Here are my reactions to three more 1994 stories from the Garder Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection. Living in Gainesville, I was caught up that year in University of Florida head football coach Steve Spurrier's ultimately unsuccessful quest to win a national championship for the Gators. But a close heartbreaking home stadium loss to Auburn, along with an infamous four-touchdown blown lead to tie Florida State...along with a Sugar Bowl loss to the 'Noles in a rematch... delayed the title until another year. Still, Florida won the SEC championship. But enough of that, how about those stories...
NONE SO BLIND by Joe Haldeman
A young man, very smart, nerdy and awkward with girls, falls in love with an equally nerdy young blind woman...she returns his affections. But although he claims to be interested in restoring her sight through a new surgical procedure, he's really interested in using it to vastly enhance her intelligence. Here's a story that makes me wonder whether the author knows something that the scientific community is keeping secret, or maybe he's just engaging in some good old-fashioned science fiction speculation...
COCOON by Greg Egan
A research company working on a project to help pregnant women from suffering complications by employing a special filter to prevent noxious substances from transferring to the embryo/fetus is the target of a bomb...a detective who happens to be gay becomes the lead investigator. His homosexuality, it turns out, is relevant to the developing story as it becomes more and more apparent to him that diseases and poisons are not the only things this project was aiming to filter out from reaching the unborn. Provocative, like the previous tale, but as with None So Blind, I'm left wondering how much is fact and how much is speculation...
SEVEN VIEWS OF OLDUVAI GORGE by Mike Resnick
It is in the far distant future and thousands of years after humanity, the hyper-aggressive Terran intelligent life form, had conquered the galaxy...and ultimately became extinct. A research team of various talented entities from various systems are at Africa's Olduvai Gorge, to research artifacts there in order to determine more about humans, their nature and demise. One of them can actually melt over an artifact and tell its story to the others...hence the "seven views" in the title. Here is another novella that Dozois likes to stick in his book, so it's a bit lengthy. But the surprise ending was perfect, and yes, it figures...
Next week: more SF from '94...
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