Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 8

It's time once again to examine more short stories (or novellas) appearing in the anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by the late Gardner Dozois...this volume, Sixteenth Annual Collection, covers material published in 1998.  Although at times I can be pretty critical about various aspects of the digital revolution...particularly the Internet...I think it's wonderful that I can purchase and read at my leisure thick volume after thick volume of such an anthology series, all available by just reading off my cell phone on Kindle.  Amazing to a baby boomer like myself.  But back to those stories...

STORY OF YOUR LIFE by Ted Chiang

A protagonist/narrator here is a linguist who is telling two concurrent tales.  In one she is talking to her recently deceased daughter, recounting different revealing times in their lives.  In the other she is assigned to learn the extremely difficult language used by a visiting advanced alien species.  Aside from a lot of linguistic material here, there is a rather deep examination of two different ways of seeing the world: the causal perspective seen by humans, and the teleological, holistic one perceived by the aliens.  A very complex and interesting story...

VOIVODOI by Liz Williams

Genetic research has gone out of control in this near-future story set in Krakow, Poland, as a girl's brother is sick and infected with a disease, and with it comes ostracism.  But where it all ends up poses the question: what exactly is pathological, if the "sick" have their own unique adaptation that allows them to survive...and even thrive?

SADDLEPOINT: ROUGHNECK by Stephen Baxter

This novella (the above two were short stories) is one of those old-fashioned space colonization tales.  It throws together excessive nationalism (Japanese on the Moon, others nationalities on other Solar System worlds), a sinister, interfering alien presence (the Prion), the Earth as a nearly dead iceball..and a wily, entrepreneurial American bent on turning Lunar drilling and development into a tidy profit.  And then there is a biophysics spin: is there life that perceives reality with time going backward?  Baxter clearly knows a lot of science, and you're bound to learn a lot from this story of rockets, comets, Moon plants, misplaced nationalism...and so much more...

Next week I continue looking at the year 1998 in short science fiction...