n "The Word Sweep," Felix has an unpopular job: patrolling the neighborhood to break up parties, enforce conversation rations and otherwise prevent noise pollution—or, more precisely, speech pollution. Twenty years earlier, spoken words began to materialize. It's a perpetual blizzard—but words never melt. So "word sweeps" clean the streets every night, movies are
silent again and, in some countries, silence is enforced by death. The cause has always been a mystery. Then Felix and his boss discover a spot where words rarely materialize, and realize
they are close to the source of the problem. But in discovering the cause, they may further damage humanity's limited ability to communicate.
In the alternate history of "The Eichmann Variations," World War II ended when atomic weapons obliterated German cities, and the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who sent 6 million Jews
to death in the Holocaust, is not executed when he is captured in the early 1960s. Instead, he is duplicated, by the advanced science of his world, and every day, every hour, 10 copies of
Eichmann, identical in body, personality and memory, are hanged. They share all Eichmann's memories, but they are innocent—aren't they? If not, will one of these duplicates be able to understand
the evil Eichmann committed, and repent? And what does it mean if the executions continue until six million are killed?
In "This Life and Later Ones," a dutiful son helps his 90-something father upload his consciousness into an electronic afterlife, only to discover limitations and side effects that haunt more effectively and scarily than any ghost.
In "Godel's Doom," Witter programs an artificial intelligence to test Godel's philosophical/mathematical proof. If Godel is right, humanity has free will. If Godel is wrong, determinism is the rule of the universe, and "we're automatons!" But the results of the test may indicate a third possibility. ...
Big ideas and a true sense of wonder
Science fiction prides itself on being a literature of ideas, but it is better known for pure escapism, and not only because of dumbed-down, special-effects-laden movies; there's plenty of
simple-minded fun in print SF. Readers looking for intelligent, rigorously extrapolated, pure-quill SF literature should seek out George Zebrowski's Swift Thoughts, which collects 24 stories spanning his career from 1973 to 2001. A winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel and a frequent Nebula Award nominee, Zebrowski operates in the tradition of
Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem and Olaf Stapledon, considering genuinely big ideas and issues, as demonstrated by not only his most famous story, the brilliant, intellectually demanding "Godel's Doom," but nearly every other work in this collection.
Zebrowski explores the impossibility of absolute certainty, even in science, in "The Last Science Fiction Story of the 20th Century" and "The Holdouts"; the limits of physical (and post-physical) existence in the title story and "This Life and Later Ones"; the complexities of moral responsibility in "The Eichmann Variations" and "Wound the Wind"; and the folly of war in "Behind the Night" and "Lesser Beasts." He is also adept at classic literalized-metaphor SF, as demonstrated by "The Word Sweep" and "The Idea Trap." He shows his humorous side in "Stooges" and "Shrinkers and Movers." And unlike the many writers who use alternate history to escape the consequences of human behavior, he uses the subgenre to investigate free will, the meaning of history and the nature of evil in such stories as "The Eichmann Variations," "Lenin in Odessa" and "The Number of the Sand."
George Zebrowski isn't afraid to ask the tough questions, or to consider answers. His short fiction is the polar opposite of simple-minded escapism, but it always entertains and always excites the sense of wonder as it challenges the intellect.
