Now that I've gotten past the first...probably of several...full-blown novellas in Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fourteenth Annual Collection, featuring his selections of others' works from 1996, I can review a few genuinely short stories. To me 1996 was the year that we had a little baby, Rebecca, and our dear son Will, then 5-6 years old. Now they are young adults and very precious to Melissa and me: we are very proud of them! But enough of that mushy stuff about my family, back to those sci-fi tales, which tend to steer in the opposite direction, as the titles of all three would suggest...
THE DEAD by Michael Stanwick
This story is, I believe, a play on the notion that automation and machines are taking the livelihoods away from people and thus ruining their lives...those promoting their use instead point to greater work efficiency and the elimination of boring jobs. Instead, here is a future when the dead themselves are resurrected as programmable zombies to perform menial functions. On the other hand, I wonder, if they were human-appearing robots would they be any more acceptable? A truly gross tale, both about the corpses everywhere and of corporate greed and intrigues...
THE FLOWERS OF AULIT PRISON by Nancy Kress
Our Earth's medical science gets transplanted to a different world and abused to fit their own social power structures and culture, leading a young woman to think she isn't real because she killed her sister and must atone by going to prison to be an informer. But did she really kill her sister? A complicated story that I still don't completely understand...
A DRY, QUIET WAR by Tony Daniel
A soldier returns after twenty years of fighting billions of years into the future at the end of the universe, only to find his own world...split among the beer brewers and liquor distillers...invaded by other soldiers coming from that same future. A very creepy...and multidimensional and "multitemporal" tale, it reminded me a bit of that Douglas Adams restaurant at the end of the universe with its logic (or lack thereof),,,
Next week: more science fiction discussed from 1996...
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