Weekly Short Stories: 1996 Science Fiction, Part 5

Below are my reactions to two more stories appearing in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fourteenth Annual Collection, in which the editor picked his favorites from the year 1996.  For me, I started out that year at the Gainesville Post Office on the Tour 3 shift (late afternoon to early morning) on the LSM sorting outgoing letters and ended it as a manual clerk on the letter aisle on Tour 1 (the graveyard shift)...much more peaceful as they were getting rid of the Letter Sorting Machine anyway.  I definitely preferred that latter assignment.   But back to those stories...

THE COST TO BE WISE by Maureen F. McHugh

This is a searing indictment of how anthropologists...and academia and government in general...convicted of the past in which explorers and settlers often chauvinistically (and sometimes accidentally) wiped out the cultures of peoples they encountered, adopt a severely hands-off attitude toward their study targets.  Change the setting to other planets in the galaxy and we have a brutal, more primitive culture on one, visited and studied by a more advanced one from Earth.  Yet the "teachers" refuse to intervene when gross social injustice is going on, much to the consternation of the story's chief protagonist, a native young woman in desperate plight.  The brutality of the closing paragraphs demonstrates that any policy taken to extremes without regard for needed flexibility in cases that scream for mercy is in itself brutal and harmful.  This story's very last paragraph made a strong impact on me...

BICYCLE REPAIRMAN by Bruce Sterling

In the Chattanooga area many decades from now, the economy and sociopolitical order have undergone massive changes along with the rest of the world and America.  A young man, disenchanted with the system and the expectations from others (including his mother), has built his own bicycle repair business...with the protection of a tough gang he's befriended...in the remains of a large, abandoned building complex now populated largely by squatters.  One day he receives the delivery of a primitive cable TV box from his old roommate.  This sets in motion his encounter with the Deep State, as the agent makes one blunder after another to recover the box.  Times will change, but human nature doesn't.  This tale was very prescient in its prediction of the exponential and over-encompassing rise and manipulation of Artificial Intelligence.  Only 28 years after the story was first published, I see signs around me of what then was only in the author's imagination...

Next week I review more stories from 1996...