It's Wednesday and once again time to examine some short fiction as I continue going through the extensive year-by-year anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, this volume Sixteenth Annual Collection covering the year 1998 with editor Gardner Dozois' selections. Here are my reactions to the next two stories in the book as I read it...
DIVIDED BY INFINITY by Robert Charles Wilson
A retired accountant is in deep, suicidal melancholy over his wife's recent death, but at the brink of taking overdoses he always stops. One day he discovers in the city a used bookstore that contains certain volumes, apparently written by famous authors but which he has never recognized before. Meeting with the store's aged and eccentric owner, he is given a strange book titled You Will Never Die after that owner informs him that they are both immortal. How it all works gets revealed as the story progresses...quite a brilliant foray into metaphysics...
US by Howard Waldrop
The tragic kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's infant son in the early 1930's and its aftermath is treated here according to alternative outcomes of the event and how they might end up drastically affecting young Lindbergh's subsequent life course...told in three different narratives. There are always those punctuated events that have a drastic effect on history...such as the Kennedy assassination or 9/11...but each of us in our own more "ordinary" lives get steered in different directions by these types of things as well, occurring on a smaller scale...
Next week: more sci-fi from the year 1998...
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