Robert Sawyer is one of my favorite SF novelists. He hasn't written a lot of short fiction, and for many years, he's written it only on commission, so most of it has appeared in anthologies and small magazines. So unless you're a dedicated Sawyer completist, you probably haven't read most of these stories.
As a novelist, one of Sawyer's great strengths is the extrapolation of all the likely (and unlikely) consequences of whatever his central premise might be. Short stories, I think, don't give him the kind of room to do that extrapolation, and so some of the stories feel like sketches, mere outlines of an interesting world in which he might someday write a terrific novel. "The Hand You're Dealt," for instance, sets up a society in which genetic screening at birth and at the age of 18 is mandatory, and each person knows his genetic predispositions -- behavioral, talent, medical -- in great detail. The story itself, though, crams too much information into its final pages as Sawyer explains the convoluted solution to his mystery.
Most of the stories I like best in this collection are the shortest. "If I'm Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage," written for a Village Voice series of stories of exactly 250 words, builds quickly to a clever punchline; "The Abdication of Pope Mary III" takes the battle between religion and science to a logical conclusion.
I also very much enjoyed Sawyer's Sherlock Holmes tale, "You See But You Do Not Observe," in which Holmes's ego provides the answer to one of science's most baffling mysteries; and the lovely "Lost in the Mail," which gives the notion of parallel universes a new twist.
But even if they don't always reach the level of those stories, nothing here is flat-out awful; Iterations is a solid collection of smart stories.
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