Today I begin reviewing stories from the year 1999 as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection. I remember that year...besides Prince's 1983 anthem heralding its coming...as being full of uncertainty about the coming Y2K, that is the year 2000, and the feared shutdown of computer-based society that was supposed to descend on us after the calendar changed at midnight. Of course, nothing came of that...I wonder, though, about this acceleration in the development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence and ask myself whether maybe folks weren't worrying about the wrong thing. In any event, below is my discussion of the one story I've being reading for the past week. Once again, it's a novella: Dozois sure loved "long" short stories...
THE WEDDING ALBUM by David Marusek
The anthology's editor, in his preface to this tale, referred back to an earlier story by Marusek titled We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy. Both of them take place in the not-too-distant future, when biological and digital advances have brought into question the meaning of what it means to be alive and possess identity. Told from the shifting perspectives of "sims", that is animated, life-size copies of real people that can freely be altered or even deleted at the "real" owners' discretion, the author seems to be forwarding the notion that artificially-constructed intelligence deserves some recognition for its own rights and interests. In a world being overtaken in the 2020's by rapidly accelerating advances in AI, this to me portends something likewise that may be on our horizon. That said, the story was hard for me to follow as the narrative had a tendency to confuse what is real with what isn't...
Next week I'm forging ahead with more stories from 1999 (hope they're easier to follow)...
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