Weekly Short Stories: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to three more science fiction short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection.  1994 was the year of the incredibly dumb Major League Baseball strike that ended the year in the middle of the regular season, no postseason or World Series...it should have bothered me, but it didn't.  About the time that was going on, my family and I made a summer road trip to visit my sister Anita and her family in Plano, Texas and later a friend of Melissa's in Murfreesboro, Tennessee: it was a lot of fun and memorable.  We even retraced the Kennedy assassination route in Dallas: it was a lot more closed-in than I expected, making me wonder whether some of the extra shots that witnesses say they heard weren't reverberations off buildings.  But back to those stories...

MARGIN OF ERROR by Nancy Kress

This is a story about revenge as two sisters meet up again after five years.  Paula has bullied and manipulated Karen their whole lives.  Her intellectual theft of Karen's own work at a genetic research company was the final straw.  Karen's revenge? I'm not telling, but I will say that it's interesting that the perpetrators of vengeful acts often seem to think it's necessary to let their victims know what's going on...even when it sets themselves up for payback...

 

CILIA-OF-GOLD by Stephen Baxter

This is a great old-style sci-fi tale set on Mercury, told from the viewpoint of both its own indigenous life under the surface and of the human explorers based there.  It also presents the twists questioning what truly indigenous life is and what is advanced and intelligent.  The explanation for the multiple mysteries is given through conjecture, but you just know it's true...

GOING AFTER OLD MAN ALABAMA

In generally our present time (c. 1994, that is) it's rural Oklahoma and Native Americans there are practitioners of their own traditional magic, with medicine men and witches and their own special talents and proclivities...move over, Harry Potter.  One sinister old man among them is Old Man Alabama, and a couple of medicine men think he's up to something really bad...and they follow him to a destination that reveals both his great knowledge...and great ignorance.  A very funny ending... 

Next week: more sci-fi reviews from 1994...