Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

5. “Against Babylon” by Robert Silverberg

At first this reminded me lots of his story “Hot Times in Magma City” which I’d read in the first volume of Year’s Best SF from nearly a decade later.  Both follow fire-fighters in LA, albeit in the other responding to volcanic activity and in this case clumsy aliens.

Another story of culture clash within the US, the whimsy quirkicality of the Bay Area against the stolid, down-to-earth interior and the gulf of values and understanding between them.

America, America, America again, and I’m sick of it. The USA and the UK, I’d love to go a good long while without their stories, their centredness. I want an escape from having to hear about them, care about them, know about them. But I won’t have it, of course. I’d have to cut myself off from the world almost entire, nearly everyone I know. No where else to go.

But it ain’t right. That teensy little description up above about the cultural divisions represented and played out in this story? Of where else in the world would I be able to write that out, off the top of my head? Just about nowhere, that’s where, and that even includes my homeland, because I’ve never had enough stories of where I am to get that same embedded understanding of its dynamics.

How do I feel about this story? It makes me want to weep because I’m tired of hearing about the good old US of A, that’s how. (the aliens are mainly a narrative device to puncture the protagonist’s cultural complacency)

Disappointing, as Silverberg’s stories in previous anthologies have tended to be among my highlights.