I'm continuing my slow reading slog through the year 1998, discussing the next two stories in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, which covers material published that year...
THIS SIDE OF INDEPENDENCE by Rob Chilton
It's off in the reasonably distant future...not at the end of the universe, mind you, but far enough off into it to when practically the entire human population now lives on small artificial worlds located in our solar system space, mostly between Earth and the Sun. Earth itself is in the deep throes of a permanent ice age after the Sun weakened and "shaded" it...the planet is now primarily used for mining its still-plentiful natural resources and only a handful of people still live there. A small group of these reside in Independence, in former Missouri. The protagonist, from one of those space "colonies", is assigned to go down there and convince them to flee dying Earth for the safety of her adopted home world or others. But old ways are often hard to change, as she soon discovers...
UNBORN AGAIN by Chris Lawson
This is a disturbing tale...well, they're almost all disturbing, aren't they...about revenge. A professor of pathology knows she is coming down with Parkinson's Disease, but in her time the most effective treatment for it, using stem cells, is universally illegal. Still, knowing the existence of a black market in them and their application to conditions such as her own, she travels to Hong Kong and gets her sought-after treatment...but it backfires. The author makes a good point of showing why criminalizing things and making them underground contraband only removes needed regulatory safeguards that might have instead prevented disastrous results...like the one in the story. This tale reintroduced me to the concept of "prions". That's the cool thing about science fiction: it teaches you stuff and often gets you to think the way a scientist or engineer does...
Next Wednesday: more from 1998...
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