This past week, as I continued reading through the annual retrospective anthology series edited by the late Gardner Dozois titled The Year's Best Science Fiction...this volume covering 1999 material being the Seventeenth Annual Collection...I managed to get through just one story. Tomorrow I'm having surgery and see possibilities for a little more reading time in the week to come as I recover. That's good, because the next story after this relatively short one is a long drawn-out novella...
WRITTEN IN BLOOD by Chris Lawson
A Muslim man is taking his daughter with him to Mecca as he is fulfilling Islam's Fifth Pillar by going on a pilgrimage there. Told from his daughter's perspective, "Da" is a trained biologist who is in remission from cancer. There they encounter a vendor selling a special product: the Qu'ran encoded into one's own blood. Da takes him up on the offer, and as the story's ending reveals, most likely suffers the consequences of that action. I felt that this story was sensitive to Islam and its believers, and I learned a few things about their prophet Muhammad in the process. As for imprinting a document...or pictures...onto one's own DNA or blood is concerned, the author raises the point that while doing so might be done as a gesture of faith or personal preference, it could also eventually be used against the person to identify them as being part of an group in disfavor, exposing them to persecution down the line. In an allegorical sense, I think all the trails of ourselves that we leave in the Internet are doing something similar, don't you?
My intent for next Wednesday is to keep on reviewing stuff from the Dozois anthology...
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