Today I resume my weekly look at short stories I've been reading, slogging through the years in the genre of science fiction. I've reached 1997 and am in the middle of reading the late Gardner Dozois' series The Year's Best Science Fiction, this volume being the Fifteenth Annual Collection and containing stories from that year. So without further ado, let's see my reactions to the next three tales appearing in that book...
ECHOES by Alan Brennert
A young woman, genetically engineered for high intelligence and artistic talent, begins to see images, or "echoes" of herself in her everyday life. The disturbing phenomenon convinces her of the myriad lost possibilities as to what she could have become. But is this simply in her mind, or is there a literal meaning to this all...
GETTING TO KNOW YOU by David Marusek
Sitting here reading this story in 2024 amid all the accelerating AI culture around us makes this tale more immediately relevant than many others. A young jet-setting corporate investigator relies on her portable AI robot for information and direction, but Bug is getting just a bit TOO intrusive and testy...time for an updated model. But after her "partner" acquits itself well in difficult circumstances, maybe that replacement model might not be the way to go. Being of mixed opinions about AI, I also had mixed feelings about this story...
BALINESE DANCER by Gwyneth Jones
A dystopian tale about a bickering couple, along with their young son, driving in a declining France looking for a camping site on vacation. The wife, a biological research scientist, has been summarily fired for simply reporting a find that her boss finds politically incorrect, and the husband is a moderately successful writer of children's books. Their experiences on the road...and at camp where a cat they name "Balinese Dancer" befriends them...are a word picture of troubled times and an extension, in my opinion, of where we're sadly heading. It's also an indictment of how some people will twist objective scientific research to suit their own subjective agendas...
Next week: more from 1997...
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