The Ultimate City, by J. G. Ballard

This one contains Ballard's take on Shakespeare's Tempest. This one novella, called Ultimate City, has virtually every obsession Ballard has ever harbored in that weird imagination of his, sans space age imagery. Plus, the cover art isn't half bad either. 

The Ultimate City, by J. G. Ballard

This story has a lot to say about the attractions of science fiction, and what these attractions might really hide. The protagonist loves to fly, loves airplanes, but the actual reason turns out to be an island he desperately wants to explore, and which is approachable only by an aircraft. Much like this island, the singular obsession with technology for science fiction writers and readers often mask a dissatisfaction with the material self, with the progress of history, with the obviousness of the problems affecting the world and the easy solutions which seem viable if only the powers that be would take note. If that isn't happening, let's turn towards the hard edges of a symbol that is also truth: an aircraft would be a beautiful example. It has no desires; on the contrary, it is desire given form, or it is an attempt at quelling desire. Regardless of whether it actually succeeds in utopian fulfilment, it at any rate redirects an impossible desire towards a more worldly alternative.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, by James Tiptree Jr.

Human Moments in World War III, by Don DeLillo

The astronaut, stripped of all its ornamentation, is a man who has an opportunity to take in all of the world without any of human reality getting in his way. Something about drifting in outer space and watching a blue marble floating makes you want to put things in a cosmic perspective, even if the things themselves are too removed from cosmic speculation to make good on that connection. So it goes with the characters in this story. It's very easy to give in to sentimentalism with stuff like this, but DeLillo delivers, and how.

Buddha Nostril Bird, by John Kessel

I swear, I had to read this one several times over before realizing the author didn't want me to take it that seriously either. The characters had no background, and you only ever got by thanks to the barest possible clues as to what their agenda is. Granted, these grow as the story proceeds, but the stakes become even more weird (for lack of a better word) and before you know it, reading it for the sake of the characters has suddenly lost all meaning.

Instead, this story is best approached with the enduring faith of a twelve year old reading a pulp fiction SF short story in a magazine. He will be willing to accept the weirdest predicaments for the sake of the gosh-wow that ultimately drives it. What Kessel seems to have done is draw attention to that explicitly by making fun of everything else (covertly). This is the best kind of meta-fiction, in my opinion: one that really needs no prior knowledge to enjoy or no intellectual leaning to appreciate. All it does need is an open mind and complete faith. Both are really hard to come by nowadays: the first isn't really in vogue (you're encouraged to have stylized prejudices) and as for the second, it's too scary a proposition for people who would much rather be comforted by predictable fare over and over again.

Useful Phrases, by Gene Wolfe (1992)

I suppose if someone were to introduce a friend to the pleasures of reading Gene Wolfe, he could do worse than recommend this story. It is both a ghost story and not a ghost story, thanks to the author's playing to the genre's strength's of literalizing metaphors.

A lonely old man owns a bookshop, and finds a book in it that instructs the reader in the ways of a foreign language. Each phrase in the book is accompanied with English and French translations. The old man grows pretty good at it, to the extent that he wishes he had more people to talk to with it. But the few who do respond to his advertisement turn out to be frauds, or opportunists. The third responder, however, puts a whole new twist to the story...

...that isn't immediately evident. But look around and you'll come up with a few clues here and there that's guaranteed to enthrall.

Chippoke Na Gomi, by Misha Nogha (1989)

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (where this story is reprinted) tells me that Chippoke Na Gomi means tiny specks of dust, or, put in another way, petty refuse. In the title itself is evoked a kind of duality that is arguably the very tension that drives this story, and, in a much larger sense, science fiction itself. This tension is that between a literal reading of something and the figurative impression that it creates. What is dust to some is garbage to someone else. The dust in this story, however, is a very specific sort: it refers to the radioactive fallout succeeding the Nagasaki bombings of 1945.

The protagonist of the story is a scientist who studies dust, a konologist. It is his profession to take something seriously, scientifically, and objectively, what might seem to others as being an inconsequential aspect of their existence. But that is one of the very purposes of science: to explicate as objectively as possible the workings of nature, and lay bare its invisible engines. The very foundation of science is mired in this objectivity: it has little meaning otherwise. A positivism, till very recently, was what defined scientific explorations. Gauging something empirically, using our senses, is the sole recourse that humans have towards making sense of the world around them.

Our protagonist is being haunted: by the ghosts of Nagasaki, and by a woman at the station where he is waiting for a train, a symbol of that slaughter. She is, in one sense, representative of everyone who perished that day. Through the sections of the story which are italicized, we glean the inner workings of our scientist's mind. It betrays an anxiety that is punctuated with images from that past. Through the twin figures of the scientist and the woman, history comes full circle, comes back, in a way, to teach us again what we have forgotten thanks to a pride we take in enunciating and making sense of things. The scientist tries to explain to her how his profession works, but is repeatedly thwarted by her inexplicable gaze that simultaneously unnerves and intrigues him. What does intrigue him is the effects of history, but it is something he cannot meet head on. Thus, he clothes it in a detached and curious demeanour: detached since he is escaping the difficult questions concerning responsibility that history is asking of him, has been asking of him rather, from the minute he chose his profession, and curiosity as the sole 'human' reason that is permissible in science. For a profession that prides itself in being objective and unromantic, the only romance allowed to creep in to its domain is that of 'curiosity', what we call, by turns, the sense of wonder, the sublime, and sometimes, the grotesque.

But nothing is isolated, can stay isolated. We already feel the scientist's defenses crumbling on his phone conversation with his wife, where his inner insecurities are revealed to us using a surreal combination of imagery. We know it for a fact when he sees a human face trapped in the blown up photographs of dust motes. He does not quite know how it escaped him before. He was possibly too enthralled with the bizzare, monstrous shapes of the minuscule insects, almost a boyish love for the imagination.

Appearing near the end of this comprehensive anthology, Misha Nogha's highly cryptic take sums up several of the concerns of science fiction, and science, using a framework that defies the genre. If we consider this story as SF proper, it'd be a conceptual leap in itself, and would mean a positive, life affirming step towards understanding what it is ultimately capable of.