Today I continue examining 1995 short stories from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirteenth Annual Collection. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I like to run long distances...but for much of my adult life I instead enjoyed riding the bicycle, including to and from my workplace that is nearly eight miles from my home. 1995 was the last year I did this regularly, and for a little more than a decade afterwards I pretty much avoided aerobic physical activity (except for a brief three month stretch in early 1998) until I resumed my interest in running in 2007. But enough about me, here are my reactions to three more stories in the Dozois anthology...
A PLACE WITH SHADE by Robert Reed
It is millennia into the future and humanity has settled the near cosmos, for a few light-years at least. Old-timer SF writers Isaac Asimov and Clifford Simak might have liked this story, for the settlers...and designers...of other worlds liberally use advanced robots to perform the needed labor. One isolated elderly owner of an ice world hires a terraforming artist from the outside to train his daughter in the art. Only the young woman has her own ideas about what a world should look like, quite different from the benevolent, peaceful landscapes that are the norm in this field...
LUMINOUS by Greg Egan
Mathematics is often described as a nerdy field, the purest form of which has little application in the "real" world. But what if simply mentally processing the axioms through one's nervous systems actualizes it and implants it all into physical reality...and what if the mathematics so implanted is contradictory to our own, setting up regions in the universe where mathematical principles are realized completely differently? This is a tale of international, ruthless industrial espionage as two "nerdy" math geniuses access a Chinese supercomputer composed entirely of light in order to test their hypotheses about this all...
THE PROMISE OF GOD by Michael F. Flynn
As much a fantasy tale as science fiction, set in the Germanic rural woods, a boy realizes he has the "Power" to instantly alter reality...including transforming and killing people and animals. His father, upon discovering this, notifies his local priest who pairs the lad up with a girl trained to handle such cases, which are apparently (and unfortunately) relatively common in this fantasy setting. Her role is to alternately discipline and reward him in order to suppress his desires to act out his terrible power.,,they eventually marry. If only Billy Mumy's character in that scary Twilight Zone episode It's a Good Life had someone similar to protect him from himself...and others from him...
Next week I continue looking at short science fiction from 1995...
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