It's time for another weekly look at science fiction short fiction that appears in the series The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by the late Gardner Dozois. The year in focus is 1997 and the specific volume is titled Fifteenth Annual Collection. My local public library doesn't have this series for checkout and to buy them hard-copy would be way too cumbersome since there are a lot of them in the series and each one is pretty thick. So the advance of Kindle has really helped me in this ongoing project: I have all fifteen of the first books in the series with easy digital access, and I can read stories conveniently at different opportune moments during my day. But let's now delve into the next three stories...
ITSY BITSY SPIDER by James Patrick Kelly
The setting is the year 2038...only 14 years from now but 41 from when this story was published. A woman visits the father who abandoned her in her childhood many years before, full of bitterness at him but feeling responsible to her recently deceased mother, who inexplicably maintained some affection toward him and bequeathed him some money. At his home she encounters a robot girl who looks and sounds uncannily like she did as a little girl. As she talks with her long-lost deadbeat dad, who has declined cognitively, she realizes why his robot assistant/caretaker is the way she is...and why her mother wanted her to see him. I wonder how close we'll be to this scenario with AI when 2038 gets here...
A SPY IN EUROPA by Alastair Reynolds
Off in the reasonably distant future when the solar system has been settled and humans genetically transformed to adapt to different environments, the balance of power has shifted from Earth to the outer planets...mainly Jupiter...as two competing factions based on moons Europa and Ganymede play a life-and-death struggle to dominate the other. A spy from the latter is sent to pick up special information from an agent they planted in Europa...lots of crazy plot twists and double-crossings here, enough to make my head spin. And a bit of hard sci-fi, especially with regard to biology, is thrown in for good measure...
THE UNDISCOVERED by William Sanders
An alternative history story has William Shakespeare one night fleeing pursuers in London while drunk. He finds a ship and climbs aboard to sleep it off and then discovers the next day he's on the high seas, headed for what would become America. This story is told from the vantage point of a Cherokee leader who befriends Shakespeare...now a slave won from another tribe in a skirmish. The language barriers are immense, but the two reach a basic level of communication and Spear-Shaker, as he is called, even stages a play with the community actively participating. A funny story, but ultimately I failed to see where the author, a Cherokee himself, was getting at other than maybe showing how crazy they thought white people were...no argument from me...
Next week: more sci-fi adventures originally published in 1997...
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