Neal Stephenson's "The Great Simoleon Caper" (short story, anarchy, free): Anticipating BitCoin in mid 1990s!

This is my first story of Stephenson, though I have Diamond Age lying around somewhere (unread). And if this is typical Stephenson, he just won a new fan.

Its appeal to me might have been both because I'm a programmer, & because I'm fed up with my fiscally irresponsible government. Your leverage will likely vary depending on how excited you get about these things. As a narrative, I'll say it's just about ok; it's the content that I found interesting.

Story summary.

An internet company has invented a new online currency called "Simoleons". With the promise that it will be better managed than the official government issue currency. And, of course, government wants to nip it in the bud.

This is the story of anarchist hackers rescuing the baby currency from government villains.

Fact sheet.

First published: "TIME Domestic SPECIAL ISSUE, Spring 1995 Volume 145, No. 12 (March 1, 1995)".
Download full text from Mark Damon Hughes or Internet Archive. [via Best Science Fiction Stories]
Caution: Later is the badly formatted original from Time magazine; you'll have to endlessly click "next page" that once would have generated more clicks for Time. Former link is much easier to read.
Rating: A.

Amitav Ghosh's "The Calcutta Chromosome" (novel, immortality)

This was disappointing in a way that many bestsellers are - quick page turner, great mystery build up, some interesting characters, but a dull ending. Ending was very confusing, & for a story that is mostly quite logical, there is an ghost story as one of the chapters!

A note for Indian readers: I picked up the story seeing an Indian author's name on cover. But while reading, I kept getting the impression that it's primarily targeted at western audiences, even though much of the story is set in Calcutta.

Story summary.

Story starts off with a historical fact - Ronald Ross, an Englishman born in India who made a medical discovery that won him a Nobel prize: that malaria is transmitted to humans via mosquitoes. Most of his research was done as a colonial officer in India, last part of it in Calcutta.

The story treats this medical discovery as part of a conspiracy. There is a secret sect of "Silence" worshipers in India who've already discovered some things about malaria & mosquitoes. But their main interest is immortality: there is a generally unknown human chromosome, the "Calcutta chromosome", that is found only in brain cells & that encodes whatever makes you you.

And these guys are trying to figure out a way of transmitting this identity so you can continue living in another body by consciously infecting that body (with a variant of malaria). And they kept nudging Ross in the right direction at critical points because, unknowingly, he was solving one of their immortality problems.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1995.
Rating: B.

Stephen Baxter's "Gossamer" (short story, free)

This is for readers interested in description of yet another exotic alien life form. I didn't seen any entertainment value, however.

Collected in.

1. David G Hartwell (Ed)'s "Year's Best SF" (1996) (Volume 1 of his annual series).

Fact sheet.

First published: Science Fiction Age, November 1995.
Download full text from Lightspeed. [via Best Science Fiction Stories]
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Stephen Baxter.

Marc Laidlaw's "Dankden" (novelette, fantasy, racism, free)

A swampy town called Dankden, peopled by amphibians called "phibs". Humans come, hunting phibs for their hides. Overtime, there is a group of half-breeds too - partly human, partly phib. And some humans hunt the half-breeds' children too. So we have a conflict, eventually resulting in division among humans & burning of a half-breeds' township.

Not exactly my kind of story, but not boring either.

Fact sheet.

First published: F&SF, October/November 1995.
Download full text from publisher's site (I think this link won't work after a month or so).
Rating: B.
Related: Stories about racism.

Anil Aggarwal's "The Mystery of the Drowned Man" (short story, free): Biological basis of drug addiction

This is as original as most of Anil's fiction, but is probably his longest story I've seen so far (most of his work appears to be flash fiction length). It also has a lot of info dumping. Read it for the idea rather than entertainment.

Government propaganda tells us that drug addiction is a bad, in fact criminal, thing. What if people differ sufficiently in their metabolism that what is poison to one is sugar to another? That's the basic idea of this story.

Story summary.

There was "some rather dubious evidence that Ramlal had been killed by Jagga and then thrown in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Gujrat." It's also known that he was a drug addict & might have drowned. How to prove if he was killed & then thrown into ocean, or entered water on his own & drowned?

This is the story of doctors piecing together the evidence from postmortem, & finding something new about human biology.

Fact sheet.

First published: Spandan, 1995-96.
Rating: B.
Download full text from author's website.