Marie’s Reviews > The Best Science Fiction of the Year 6 > Status Update

We end with "Bicentennial Man" which I just NOW realize Asimov wrote in time for the US Bicentennial. Clever boy.

All the beats of the story are exactly as I remember them from back when I was absolutely in love with it as a teeny bopper, but now Andrew feels a lot less likable -still got misty on the last scene, which is some of Asimov's best writing.

"Custer's Last Jump" by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop

...extremely dryly written, in imagined encyclopedia entries. Full of stereotypes, and I was disappointed it didn't quite commit to changing the outcomes of history. I like to think if Crazy Horse had a biplane, we'd have actual native territories out west now.

"Meathouse Man" by George R. R. Martin
Best writing so far! Actually engaging, but also rather soft-core porn... ah, George, we knew ye. Found the story somewhat alarming. It's either straight up misogyny or critiquing it?
Ah, George.

Jack Williamson "The Highest Dive"
Very golden age - here's a weird physics situation and let's bend a plot around it.

"infinite summer" by Christopher Priest
Best scene description so far. Was beginning to think 1970s writers couldn't evoke scenes at all. Time travel, plot is mostly implied?

"The Eyeflash Miracles" by Gene Wolfe - somewhat lyrical but definitely a throwback. Feels like it could have been written in the 30s.

"The Psychologist Who Refused to Do Awful Things to Rats" was disappointing. James Tiptree Jr. is usually brilliant, but this felt unstructured and one-note? The ending threw me.

"The Death of Princes" by Fritz Leiber is truly bad, it feels like listening to a boring drunk guy try to tell a story he keeps forgetting the start of. I can only deduce that it made it into the collection on the strength of Leiber's other work, and all the recent science fiction novels and authors he name-drops.

Harlan Ellison's "Seeing" is a noir pastiche with a hooker with a heart of gold who possesses magical eyes. An elderly oligarch woman steals the eyes and goes mad from being able to truly see while the now-blind prostitute ends the story with beatific serenity.