On this weekly installment of my reactions to short stories of the past, I'm still "in" in the year 1996, going through Gardner Dozois' series of retrospective anthologies title The Year's Best Science Fiction, this volume being the Fourteenth Annual Collection and containing his picks from that year. Today I'm focusing on one of this book's several novellas, an intriguing tale...
CHRYSALIS by Robert Reed
For millions of years, the remnants of humanity...along with several intelligent life forms picked up along the way...are on a long voyage, fleeing from a self-destructive, warring Earth to reach out into deep space, even beyond our Milky Way galaxy. The ship is a converted asteroid, run and tended by intelligent, mobile machines called the Artisans that the fleeing humans created. Sarrie is a young woman on the planet/ship, and the Artisans see her in a special role, to become their Voice that speaks to the worlds they visit as they select and draw upon new life to join them in their long quest. But as she encounters strange reactions to events from her friends, she begins to question everything...and it comes to a head on a distant, ice-bound world well outside our galaxy. In some ways, this provocative story brought to my mind the Requiem episode in the old Twilight Zone series, in which three astronauts encounter an animated android on a remote asteroid, and the first Star Trek movie in which future technology catches up with one of our earlier space probes. This is science fiction at its best: stuff that makes you sit back and speculate...
Next time, more from 1996...
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