Although my reading has slowed down, it's still there, and I'm here to dutifully report on another week as I got through one more story in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection, and featuring his selections of short fiction from various writers appearing in the year 1997. Here's my take on the next one in the book...
AFTER KERRY by Ian McDonald
After reading this story about voluntary memory erasure, I was reminded of the Jim Carrey/Kate Winslet 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a split-up couple have their memories of each other erased. After Kerry, predating that film by seven years, has the adult daughter of a manipulative, abusive and chronically gaslighting mother going a step further and having her own entire identity changed, wiping out all of her memories of her previous existence and substituting implanted new ones. Kerry's brother, the protagonist and narrator, goes on a detective sleuthing mission in search of her new location and identity after their mother's death to reveal the "good" news. There's a lot of darkness in this story...but maybe that's a common element of science fiction that tries to delve deep within the sometimes very dark and disturbing recesses of the human psyche...
Next week I'll hopefully be in a position to review a larger number of stories from this 1997 anthology...
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