Here are my reviews of three more short stories from 1990 appearing in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection. Let's see...music-wise, in that year I was into mainstream/alternative rock, with Midnight Oil's Blue Sky Mine and Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence my top two favorite songs...the latter, with singer David Gahan dressed like a king and roaming the countryside, also has one of the greatest videos ever made, in my humble opinion. Anyway, let's get back to those stories...
THE FIRST SINCE ANCIENT PERSIA by John Brunner
A young, single woman is traveling around in near-future rural Argentina and the tradition-wed folk living in the spooky, stagnant little town she visits think there's something wrong with her since she isn't married and at least pregnant. Meanwhile, a secretive community of scientists exists a few miles out of town...and they have a secret project that bodes well for humanity...or does it? And what have they to do with the villagers, who think the outsiders are evil? Another tale in which science can cut both ways, depending on who's holding the strings...yes, I'm mixing metaphors...
INERTIA by Nancy Kress
Gram ("grandma") lives in a quarantined community with her affliction and family. The affliction is a permanently skin-disfiguring eruption that is otherwise harmless...yet it renders the victim very ugly to see. The community, while just getting by, has learned to live peacefully among themselves, which is the opposite of the "normal" outside world that is descending into chaotic, self-destructive violence. A scientist from the outside pays them a visit, and besides arousing suspicion from them, promises a solution to both their problem and the world's. This story's ending reminded me of an old movie I saw, Pascali's Island...
LEARNING TO BE ME by Connie Willis
For me the most intriguing of today's three stories, it is sometime in the future as people's skulls are implanted with an artificial "jewel"-centered parallel nervous system that senses, feels and thinks everything the original, organic brain and nervous system are experiencing...eventually the jewel, which is immortal, will take control and replace the brain after a medical procedure...this is a socially promoted rite of passage. Besides being scary as hell, this story brings up the question as to what really constitutes the identity "I" that we feel about ourselves. This one's worth returning to...
And that's it for this week. Next week: more from 1990 and Dozois' excellent book...
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