I have been digesting this pleasant miscellany by science fiction writer David Brin at a slow pace, and have found the experience (my first encounter with Brin) highly enjoyable.Otherness is a miscellany in that it mixes short stories (13), along with story notes (3 texts), and essays (5) in a fine collection of interesting ideas. It is divided into five parts: Transitions, Contact, Continuity, Cosmos, and Otherness, all representing basic ideas around which the texts in each part circles.For me six of the short stories stand out a bit extra, although the entire lot is enjoyable enough to be sure.First out is the "The Giving Plague", first published in 1988, and here found in the section Transitions. Here Brin digs into the idea virus evolution, and how influence on the host can effectively guarantee spread. The choice of narrator here is also good, as it brings the strong ideas into an individual and personal narrative.The Transitions section also contains my next favourite, "Dr. Pak's Preschool", which deals with the idea of foetal development, and how foetuses can be affected in utero. Brin here gives us a Japanese mother to be as a narrator. She and her husband want to control the conception, initially to ensure a male child, but the procedure goes further to ensure intelligence, and maybe, just maybe, allow the child to be useful before birth. Frightening and fascinating.The story "Sshhh ..." opens the section Contact. Here we learn that the aliens have arrived and that Earth has become part of a larger community, but also that there is a hidden trait, something which we must never talk about, must always hide, because it would ruin everything.My final three favourite are the three stories from the section Cosmos: "Bubbles", the story about Serena, a Grand Voyageur, travelling between in deep space and getting lost outside of the galaxies in the universe; "Ambiguity", in which a scientist experiments with quantum mechanics and micro singularities; and "What Continues ... and What Fails ...", in which the idea of evolution comes back into play, nicely setting up a comparison between human birth and genetic heritage, and those of the black holes and the universe itself.Among the non-fiction, the essays "The Dogma of Otherness" (in Transitions) and "The Commonwealth of Wonder" (in Otherness) are worth extra mention. Both tie in to Brin's concept of the dogma of otherness and otherness itself, and explores how these things may have affected human development and our understanding of the world.All in all, Brin's miscellany is well worth reading, and an interesting exploration of ideas through fiction and non-fiction alike.
