Once again Wednesday has arrived, so it's time for me to delve into the next stories as they appear in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, featuring the late editor's selections from the year 1998. Dozois, who had a special affinity for novellas, included two in a row...somehow I managed to get through both in time to write about them in today's article...
THE DAYS OF SOLOMON GURSKY by Ian McDonald
Told in elapsing episodes starting in the present and spreading far into the distant future and throughout the cosmos, a scientist has developed a formula for resurrecting the dead and in the process runs afoul of a megalomaniacal corporate figure who reminds me too much of Elon Musk. As the novella progresses, the narrative becomes too distant from our familiar points of reference regarding reality and technology...that's my own problem as a reader but it still was difficult to slog through. The story's ending, though, was awesome...
THE CUCKOO'S BOYS by Robert Reed
Written some twenty-or-so years before the COVID debacle, a scientist comes across a way to transmit, virus-like, his own genes through a targeted female population to produce offspring cloned with his own version of what constitutes genius. The experiment gets out of hand, becomes a pandemic...and he is left as a mentor to some of his now-teenage products in the face of the violent prejudice arising against them...
Next week: more sci-fi from '98...
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