Reviews for Science, Technology and Development in Afghanistan

The average rating for Science, Technology and Development in Afghanistan based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-03 00:00:00 John Smith This is another one that I first read many years ago, and some of the stories read very differently to an adult than to a kid. Variation on a Theme from Beethoven, Sharon Webb – Humans have developed the technology to become immortal, but immortality kills off any artistic ability, so especially talented kids are trained and then given the option to choose a mortal life. I can’t help questioning the premise here, from several different angles, but I basically liked it. Beatnik Bayou, John Varley – I love a good “the social norms of the far future will be almost incomprehensible and often disturbing to our eyes” story, and this one really pulls it off. You really feel like the world of this story could be the setting for hundreds of other equally fascinating stories. But… and this is kind of a big but… there’s some stuff in here about children having sex with people who are artificially-aged-down adults, and while it didn’t actually bother me within the context of the story, I can see this particular story REALLY REALLY not going over well with many people. Elbow Room, Marion Zimmer Bradley – A woman is stationed by a wormhole in the middle of nowhere, and hardly ever sees her other crewmates… and then, well. Basically, the idea here is that certain kinds of mental instability might wind up being assets as humans move into space and way, way out of our comfort zones. I liked this, though the twist is pretty obvious from a mile away (though I’m not sure it wasn’t supposed to be). The Ugly Chickens, Howard Waldrop – This is one of my favorite SF stories of all time. An ornithology grad student happens to be reading a book about extinct birds when an old lady on the bus leans over and says, “hey, I haven’t seen one of those ugly chickens since I was a little girl!” She’s talking about a picture of a dodo. And from there… well, I won’t ruin the story, but it’s all completely plausible and surprisingly emotionally affecting. Prime Time, Norman Spinrad – “What if retirement homes were Matrix-esque virtual reality tanks” is the basic setup here. The story presents three possible responses to this situation: living in the past and pretending it’s real, pursuing ever more outlandish and insane fantasy scenarios, or going insane. This is much more dated than most of the rest of this collection, but you can’t really fault it too much for that. Nightflyers, George R. R. Martin – A second-tier group of scientists charter a ship to pursue a mysterious object which has been slowly moving through space for aeons. This could easily have been adapted as a movie; GRRM’s screenwriter experience is super visible in this one. I can’t say the ultimate revelation (which I won’t spoil) was exactly mindblowing, but it had some great imagery and genuinely tense moments and it moved along at a good clip. A Spaceship Built of Stone, Lisa Tuttle – A small group of people have the same mysterious dream about a maze, and then, well… this is as unsettling as a story about nice aliens who mean us no harm can get. (Oddly, this is the second story in this collection where the plot is set in motion by one character noticing a picture in another character’s book on a bus.) Window, Bob Leman – A mysterious government-funded experiment goes weirdly awry, and suddenly there’s a massive one-way window into the idyllic Victorian past in the middle of a research base. The first time I read this, I was genuinely surprised by the direction it took. The Summer Sweet, the Winter Wild, Michael G. Coney – What if everybody could feel everybody else’s pain, all the time? Probably world peace or something, right? MAYBE NOT. This is the best story from the perspective of a herd of caribou you’ve ever read. Achronos, Lee Killough – An artist stumbles into a still pool in the time stream, accessible from every point in time, and meets some people who live there full-time. Another one that makes much more sense to me as an adult than when I first read it! Favorites in this one: The Ugly Chickens; The Summer Sweet, the Winter Wild; and because I was really captured by the world it paints I gotta say Beatnik Bayou although, ya know, trigger warning and all that

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-29 00:00:00 Thomas Abran In Variation on a Theme by Beethoven by Sharon Webb humans have developed an immortality treatment but it comes at the expense of their creativity. A reluctant David, who is musically gifted, is plucked from his boyhood life on Vesta to be taken to Renascence, on Earth, to be trained for sixty lunar months before deciding if he wants to be immortal or creative. Beatnik Bayou by John Varley is set in his future where medical modification of the human body is commonplace and sex changes unremarkable – even desirable. This one deals with what growing up in such a society might entail and the problems with having age-altered personal tutors as constant companions. Tonally the narration is not consistent. Elbow Room by Marion Zimmer Bradley is one of those confessional stories within which the narrator becomes riddled with self-doubt. She is the director of a Vortex station, institutions which oversee wormholes and had a history of their operators committing suicide or else murdering one another. So a system was evolved in which only a few people would inhabit the stations meeting only occasionally so as they have elbow room. The narrator therefore has her own cook, her own gardener, her technician, her personal priest; even perhaps her own male whore. The crisis comes when a malfunctioning ship arrives at the Vortex and she has to board it, thereby encountering strangers. The Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop finds Paul Lindberl, biology assistant at the University of Texas, setting out on a wild bird chase after a woman on the bus refers to seeing in her childhood the “ugly chickens” he was looking at in his book of Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World. Prime Time by Norman Spinrad is a take on the future of entertainment where people retire to Total Television Heaven able to access tapes (how soon the future becomes obsolete!) containg their favourite programming and real-time-share them with their nearest and dearest or not-so-dearest as the case may be. The story also has a rather conventional view of the lineaments of male and female desire. Though typically well written George R R Martin throws a lot of SF tropes into Nightflyers - cloning, telepathy, ancient star travellers, holograms, telekinesis, a backdrop of an extended time-line, the mad woman in the attic (or in this case, a spaceship’s control systems.) Karoly d’Branin has assembled a crew of xenobiologists, linguists, a xenotechnologist, a telepath, a cyberneticist and an ‘improved model’ human to find the almost mythical volcryn, said to have cruised the galaxy at sublight speed for millenia. The ship’s captain, Royd Eris, is secretive though, never emerging from his quarters, appearing only as a hologram. Things begin to go wrong when the telepath feels a stange presence before dying violently. The first sentence of A Spaceship Built of Stone by Lisa Tuttle is reminiscent of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias but the scene it describes is occurring in a dream. The dreams, apparently of the stone-built city of the ancient Anasazi culture, are being experienced simultaneously by many people round the world. Narrator Rick comes to suspect they are a softening up exercise for a quiet alien invasion. In Window by Bob Leman, an experimenter on telekinesis has disappeared, along with his work cabin, and been replaced by a transparent cube one hundred feet to a side. The scene it shows, of another reality, looks idyllic. Then, during the brief time there is an interface, one of the obsevers steps through. The Summer Sweet, The Winter Wild by Michael G Coney is one of the very few pieces of fiction to be written in the first person plural. (Another is my own This is the Road.) Here the We of the narrator(s) is a herd of caribou, some of whose members a while ago developed the telepathic ability to make the Herd and other animals feel their pain when they were injured or attacked. Wolves then back off, also humans (thought of by the Herd as ‘You’,) hence the weak and ill of the Herd do not die, therefore go on to breed. A disillusioned artist wanders a beach in Achronous by Lee Killough and finds he has stepped into a bubble in time, with people from the far future taking refuge from the end of their world. It gives him new inspiration.