The ascent at the Jardin de Luxembourg is still the best science fiction of the Year Three.
Dolly
ELIZABETH BEAR
Elizabeth Bear (www.elizabethbear.com) lives in Hartford, Connecticut. Prolific as well as talented, she has published fourteen SF and fantasy novels since 2005, more than forty stories since 2003, and a collection, The Chains That You Refuse. She has won in that short time two Hugo Awards, the John W. Cambell Award for Best New Writer (2005), a Theodore Sturgeon Award, and several others, including an honorable mention for the Philip K. Dick Award.
“Dolly” appeared in Asimov’s, and is situated in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s robot and detective stories. This tale is emblematic of one of this year’s dominant themes: humaniod technology that is not given fully human social status; how people feel entitled to behave toward humaniod technology; and how that technology returns the favor. In this story, a human detective who at least partly comprehends this dynamic attempts a partial solution.
On Sunday when Dolly awakened, she had olive skin and black-brown hair that fell in waves to her hips. On Tuesday when Dolly awakened, she was a redhead, and fair. But on Thursday—on Thursday her eyes were blue, her hair was as black as a crow’s wing, and her hands were red with blood.
In her black French maid’s outfit, she was the only thing in the expensively appointed drawing room that was not winter-white or antiqued gold. It was the sort of room you hired somebody else to clean. It was as immaculate as it was white.
Immaculate and white, that is, except for the dead body of billionaire industrialist Clive Steele—and try to say that without sounding like a comic book—which lay at Dolly’s feet, his viscera blossoming from him like macabre petals.