Weekly Short Stories: 1995 Science Fiction, Part 8

Actually, the title of today's article is misleading, since what I'm discussing today isn't a short story but rather a novel, and it was published in 2000...let me explain. Poul Anderson, one of the great science fiction writers of the late twentieth century, sadly passed away in 2001.  The year before, though, he expanded his 1995 novella Genesis into a full-length book.  Genesis first appeared in that '95 novella form in Gardener Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirteenth Annual Collection.  Discovering that it was later turned into a novel and that it was available for checkout from my Libby app, I did just that and read it.  I was intrigued by the story's premise, in which the development of artificial intelligence has culminated in the entire human race uploading itself into AI, which reminded me in a different vein of what happened to everyone in Clifford Simak's earlier, wonderful novel City (read it to find out).  Anyway, the way Anderson implies, our identities become immortal...in  a sense...and space travel and exploration and "settlement" of the cosmos becomes very feasible, especially since lifespans and time itself cease to be a limiting factor.  So it shouldn't surprise readers that "man" is still around hundreds of millions of years in the future, in the virtual forms of former-real humans who have been sent by the major AIs to try to circumvent the sun from destroying the Earth...its resident AI, called Gaia, is inexplicably resisting their efforts.  I'd like to say I came away from the reading with great praise, but I found it extremely difficult to follow as the author would hop from one plot sequence to another without explanation.  And the "humans" were also hard to empathize with, seeing that in essence they were only constructions of a greater intelligence and not real flesh and blood.  Genesis was picked, as I said, for the Dozois anthology,  It probably would have been best had Poul Anderson just left it back there as a novella and not tried to make it something bigger.  I'll see if I can't come up with a few more hopefully-shorter stories to review from the Dozois book next week...