ewaldkastr6355

Most of the stories fall into two categories that I have no patience with -- man-vs.-nature adventure stories and Concepts thinly clad in character and plot. Stories I did enjoy: Nancy Kress's novella version of "Beggars in Spain" -- the one where gene therapy makes it possible for children to be born who don't need to sleep, and a political/moral philosophy holds that all good is generated by individuals trading their best efforts. Not quite as good as I had expected it to be, to tell the truth, but in this company, I quite enjoyed it. Joe Haldeman's "To White Hill" -- the one where the artists are brought to a dead Earth to do a memorial, and then trapped there by action of the enemies who killed off all life on the planet. The enemy is kind of mcguffiny, and I'm afraid I don't have enough familiarity with the Shakespeare sonnet it's supposed to be based on to see the perfect correspondence, but the characters seemed real to me, the various cultures were well drawn, and the insights on art were believable. James Patrick Kelly's "Think Like a Dinosaur" -- the one where the aliens called 'dinosaurs' oversee a technology that allows humans to transfer their consciousness to another body in a faraway place -- but then the existing body has to be killed. Terrific moral crisis, unfolding with both the standard fiction kind of suspense and the good puzzle-story kind of suspense. Greg Egan, "Reasons To Be Cheerful" -- my favorite in the entire book, the one where the kid gets a brain tumor that causes him to be happy all the time, and when they burn out the tumor they burn out all his happiness receptors and he lives for a while without them, and then a new technology allows him to replace them. I couldn't tell you why this guy reads as a real character to me -- he has almost no interaction with anyone -- but his understanding of his own feelings, and his puzzling to make sense of how happiness can be real and whether it matters, really moved and excited me.

2022-10-29 03:31