Once again, it's Wednesday and time for me to continue with my look back at the year 1991 as I review three more sci-fi short stories appearing in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual Collection, edited by the late Gardner Dozois and featuring his picks from that year. In '91 Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, an icon in the civil rights movement, after 24 years on the bench, announced his retirement. The Republican president at the time, George (H.W.) Bush, nominated very conservative judge Clarence Thomas, another African American, as Marshall's replacement. Although the Democratic majority in the Senate wasn't enthusiastic about a conservative justice replacing a liberal as it would change the dynamics of future cases and rulings, unlike Republican Mitch McConnell with his more recent stonewalling of Merrick Garland, they processed Thomas' nomination. And even though Anita Hill accused Thomas of past sexual harassment, he was narrowly confirmed...and is now the senior justice on the Court. But as I like to say, back to those stories...
DISPATCHES FROM THE REVOLUTION by Pat Cadigan
This is another of those tedious "what if" alternative history stories, focusing on the 1968 Chicago anti-war protests during that tumultuous election year. The lefties are the good guys here and the righties...especially Ronald Reagan...are portrayed as the evil villains. I think the author was saying here that even if the tragic assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King that year turned out differently, horrible things would still have happened as they were all symptoms of an underlying sickness in the country. It's up to the reader to agree or not with that premise...
PIPES by Robert Reed
There's a project in the future, kind of like Jurassic Park, where extinct prehistoric animals are to be brought back into existence and set in a vast reserve in the American plains, accessible to the wealthy and elite for study and entertainment. The scientist spearheading it all has everything down about the needed genetic codes down on his computer in his apartment, when a Native American plumber pays him a visit to fix his pipes. The point of his appearance soon becomes clear when he, apparently already aware of the project, proposes that the Indians also be returned their land that was taken from them. A thoughtful and funny ending...
MATTER'S END by Gregory Benford
Trying to prove the decay of protons is a formidable task, especially in India of the future where much of the population has grown hostile to science and technology after biological "innovations" have unintentionally decimated their agriculture and even bred tiny predatory fish that lodge themselves in people's urinary tracts...shudder! But deep beneath the surface near Bangalore is a facility that reports to have evidence that the world's scientific community has been waiting for...a western scientist is there to ascertain the experiment's validity and report on it. The result: let's just say that once again here is a tale that pretends that religious dogma...in this case of India...rings of literal truth. And that perceptions of truth...even greatly exaggerated...can create new truths, if you can wrap your head around that. By the way, Benford is an astrophysicist as well as a sci-fi writer: he knows his science at least...
Next week: still more stories of 1991 discussed from Dozois' book...
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