Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 5

As I continue to reflect on stories from 1999 I 'm reading from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, I find myself a little "unstuck in time"...as Kurt Vonnegut might put it.  For me growing up and into early adulthood, the year 1999 was a far-off future time, science fiction in itself. Not only did it figure in Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's space exploration classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, but we even had in the early 1970s a syndicated sci-fi TV series called Space: 1999 that starred old Mission: Impossible stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.  This was long before Prince enshrined the year with his 1983 hit 1999.  But now the year 1999 is more than a quarter century into the receding past.  Anyway, let's take a look at a couple of those stories...

GREEN TEA by Richard Wadholm

A "hard" science fiction tale about revenge, I found the technical descriptions of spaceship hardware and arcane narratives about chemical/physical breakdowns of exotic, dangerous substances hard to follow as the story's narrator describes, as an obvious survivor, the heavy loss of life and destruction as a ship transporting dangerous cargo must scramble against all odds to avoid its own destruction...and possibly that of the star system it has entered.  I did make it all the way to the end, for which I'm very proud of myself.  This isn't a story you can rush through, and I felt the author went out of his way to make it a difficult read...

THE DRAGON OF PRIPYAT by Karl Schroeder 

The nuclear reaction meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 is the basis of this tale, set twenty years later in the "future" 2006 (you know, our "past" 2006).  It seems that the supposedly secured site is emitting toxic radiation, a "release", and an investigator is sent there to, well, investigate.  Is a terrorist group behind the new danger?...I enjoyed reading about how the surrounding environment responded to the Chernobyl debacle over the years.  The author added the twist of virtual reality here as an alternative lifestyle...

Next week I continue looking at 1999 in science fiction...