Maneki Neko, by Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is one of my favorites, and I try to read whatever I can find of his.  Maneki Neko got a Hugo nomination for best short story in 1999.  When it was written we were on the cusp of the Web.  I was on Compuserve at the time--there were several proprietary networks that worked sort of like the Internet was going to. 

So Sterling imagines people organizing into mutual aid networks, with computers that keep track of the favors people do for each other.  You do little favors for people, without knowing them or knowing why.  Sterling portrays it as pretty much positive, but at the same time gives a pretty good picture of how it could be subverted.  It's a really interesting short read, and with four stars you should go read it.

Divided by Infinity, by Robert Charles Wilson

I love idea stories.  Idea stories are what hooked me on SF in the first place.  Divided by Infinity is almost a pure idea story, though it has some good characters wrapped around it.  It was nominated for a Hugo for best novelette in 1999. 

The idea is a variation on the "many worlds" hypothesis of physics--that at each point where things could have happened differently, they DID happen differently, in some branched reality.  The argument is that, once we come together as conscious beings, our consciousness maintains contact with all these alternate realities.  And it keeps going on, as long as there is some reality, no matter how weird, in which we could go on. 

Now, there are a lot of holes and gaps in making the leap to having a consciousness that spans realities.  When would we, as individuals, start?  How does our sense of being in one place transition across possibilities?  The "many worlds" theory itself runs into a lot of trouble as an explanation for reality.  We end up imagining a cosmos so big, that everything that could possibly happen has happened, an infinite number of times.  That has no explanatory power at all.

Wilson doesn't fight this implausibility, he just works it in, which makes the story very interesting and worthwhile to read.  Am giving it four stars, go experience it for some mental stimulation.

Presence, by Maureen McHugh

Presence is another story in Maureen McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters collection, and I liked this one quite a bit.  It's a very close and informed view of what it is like to deal with someone with Alzheimer's disease.  The growth in this condition would be considered far more tragic if several other impending tragedies like global warming and such were not drowning it out.  In this story it is possible to cure the disease, but at great monetary and personal cost--the recovered person is not really in any particular sense the same one.  This happens in other conditions  as well--see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for how this transpires in personality disorders.  Our identity is indeed fragile.  3 stars.

The Specialist's Hat, by Kelly Link

The Specialist's Hat is another story in Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen collection, and it won the World Fantasy Award for 1999.  The hat is indeed a nasty thing, what with it's making noises like "an agouti" and grunting and such, but the setting is highly fascinating--a huge old mansion with eight three-story chimneys.  Cool indeed, and they have interesting secrets.  The story is well constructed and flows nicely, so no surprise it won.  I still like my fiction a bit on the harder side, so I will give it 3 stars to be diplomatic.

Every Angel is Terrifying, by Jonathan Kessel

I'm never quite sure how to react to stories that are mostly horror.  Every Angel is Terrifying is probably a good one, part of Jonathan Kessel's Baum Plan for Financial Independence collection.  The macguffin in it is a wish-granting cat, though it would be wrong to say it is the focus.  The focus is a cold-blooded killer who seems to be trying to go straight.  Way hard to do, really.  And he doesn't understand the cat.  Well, it's interesting to read, so I will give it 3 stars.

Random Readings

I read a couple of stories on the way to other things, so am going to go ahead and react to them here.  John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence is the title story in the collection.  It is a nicely set story, with some reasonable characterization, but I can't say it is really all that special, just a pot of gold story.  Wicked is a very short filler piece in Maureen McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters collection.  I never quite know how to react to these in writing.  Reminds me of the ending of The Neighbors with John Belushi.

Ancestory Money, by Maureen McHugh

Ancestor Money, part of Maureen McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters collection, is its lead story.  And it's the one by McHugh that I've enjoyed the most so far.  It got a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2004.  There is a strain of thought in Christian afterlife that says it's pretty much like an ideal version of life on earth--a nice little house with a yard and time to enjoy it.  Meant to appeal to lower-middle-class folks, I got it on a flyer once.  This is where our protagonist is, and has been there happily for seventy years, though there is no real presence of God.  Then she gets word that a granddaughter has sacrificed money for her in a Buddhist temple, and she can go claim it.  It's a very well-told and thoughtful tale, and I am glad I read it.  With three stars you should go ahead and read it too.