Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 11

Wednesday has once again rolled around, telling me to write another article about the short stories I've been reading, at this point looking at the output from the year 1998.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that I chose a science fiction retrospective anthology series whose editor harbors a deep fondness for novellas in his selections, I've often found myself slowly slogging through material. This has been one of those weeks, although the novella I'm discussing today (second of the two below) has thankfully been more readable than last week's novella.  I'm using Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection...

LA CENERENTOLA by Gwyneth Jones

This is a chilling tale discussing where we may be heading with our advancing know-how regarding the control of our own reproduction...and what kind of offspring we will be producing.  Cloning, prevalent here in the tale of a young couple traveling in Europe with their daughter as they encounter a mother and her two obviously cloned, stunningly beautiful daughters, seems to be the topic for discussion here.  Except when the narrator sees the daughters fade and vanish into thin air!  Then the story advances to beyond cloning, and into a world that maybe we don't know what we're really getting into.  The title is the nickname of another, less-favored daughter of the woman with the "cloned" daughters', and who seems to hold the key to the mysteries in the story...

DOWN IN THE DARK by William Barton

This novella examines a topic commonly covered in sci-fi tales: the end of the world.  It's not so far off into the future (2057), and humanity had already begun to explore and even settle different feasible worlds within our solar system, including the Moon, Mars, and some of the outer moons in the solar system like Saturn's Titan, where the narrator is based.  The Earth and all life on it has been recently vanquished, due to an asteroid crashing into it along with misguided, backfiring efforts to break it up in space before the strike...the planet itself is now uninhabitable.  Now only about two thousand humans are left, scattered on a few different worlds in the solar system, with their machines, food and ability to replace depleting stocks running down toward an eventual extinction.  In contrast to what happened so abruptly to the billions of Earth-dwellers, their plight is an agonizingly slow one, and with this comes the opportunity to observe how people might react to their apparently hopeless situation.  Hence this tale, which in the end is very heavy on psychology and how people deal differently both with grief and with their oncoming deaths.  But there is something else happening on Titan...is it another form of life?  I'm not telling...read on, reader: there's more to this story than the oppressing doom and gloom...

And that's it for this week: let's see what happens next Wednesday...