As I sing "have a holly, jolly christmas" under my breath, I've been sorting through the holiday loot, and I am a right jolly old elf! I got a best sf of the year anthology (the big chunk-style gardener dozois extravaganza) , a heart rate monitor (to help me shed a little extra christmas "huggability") , some cds (including pink floyd's "the piper at the gates of dawn") . . . . Well, anyway, a ton of stuff.

The Dozois is highly recommended. So far every one of the stories has been good, with the exception of the John Varley story, a murder mystery set on a completely colonized moon. A serial killer is slaying pregnant women and then cutting their fetuses out of their wombs. So, first of all, what kind of sick bastard comes up with this as a premise, and then feels that it would be a great way to entertain the kiddoes? And, in a nice new-age, vegan touch, it turns out that the women are NOT being killed by a psychopath, but rather by a soulless capitalist selling off the fetuses as entrees (shades of Swift!). But there's more! The story also has Varley's standard kinky sex stuff: here the culture is such that couples (and more) consider it an evening's fine entertainment to go to nightclubs and put on sex shows for the patrons.

I actually liked Titan, when I first read it back in the 80s; although even back then I remember thinking that he had incipient Bors Borka symptom. "See there's this alien race! And there are six sexes! and they need all six of them to reproduce! and one's like humans! so Bors Borka gets asked to participate! . . . ." (as told in Budding Prospects, by another guy I don't much like).

I should also say, however, that the PBS version of "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" has had an effect on my attitude towards Varley.