Today I'm finally moving on to a new year, 1993, and a new book in the excellent anthology series edited by the late Gardner Dozois, this volume titled The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection. For Gardner's series I have been purchasing each successive volume from Amazon for my Kindle account...I read everything straight off my phone. Back in 1993 computers were just beginning to take off with the Internet...we were still doing the floppy disk thing, saving stuff to them that we will never access again after they became obsolete...and what about all those old CD-ROMs? But for now, let's return to our vantage point in the present and check out the first stories in the book...
PAPA by Ian MacLeod
Told by an extremely old man in the not-so-distant future, this story paints the picture of a society where robots do all the menial things as well as provide medical care, and people's bodies increasingly transform into cyborgs with mechanical constructs replacing human tissue. In spite of these pronounced differences, we see here some familiar family dynamics has "Papa" struggles to relate to his carefree and somewhat irresponsible two grown visiting grandchildren while his son always seems to be tucked away in his city office job, too busy to interact with him. And then there is Papa's love, his wife Hannah who passed away some seventy years earlier. A tender, bittersweet story tying the present to what might come...
SACRED COW by Bruce Sterling
Why are Indians (Hindis, Tamils, etc.) in this tale a world power and Britain and the U.S. fallen societies? The answer is eventually provided in this brief tale of an Indian filmmaker who is making a series of cheap films in England for mass distribution. It's a combination of the author capitalizing on an ongoing important news story at the time of writing with the reputation of India's huge movie industry, largely unrecognized by the rest of the world...
DANCING ON AIR by Nancy Kress
Never having taken an interest in ballet, either as a dancer (that would be a laugh) or a spectator, this novella, set like the previous two in the near future, exposes the extremely fragile nature of dancers' bodies as they attempt to test the limits of their possible movements onstage. Genetic biological engineering has stepped in to enhance the dancers' bodies' abilities and help avoid injury, but no one knows the ramifications for their health later in life. A genetically modified guard dog, able to speak his thoughts, has been assigned to a star ballerina and narrates part of the story while a reporter, whose daughter is struggling to join the New York City Ballet over her own objections, tells the other. Quite an eye-opener about ballet, and also how people can become so obsessed in an area that they lose perspective...
Next week I continue reviewing 1993 sci-fi short stories from the Gardner Dozois anthology...
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