Weekly Short Stories: 1997 Science Fiction, Part 6

We've reached yet another Wednesday as I continue plodding through the Gardner Dozois-edited anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection and featuring his picks from 1997.  I remember around that time being a fan of alternative rock, with my favorite station, now defunct, on 97.7.  Rock/104 also played music to my liking: Naked Eye by Luscious Jackson and Everlong by the Foo Fighters were my favorite songs from that year. Also, 1997 produced two more popular songs I've grown to cherish: Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan and Sunny Came Home by Shawn Colvin.  But what am I doing...this is about sci-fi short stories! Onward...

MARROW by Robert Reed

Marrow was Reed's breakthrough novella for a much-longer same-titled novel and a subsequent series of books based on his particular science fiction universe: another reviewer compared it in that regard to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which also began as a shorter work.  But Marrow is much more complicated and harder to grasp than Asimov's fiction was.  It is many, many millennia into the future and humanity has undergone a vast genetic transformation into virtually immortal beings that automatically repair themselves as they go on and on for thousands of years.  They discover a vast Jupiter-sized "ship", built by an unknown race eons earlier, that was wiped out in an attack by another group.  The protagonist is a 
"captain" in the command hierarchy here and she is assigned to investigate a hidden, violent world just discovered at the ship's core: will it solve the mystery of who the Builders were?  Lots of plot twists and double-crossings here: humanity may have physically changed but their power-grabbing, petty and jealous natures haven't.  Personally, I greatly preferred Asimov's Foundation for its plain writing style...

Next week: more from the 1997 anthology of science fiction stories...