I had a long car ride earlier this week, and used part of it to listen to Linda Nagata’s short story Codename:Delphi. It’s military science fiction, that (if you squint a little) really may not be science fiction at all. I’m thinking about this story right now because I recently was reading a really strange diatribe about the gap between literary fiction and genre fiction, and among the many silly things involved in article’s point of view is that literary fiction had to mean something while genre fiction was … ahem … unencumbered with this requirement.
It’s an insane argument, of course. Every story means something–or at least has the “requirement” to mean something. Some stories, regardless of “type,” are more successful at this than others. This one is more than successful, regardless of whether you call it science fiction or not.
Very good story.