Here's yet another installment in my Wednesday feature, with me reading and reacting to stories appearing in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, and featuring his picks from the year 1998. Today it's just one tale, a long novella...
GRIST by Tony Daniel
Sometimes an author has several different provocative ideas that he or she would like to put into a story, and that's one of the things I like about science fiction. But if those provocative ideas all get thrown into one tale, then a problem arises...at least with me as a reader...pointing to a general lack of a stable point of reference that I can anchor myself to. It's immediately clear to me what my problem with this novella is: there is no clear-cut notion of what constitutes individual identity, as almost all the characters...including the protagonist...are composite amalgamations of multiple brains and artificial intelligence. It's so murky that not only do I not care about the hero's assignment to help avert a cataclysmic war, but I'm also not interested in "his" history of relationships with the other characters. I suspect a lot of readers think that it's kind of cool to go deep down the rabbit hole of speculative fiction, but seriously, stories like this one just make me want to throw my hands up in frustration and walk away. But the late Gardner evidently loved these disorienting stories, and the longer they are the better. I'll tell you what: see if you can't find Grist and read it yourself...and tell me what you think about it, along with any suggestions on how I can better approach it...
Next week I'll see if I can't come up with some more reactions (hopefully positive) from Gardner Dozois' anthology...
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