F/SF

"Vestibular Man" remains my favorite short story and worth the purchase of the book. This is my second time reading Orson Scott Card's collection, and Felix Gottschalk's “Vestibular Man” is my favorite author and style. He's closely followed by Ursula K. LeGuin and Bruce Sterling. Future on Fire is a good mix of styles and stories. ( )

"Vestibular Man" remains my favorite short story and worth the purchase of the book. This is my second time reading Orson Scott Card's collection, and Felix Gottschalk's “Vestibular Man” is my favorite author and style. He's closely followed by Ursula K. LeGuin and Bruce Sterling. Future on Fire is a good mix of styles and stories. ( )

Future on Fire is an anthology of science fiction from the 1980s assembled by Orson Scott Card. Card explains in the introduction that when selecting stories for inclusion, he didn't seek to include all his favorite stories, but rather the stories he felt were most important to the genre. Each story is introduced by a more or less brief comment by Card talking about the author, and what Card believes to be the author's contribution to science fiction, and usually a bit about why the story in question was chosen for inclusion. Though some of the stories are a little dated, and the collection is a little uneven in quality, overall, this is still a decent assemblage of short science fiction that gives a window into the themes and thinking of the 1980s.

One of the dominant themes that runs through several stories is the cyberpunk ethos, which shows up in Dogfight, Down and Out in the Year 2000, Rat, Pretty Boy Crossover, and Green Days in Brunei. Part and parcel of the cyberpunk idea was the belief that as technology advanced, society would become seriously stratified and people, on average, would be much poorer. This is most apparent in Robinson's Down and Out in the Year 2000, which is the most disappointing story from a good author - despite being set in the year 2000 there are no real science fiction elements to the story, just an impoverished drug dealer trying to make ends meet. Drug dealers crop up again and again in cyberpunk, James Patrick Kelly's Rat, also about a drug dealer, takes place in a cyberpunk world with the science fictional element (the drug itself) taking center stage. Dogfight and Pretty Boy Crossover are fairly lightweight stories that require the reader to buy into the obsessions of their protagonists: in Dogfight, one has to accept that a virtual reality simulation of World War I dogfights would be the obsession of bar denizens in a manner similar to pool, whereas in Pretty Boy Crossover one has to accept the obsession of a nightclub rat and his quest for love an adulation on the dance floor. Dogfight deals with the question of free will, and also with the cost of the obsession of the protagonist, while Pretty Boy Crossover concerns the nature of identity. The best of the cyberpunk type stories in the collection is Sterling's Green Days in Brunei, which I think illustrates the paucity of thought in cyberpunk as the story more or less boils down to the idea that eastern mysticism and ecologically friendly culture will come to the rescue of a materialistic and decadent western world. I think the idea that eastern cultures live in harmony with nature has been more or less laid to rest, but even taking the elements of the story as true, the story is built upon a tired idea (a fact made all the more striking when one reads Card's introduction in which he lauds Sterling as a visionary).

Connie Willis' All My Darling Daughters and Wayne Wrightman's In the Realm of the Heart, in the World of the Knifeare both quasi-cyberpunk stories, filled with cyberpunk attitude, but having the trappings of more traditional science fiction stories. Willis' story deals with gender issues, genetic engineering, and a very creepy interaction between the two and paternalism run amuck. Wightman's tale is about belief, idealism, and how this can be crushed by harsh reality. It is probably the best story in the entire books. Lucius' Shepard's Fire Zone Emerald also has some cyberpunk overtones, as a battle between power-armored warriors in the jungles of Central America, although the most interesting thing about this story is Card's introduction. oddly, Card introduces the story by talking about how Shepard has introduced the Third World into science fiction, as opposed to the older writers who had Anglo-American protagonists, or who did a faux Third World story involving Anglo-American villains. The strange thing about this introduction is that Shepard's story is about an Anglo-American protagonist fighting a renegade Anglo-American soldier in the jungles of Nicaragua, with any actual Third World characters being relegated to the sidelines. (As a side note, it seems that in the 1980s many science fiction writers believed that the U.S. would be involved in perpetual war in Latin America with this showing up in this story and Dogfight. This prediction, of course, has turned out to be untrue, just as the prediction that the Japanese economic miracle would overwhelm the U.S. and turn the U.S. into a dependent backwater. I would think this would be a lesson for those just as now many seem to believe that the U.S. will be involved in perpetual war in the Middle-East and that China will economically dominate the world).

Most of the rest of the stories are a grab bag of science fiction and fantasy ideas. Identity is the critical element in Murphy's story Rachel in Love, as a child's mind is transferred to that of a chimpanzee, and the question becomes whether she is the child Rachel, or merely a chimpanzee with delusions of grandeur. The story is ambiguous as to the conclusions, and well-written. Vestibular Man is a mildly humorous trans-humanist take on Heinlein's training sequence from Starship Troopers that raises some questions as to the line between man and machine. Frankly, I found Harrison's parody of Starship Troopers training in Bill the Galactic Hero to be better. Bishop's A Gift from the GrayLanders reaches back to the nuclear nightmare subgenre of science fiction, focusing on the insecurities of an abused little boy, and how he might find the apocalypse to be a welcome and comforting change. I Am the Burning Bush is a fantasy in science fiction clothing concerning an astronaut who returns from space with a virus that prevents him from dying, and the mania it brings out in society as others try to get themselves infected with the same virus. The protagonist kills himself for pay (in the story, he burns himself to death) so that those who are in attendance can kill themselves in an effort to become infected. Palwick's poem The Neighbor's Wife is mildly interesting at best.

The two weakest stories in the volume are Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight by Ursula K. LeGuin and Angel Baby by Rachel Pollack. Both suffer because there is no evidence of any science fiction in either story, despite their inclusion in a science fiction anthology. Buffalo Gals is the better story, dealing with Native American legends being pushed aside by the modern society of the interloping Europeans as told from the perspective of a lost little girl taken in by the mystical Coyote. As with most LeGuin stories, it ia laden with symbolism and the fantasy is well-written. It is simply out of place in this anthology. Angel Baby, on the other hand, is not only an out of place fantasy story, it is a weak story. The story concerns the obsession a woman has with her angelic rapist. In the end, she has a baby (at home) with wings, but they disintegrate before anyone but the protagonist can see them, leaving open the question as to whether the angelic being was merely a delusion or an angel sent to impregnate the protagonist. The story is ultimately pointless, as it ends as soon as the baby is born. Even the fantasy element is unconvincing, and in the end, one simply does not care one way or the other whether the angel was a delusion, an alien, or a supernatural being.

With a few stumbles, this is a well put together collection of stories that do a good job of representing the state of science fiction in the 1980s. While many of the stories proved to be less than prophetic, that isn't that important. What is important is what the stories tell us about the 1980s, and from that perspective, this anthology is a conditional success. However, since many of the stories themselves are severely flawed even when the assumptions of the day are taken into account, this anthology gets only a slightly better than average recommendation. ( )

Some of the best sci-fi short stories of the 1980's. ( )