complaints about the Year's Best SF 17
Aug. 12th, 2012 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jinianThis is the Hartwell and Cramer one. As usual, good stories, but this time there were a whole lot of details that made me crazy. I marked them as I read so I could complain, because I'm like that.
"Best Science Fiction of the Year Three", Ken MacLeod. One of the characters is "an anthropology professor at a Catholic university deep in the Bible Belt." This is stated as if it were a normal thing to be, when in fact real anthropologists can get funding to study the unusual state of being Catholic in the Bible Belt.
"Dolly", Elizabeth Bear. In a story where neurology is highly advanced and androids are a going concern, there is supposed to be an article in Nature on advances in PCR for forensics. Technically this would be possible, but PCR is pretty highly polished as a technique and top journals like Nature publish papers with substantial novelty. As a biologist, I found this rang false.
"Tethered", Mercurio D. Rivera. Possibly prompted by the awesomeness of the author's name, cool-sounding and vaguely related words (beginning with M) are here co-opted to mean infuriatingly wrong things. "Meiosis" is the worst: yes, it is part of sexual reproduction, but it is not the fusion part. That is called fertilization. Meiosis is, in fact, a type of cell division. No scientist would ever have named these alien processes after their opposites.
"Laika's Ghost", Karl Schroeder. This is way cool, except for the part where, if a person would be turned into "a smear on the floor" by "thousands of gravities", why would seeds be able to survive the same process? Or even bulldozers?
"Home Sweet Bi'ome", Pat MacEwen. The nu-bats have "had some human alleles added so they're resistant to white-nose fungus, and rabies too." Well, unfortunately for us, humans are not currently resistant to rabies, so this doesn't seem terribly effective. I also questioned whether one could really be allergic to rayon, since it's basically plain cellulose, but there can be any number of chemicals used in its processing, so I'll go along with that. (Note too that this story is amazingly, repeatedly repulsive for being so pleasant in theme. A house made out of your own tissues, ugh.)
"Eliot Wrote", Nancy Kress. The character writes, "a genetically engineered Bt gene that fights blight because it allows the use of strong pesticides." Wrong! There are multiple transgenes used in different crop plants, and they do different things. Bt is a toxin that kills insects; this is why Monsanto's nitwittery in allowing Bt into corn pollen caused a scandal. Herbicide resistance genes have nothing to do with Bt. And at the next level of wrongness, blight is not treated by herbicides or insecticides, because blights are diseases caused by microbes.
"Best Science Fiction of the Year Three", Ken MacLeod. One of the characters is "an anthropology professor at a Catholic university deep in the Bible Belt." This is stated as if it were a normal thing to be, when in fact real anthropologists can get funding to study the unusual state of being Catholic in the Bible Belt.
"Dolly", Elizabeth Bear. In a story where neurology is highly advanced and androids are a going concern, there is supposed to be an article in Nature on advances in PCR for forensics. Technically this would be possible, but PCR is pretty highly polished as a technique and top journals like Nature publish papers with substantial novelty. As a biologist, I found this rang false.
"Tethered", Mercurio D. Rivera. Possibly prompted by the awesomeness of the author's name, cool-sounding and vaguely related words (beginning with M) are here co-opted to mean infuriatingly wrong things. "Meiosis" is the worst: yes, it is part of sexual reproduction, but it is not the fusion part. That is called fertilization. Meiosis is, in fact, a type of cell division. No scientist would ever have named these alien processes after their opposites.
"Laika's Ghost", Karl Schroeder. This is way cool, except for the part where, if a person would be turned into "a smear on the floor" by "thousands of gravities", why would seeds be able to survive the same process? Or even bulldozers?
"Home Sweet Bi'ome", Pat MacEwen. The nu-bats have "had some human alleles added so they're resistant to white-nose fungus, and rabies too." Well, unfortunately for us, humans are not currently resistant to rabies, so this doesn't seem terribly effective. I also questioned whether one could really be allergic to rayon, since it's basically plain cellulose, but there can be any number of chemicals used in its processing, so I'll go along with that. (Note too that this story is amazingly, repeatedly repulsive for being so pleasant in theme. A house made out of your own tissues, ugh.)
"Eliot Wrote", Nancy Kress. The character writes, "a genetically engineered Bt gene that fights blight because it allows the use of strong pesticides." Wrong! There are multiple transgenes used in different crop plants, and they do different things. Bt is a toxin that kills insects; this is why Monsanto's nitwittery in allowing Bt into corn pollen caused a scandal. Herbicide resistance genes have nothing to do with Bt. And at the next level of wrongness, blight is not treated by herbicides or insecticides, because blights are diseases caused by microbes.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-19 09:40 am (UTC)