Deriving Life by Elizabeth Bear
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Length: Short Story (39 pages)
Rating: 5 Stars
Reviewed by AstilbeIn Deriving Life, love has no time limits, but life does. Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear gives us a future where life and love and identity have so many more options than they do today, in this visonary short story, a Tor.com Original.
Now day’s maximum percent of male victims are getting trapped by this disorder as an account of their stressful working hours and the side effects are minimal deeprootsmag.org cialis without prescription which disappear within few hours. Endometriosis can cause heavy bleeding as well as purchase cialis from india pain. The medication enables a man to get firmer penile erections rather than erections that are just in the middle The middle erection can be just as bad as not getting generic tadalafil online an erection is associated with declining masculinity. Irritation of the empty duodenum wall pushes the acidic bile up cialis pills for sale to the stomach. Is it better to experience a shorter life without suffering or a longer one with it?
Marq, the protagonist, lived at a point in the future when humans were able to cure any illness no matter how serious or advanced it might be. The catch was that the cure shortened one’s lifespan. I can’t go into many details about why this treatment worked or how people discovered it, but I will say that I was fascinated by the idea of a world in which there was no longer such a thing as chronic or life-threatening illnesses. Anyone could have perfect physical and mental health if they chose to do so, and this was something my mind kept reveling over as I read. What an amazing opportunity that would be!
The world building was phenomenal. While certain portions of it weren’t shared with the audience until much later in the storyline, I was thrilled to learn about them once they did show up. They brought new light to some of the choices Marq and the people around him made that I originally found a little puzzling. It was immensely satisfying to put all of these pieces together and realize what was really going on in this universe.
By far one of my favorite things about this tale were the ethical questions it raised about the treatment I mentioned earlier in this review. Not everyone agreed that the cure was a good thing to offer to patients who would otherwise suffer without relief, and I appreciated the fact that the narrator spent so much time exploring why this conflict existed. There truly was a great deal of grey area in the morality of their debates, and that made this an even more memorable and thought-provoking read than it already was.
Deriving Life was one of the best science fiction stories I’ve come across so far this year. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
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