Weekly Short Stories: 1997 Science Fiction, Part 8

Once again it's time for a look at the short fiction I've been reading, although it's been creeping along recently at a terribly slow pace.  I'm going through a retrospective of the year 1997, using tales appearing in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection and edited by the late Gardner Dozois.  Here are my reactions to two more stories as they appear in the book...

THE PIPES OF PAN by Brian Stableford

What if, in our distant future, humanity has advanced to where people are essentially immortal, with the aging process eliminated?  How would it deal with the twin facets of overpopulation and having children?  The author suggests a possible solution, which involves the protagonist Wendy, a thirteen-year-old girl trying to hide from her parents her "coming of age".  There's a lot of Peter Pan story references in this piece about a utopian future turned dystopian...

CROSSING CHAO MENG FU by G. David Nordley

As a prequel to an earlier story by Nordley titled Into the Miranda Rift (click on the title for my review), a young poet during the (future) pioneering ventures across our Solar System teams up with a group of professional explorers, engineers and scientists to travel to Mercury and climb down into a deep crevice, with all the accompanying perils, in the old hardy tradition of exploration.  The story, full of technical information over my head...especially about mountain climbing...reminded me, with its positive spirit, of Robert Heinlein's old optimistic stories about space exploration.  I wish there were more stories like this around.  But then again, maybe they are and they're just not getting picked for these kinds of anthologies...

That's all with the short stories until next week...