This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?
The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles and Light Apparel (reviewed earlier), Flow of Blood (reviewed here), Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.
In Flow of Blood, the science is not impossible, as was the case with the two previous stories. It is about a viral fever killing people in Africa, including graduate students trying to stop it. As I write these words, the ebola virus is spreading almost uncontrolled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Perhaps the most important plot component of this story is racism. The white male grad student was raised to be a racist, until he meets and loves a black female grad student from Africa. He goes with her to study and fight the disease in her birth village. He becomes ill, and she goes back to Kansas to be with him. His family at first rejects her, thinking that Africa is where all viral diseases come from. But they have just suffered another loss: another son has died of a viral fever, but this time it was the American hantavirus. This shared experience of death brings them together.
Medical science is not just about germs and medicine, but about the struggles and perils of real people. And sometimes it takes a medical tragedy to bridge the gulf of racism.
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