This week I managed to read a couple more stories from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection, and containing material first published in the year 1997. Without any further ado, here are my reactions...
LETHE by Walter Jon Williams
In a future humanity where people can have multiple copies made of themselves and be broken down and built back up...molecule by molecule...by advanced nanotechnology, a man grieves for the loss of his female mate who died in a deep space accident. He seeks solace through his "sibs", that is, his other living copies, but they and their mates...the same copies as his lost partner...turn out to be individuals in their own right and quite different in outlook from him. I look at this fictional scenario and hope it never happens. Life extension, yes, but the copies aspect, a big NO. I never could latch on to the notion that my subjective identity can be artificially copied and transferred to the new, manufactured physical version of myself, like those Star Trek "Beam me up, Scotty" transporters...
WINTER FIRE by Geoffrey A. Landis
It is a future time in Salzburg, Austria, and that long-peaceful city is besieged in a war of attrition between advanced pan-Slavic forces and the more western-oriented defenders. Written in the middle of the brutal wars of the 1990s involving the former Yugoslavia states of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, it is a commentary on how these horrible situations are contained while just a few miles away life goes on as usual. In "our" world, Salzburg, although near the turmoil, is happily insulated from it. I think that's what the author was driving at here: the choices the outside world makes that keep such horrible, genocidal conflicts going...and separated from themselves. Also, how most of the victims of war within the general population have no notion as to why there is a war in the first place, as it takes on a mindless, all-consuming momentum of its own...
Next week: more from '97...
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