Here are my reactions to more tales from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection. I think I'll just dive right on in...
WE WERE OUT OF OUR MINDS WITH JOY by David Marusek
Wow. Normally I groan with frustration when I encounter one of the many drawn-out novellas that the editor is so fond of, but this one not only stuck with me, but was chilling as well. I could see this kind of simultaneous utopia/dystopia forming in our own reality as information technology merges with advances in the biological sciences to produce a different kind of Brave New World. It's a crazy variant on the whirlwind romance narrative, with Sam and Eleanor, rejuvenation making them virtually immortal, deciding to "have" a child. How that happens in a population-hypersensitive future society is scary enough, but then there are those slugs crawling freely around everywhere and drawing blood from the passively acquiescing people. This one's a classic...
RADIO WAVES by Michael Swanwick
This singular story probes into the notion that being dead does not mean one has departed from the real physical world, nor that there aren't extreme dangers in the post-life "life"...along with vicious predators. A newly deceased man rides the wires and haunts old buildings, avoiding the soul-consuming Crunchgrinder lurking to ambush him. He meets up with another recently died, a woman called the Widow, and discovers a great deal about himself, what kind of person he was, and the secret about his afterlife friend. Personal discovery and liberation after death: for a brief tale this one packs a lot of punch...
WANG'S CARPETS by Greg Egan
I admit to having some difficulty getting into this story, since its setting has humans "evolved" to the point where they have shed their fleshly bodies and become essentially sophisticated software...yet they clone themselves: and thus spread different personal versions across the cosmos: it's just hard for me to picture all this. The story's focus is on a habitable world orbiting the star Vega, where some flat, stretched out organic substance floating in the vast ocean (hence the title) gets analysed for whether it's alive and, if so, what kind of life. The answer is mind-blowing and makes my earlier difficulties with the scenario worthwhile...
Next week: more SF from '95...
No comments:
Post a Comment