Four Short Novels, by Joe Haldeman

One more today, this one a bit more remarkable.  Short stories are where most writers cut their teeth, and an ordinary one seems relatively easy to do (I say relatively.  I have only written one, so the opinion may not be informed).  But writing a good, remarkable short story would seem to be way hard.  One is trying to convey a fully formed, interesting story idea in a very compact form.  Some very good ones are close to poetry.  And one could read Four Short Novels that way--as four somewhat long form blank verses.  It would work.  This is a short story, nominated for the Hugo in 2004.  But it is really four shorter stories, each one quite complete, and might possibly have garnered award nominations on their own.  But they are definitely chapters, possibly verses, and hang together beautifully.  They are four riffs on immortality, each beginning "Eventually it came to pass that no one had to die...", thus the poetic overtone.

Joe Haldeman is a veteran writer, and it would take one to pull this off. This is 15 minutes of your life you will want to do again.  Four stars, go check it out.

None So Blind, by Joe Haldeman

None So Blind is a good little story based on the old saw that we only use some small portion of our brains, and that this can be enhanced significantly.  Neuroscience and psychology have advanced a bit since then--brains actually do grow new cells, every day, and we do make use of most of our brains most of the time.  But it's a nice bit of speculation, taking on several different prejudices and assumptions in the process.  I would give it 3 stars.

But if you really want a good story of this nature, check out Ted Chiang's Understand.  It's a powerful first-person piece, and somehow manages to convey what it's like to be so much smarter without sounding stupid.   

More Than the Sum of His Parts, by Joe Haldeman

The rebuilt, augmented human has been done and done and done in SF literature and film--Frederik Pohl's Man Plus, Robocop, the Six Million Dollar Man, etc. etc.  Though Robocop was a late add.  So why the Nebula nomination for More Than the Sum of His Parts?  Well, it is a pretty good tale, a story of a man letting his augmentation go to his head.  It's got hard SF elements that get underplayed in some of these stories.  But really, I just don't know.  While it is a good story, it would have felt overdone even at the time.  I liked Robocop better, go rent that.  2 stars.