Schrödinger's kitten

Meh. Fine. This won both the Hugo and Nebula (wooo). I like, but don't love, George Alec Effinger's schtick: that is, I get embarrassed by gimmicky Orientalist spec fic written by white people since I used to ply that trade myself and am still in recovery. Like, I have a half-written short story on my machine about a Delhi doctor lady going to be a frontier doctor on a literal planet of slums. I mean, it's fine - white people can write POC protagonists, that's fine. It just feels like Effinger's stories (both this, and When Gravity Fails) are fairly run of the mill once you remove the diversity thing - making the latter feel a bit gimmicky.

I'm being too hard on this. It's fine. It's enjoyable. I got choked up, even. It's about the multiple worlds theory (recommended reading on this topic), as told via a young Arab girl facing her spaghetti world-lines: does she kill or not kill the evil rapey boy? Does the Imam punish her or forgive her? Does she work with Herr Doctor Heisenberg or Herr Doctor Schrodinger? It feels super elliptical, with repeated fragments, with initial confusion that all comes together, with evocative “troubles in the souk” scenes, and there are some pretty glorious set piece scenes. I also, like all SF fans, worship at the altar of early 20th century physics, so seeing the big hits from that era - Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Einstein, Bohr - is always fun.

Buttt mehh. I look for ~scintillating~ SF, stuff that makes me get goosebumps or makes me question my existence. OR, failing that, has much drama and adventure in space (pew! pew!). This short story is like a 4/10 on the mind-blown scale, and maybe a 5/10 on the adventure scale.

It also is another entry into my Personal Law Of Science Fiction: that is, for every sci-fi idea you have, they already made a (better) version of it on Star Trek.