Well, this month it hasn't exactly been weekly short stories on this blog...the last time I wrote this Wednesday feature was exactly three weeks ago...the day before my prostatectomy surgery. But here it is again, and I'm picking up where I left off by discussing the next tale in the book I'm currently going through: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, edited by the late Gardner Dozois and featuring his picks of the best sci-fi from the year 1999. Once again, I encountered a novella, this one by the renowned writer Frederik Pohl...
HATCHING THE PHOENIX by Frederik Pohl
Pohl was a major figure during the fabled Golden Age of science fiction in the twentieth century, a contemporary of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. Like them, he tended to write in a plain, easy-to-follow style that also reminded me of writers in other genres like Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King...this has sadly become more difficult to find in the genre of science fiction. Hatching the Phoenix is just one of many stories in Pohl's fictional Heechee universe, in which an alien race, thought extinct, has bequeathed to a future space-faring humanity its advanced spaceship technology. This story is told in the first person by its protagonist Klara, a super-wealthy investor/entrepreneur who reminded me of a more human and less fascist Elon Musk. Klara is sponsoring and overseeing a special project, using black holes and gravitational mirrors, that has sent a ship, the Phoenix, to the original star system that was the site of the supernova explosion in 1054 AD creating the Crab Nebula. The intention behind the project is to determine whether intelligent life had evolved on any of this system's worlds before the supernova wiped it out. There's a lot of interpersonal relationship stuff in this story, and Pohl managed to slyly inject a bit of humor in it all. But what impressed me the most was his prescient depiction of "shipminds"...similar to Clarke's 2001 Hal...that eerily predicted where we all seem to be speeding willy-nilly toward in our present times: near-total dependence on artificial intelligence. Hatching the Phoenix was long, but an enjoyable read. Wish I encountered more stories written this way...
Next week: more science fiction from 1999...
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