This past week I only managed to read one short story in editor Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, and which features his picks published in the year 1999. Back then I was working at the Gainesville postal processing facility, sorting out mail on their flat-sorting machine while doing the graveyard shift. That meant I was awake all night and could listen to late-night talk radio, most notably Art Bell's kooky, quirky Coast-to-Coast AM show that explored the paranormal, UFOs and conspiracy theories, to name a few topic categories. But back to the Dozois anthology...
GALACTIC NORTH by Alastair Reynolds
This is a tale of three people, very much in the future when humanity has not only spread out and settled the cosmos but has also mastered biology and medical science to the point that heads can be severed...and preserved, to be later reattached to the body. Yes, it's pretty scary and gross, but the real horror to this true horror/science fiction story is the unintended consequence of the development of terraforming technology that is unleashed into the wild reaches of space, to develop on its own beyond anyone's control. A woman is committed to protecting the thousands of "sleepers" on board her ship, but must land it on an asteroid as a ferocious, sadistic pirate seeks her cargo and forces her partner to betray her. The rest of the story relates her very-long quest for revenge against both of them, and against the backdrop of a nameless doom destroying all known life in the galaxy. Pretty heady stuff...normally I'd say that stories like this leave me cold, but somehow this time it all clicked together...
Next week: more from 1999...
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