It's Wednesday again, time for yet another look at bygone years in the realm of short stories as I continue my look at the year 1992 and the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Tenth Annual Collection. That year our firstborn child, Will, was a toddler, turning two that spring...it was a pleasant chore loading up the car with all his assorted "furniture" for short excursions to relatives and the beach. At work I was entrenched on the graveyard "Tour 1" shift at the post office, working their flat sorting machine. And Steve Spurrier was beginning to hit his stride as Florida Gators football coach, on his eventual way to five Southeastern Conference championships. But back to those stories...
THE LAST CARDINAL BIRD IN TENNESSEE by Neal Barrett, Jr.
This is a short piece, presented in the form of a play that mostly likely will never be performed. A family is living in a future society based on high tech, but that technology has long run down while the people left over don't seem capable or willing to fix it. The wife, her incapacitated husband and a friend dominate the dialogue...they display ignorance, prejudice, and the kind of downward-spirally adaptative behavior to their circumstances that, frankly, I see all around me these days. Kind of chilling, actually...
BIRTH DAY by Robert Reed
Artificial intelligence one day in the story's not-so-distant past had united on Earth and transformed itself into an entity and force far beyond its original creators' ability to comprehend...and now humanity is living the consequences. Sounds like Terminator or Matrix, right? But no, it is benevolent toward all of us, and to demonstrate that annually, it holds its own "Birth Day" celebration by providing on that date everyone with their own personal hearts' desires. When I consider how Alexa, online search and social media algorithms and other contemporary manifestations of a budding AI, another chill envelopes me...
NAMING NAMES by Pat Cadigan
This tale treats the notion...going back to the yarn Rumpelstiltskin by Jacob Grimm of long ago, that each of us has a secret, true name, and that were another able to discover it then they would have complete control over us. A woman with such an ability to extract others' secret names learns that her father possessed the same skill and that her mother, now his adversary, wants to lead her to confront him. As this story progresses, the author inserts another idea, which I think is profound: that which you attain mastery over may well attain its own kind of mastery over you...
Next week, more sci-fi from '92...
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