It's Wednesday again, so time for another installment whereby I react to short stories and novellas I've read in the realm of science fiction, inching ahead in time. I'm still in the year 1996, looking at the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fourteenth Annual Collection, featuring his picks from that year. I went back in this blog to when I wrote about my favorite songs from that year...appears that I had a pretty dark, Goth perspective on things with my "song of the year" being Again by Alice in Chains with the runners-up Novocaine for the Soul by the Eels and Stupid Girl by Garbage (with their great singer Shirley Manson). Don't get me wrong...I still love that music and wish there was more like it around today. But as I usually say at this juncture, back to those stories...
THE WEIGHING OF AYRE by George Feeley
The historical late 17th Century wars between England and the Netherlands is the setting for this tale of intrigue as an English researcher is compelled by his country's spymaster to discover the secret behind the superior lens of the Dutch in their optical instruments. Those newly developed instruments...the telescope and the microscope...hold great promise for science. But which do the English want to use for fighting their enemy? Sometimes hard to follow, this story discusses the era's epidemics of plague and other horrible, contagious diseases while sadly confirming that in war, often anything goes...
THE LONGER VOYAGE by Michael Cassutt
This story is set around the end of this century as, while human life is being extended, so is the departure time for humanity's space mission to Alpha Centauri. The space station where dwells a second-generation population who have never been anywhere else, much less Earth, is full of conflict and corruption...test failures keeps kicking the mission down into the future, months or years at a time. But what will change things this time around? An excellent depiction of the base corruption underlying organized human society where insiders with underground connections hold the real power. But I didn't need to read a futuristic sci-fi yarn to figure that out...
Next week: more from '96...
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