel of Death in the garb of a stand-up comic. It was quickly compared to Jonathan Schell ( The Fate of the Earth ) out of Kurt Vonnegut, which was spot-on. It is likely, however, that the careful study by Schell, in the 1980s a prominent opponent of nuclear arms race strategy, is already forgotten, even as more nations than ever around the globe arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and plan resource-crisis wars.
    George Paxton is a tomb cutter with an “adorable daughter” and a wife “who always looked as if she had just come from doing something dangerous and lewd.” He has been spared misery: “the coin of George Paxton’s life had happiness stamped on both sides—no despair for George. Individuals so fortunate were scarce in those days. You could have sold tickets” to his life. His neighbor sells scopas suits, for Self-Contained Post-Attack Survival, and Paxton buys one, signing a meaningless document admitting his complicity in any subsequent nuclear exchange.
    In the dreadful event, the suits do not work, any more than the schoolroom “duck and cover” drills of the 1950s would have done. Here is part of Chapter 5, “In Which the Limitations of Civil Defense Are Explicated in a Manner Some Readers May Find Distressing”:
     
    Townspeople marched down to the river... arms outstretched to lessen the weight of their burned hands. Many lacked hair and eyelashes... A white lava of melted eye tissue dripped from their heads; they appeared to be crying their own eyes.
     
A seeing-eye dog, its scopas suit and fur seared away, licked the face of its dead master.