Original cover art by Tony Gleeson and Jack Coggins |
In this story, humans don't have faster-than-light space travel technology, but they can send colonists to nearby exoplanets by placing them into suspended animation for the long voyage. The destination for our six colonists is an exoplanet less than 10 light-years from Earth, a world that will have to be terraformed so as to acquire an atmosphere that will be breathable by humans. The story takes place in Sturgeon's imagined future after it has become normal for humans to give birth to litters of 6 or more babies. Yikes! What hath
analysis by Ivory |
I'm not a fan of the narrative method used here by Sturgeon. While reading the first few pages of the story, I often found it difficult to understand what Sturgeon was trying to tell us. I suppose he wanted readers to share in the confusion experienced by the colonists after having arrived at a strange new world under unexpected conditions. We are forced to ask: what is going on? A puzzle.
First Contact
editorial blurb |
Why collected? Think of Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates collecting butterflies or Charles Robert Darwin collecting beetles. Could you explain the purpose of their collections to a butterfly or a beetle?
2001 |
Lacking any other cognitive alternative, some of the colonists are tempted to describe the aliens as "angels". These angel-like aliens are so far advanced beyond we primitive humans and their motives and actions so far outside our range of experience that we can't even begin to understand them or have a productive exchange of information with them.
colony ship |
interior art by Virgil Finlay |
source |
The colonists find that the planet they have been taken to is about 35,000,000 years old (measured by radioactive dating), but it has highly evolved forms of life and seems quite Earth-like. The colonists call their new world Verdis.
Verdis is some sort of biology laboratory, used by the aliens to process the life forms that they collect. The colonists quickly realize that their bodies are rapidly adapting (or, being adapted) to the biosphere of Verdis. Soon, the toxins and poisons from life forms on Verdis begin to lose their toxicity. Even more startling, the colonists regress from the "recently evolved" human ability to birth litters of young. The second colonist who gives birth on Verdis has a small litter of only 3 babies. The third woman who gives birth produces only one baby.
in the Ekcolir Reality |
What is going on? Sturgeon never bothers to explain anything, but from the perspective of 2018, I have to assume that the aliens have some kind of advanced nanotechnology that is at work inside the bodies of the colonists, altering genes and changing the molecular components of their bodies. Certainly it is NOT natural selection that is driving the biological changes that the colonists experience.
The descendants of the colonists quickly change into new forms of life that take over the planet, displacing the creatures that were present when the human colonists first arrived. At the very end of Sturgeon's story, the collected spaceship of yet another primitive (human-like) space-faring species is brought to Verdis by the angelic aliens, and another cycle of "processing" of this newly-collected bird-like alien species begins.
source |
It is easy for me to view "The Golden Helix" as a kind of literary sequel to "Sentinel of Eternity" by Clarke.
Related Reading: Annihilation
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