Weekly Short Stories: 1991 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to three more tales from the year 1991 as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual Collection.  Last week I mentioned 1991's significance in international events by citing the Persian Gulf World that happened early in the year.  But a few months later something else occurred that dwarfed the drama of that conflict: the coup d'état in the Soviet Union, leading to the downfall of Communist Party chief Mikhail Gorbachev and the breakup of its fifteen constituent republics after a resistance movement spearheaded by Boris Yeltsin, who would become the new Russian Federation's first president.  Wow...but back to those stories...

SKINNER'S ROOM by William Gibson

I've read stories like this one set in a decaying, crumbling dystopian future where people get by living in the ruins of their ancestors.  This time it's San Francisco and folks are somehow making ends mean with makeshift homes they can put wherever they can...even high up on the Golden Gate Bridge, where our protagonist ventures to pay a visit...

PRAYERS ON THE WIND by Walter Jon Williams

Tibetan Buddhism has swept humanity through the cosmos. One planet they rule over gets a visit from the representative of a warlike species complaining about human settlement on what they claim to be their own planet.  In the middle of this the ruler (both in a spiritual and political sense) suddenly dies and the search is on to find which fetus his reincarnated spirit has entered.  This story takes that religion's dogma and treats it as literal truth...with some frightening imagery resulting.  But the author brings it all together with a pleasing, kickass ending... 

BLOOD SISTERS by Greg Egan

In a future world contaminated by pathogens developed in a supposedly secure laboratory and then...ahem...accidentally released (sound familiar?), a woman has come down with a cancer caused by her infection from them.  Given newly developed medicine to treat it and possibly cure her, she remembers that susceptibility is largely genetically based, so she calls her identical twin sister now living in Africa to be tested as well.  What follows is an indictment on the cruelty inherent in scientific testing...but what can be done about it if you want the best information?

Next week: more stories reviewed from 1991...