Helix 1954

Original cover art by Tony Gleeson
and Jack Coggins

"The Golden Helix", a science fiction story by Theodore Sturgeon was first published in 1954 (download here). Since Sturgeon was born 100 years ago in 1918, I'm looking back at his writing from the perspective of 2018.

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 God evolution wrought?

analysis by Ivory

After their long sleep, the colonists arrive at a destination that is strange and unexpected; a world 217 light-years from Earth. They expected to arrive in a new star system, awaken and find themselves in orbit around a planet. However, they quickly discover that they are already on the surface of a verdant planet when they awake.

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

Eventually readers collect enough clues so that the puzzle presented to us by Sturgeon at the start of "The Golden Helix" can be solved. While the colonists from Earth "slept" for several decades, their ship was "collected" by an alien spaceship (which is a type of gigantic spaceship that can travel faster than light).

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

After being collected by the aliens, the colony ship from Earth was sliced into pieces, room by room, and deposited on a planet with air suitable for humans. In the Sci Fi film 2001 we had the mysterious black monolith, but here, we get a mysterious golden helix. The closest we come to getting a description of the mysterious aliens is during a strange scene in which the 5 mystified colonists step out into the jungle, see the alien spaceship hovering overhead and experience some sort of incomprehensible first contact with the aliens. Ya... there is a whole big bunch of mystery and mystification dumped into our laps by Sturgeon.

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

In this hi tek^TM future of Humanity, the spaceship from Earth has gizmos like fusion-powered motors, but the library of the spaceship is stocked with "film reels" that can be read by the colonists. When the colonists wake up, they notice that all of the film reels in their library have been read and not re-wound. There were strange goings on during the voyage!

interior art by Virgil Finlay

The aliens managed to impregnate one of the six colonists during the voyage, so the first thing that the other 5 colonists must do upon wakening is see to the birth of a litter of babies. Luckily, the newborns are put into automated incubators and we don't even have to hear them cry. Sturgeon does not mention them again until they are toddlers.

source

The woman who became pregnant during the voyage dies while giving birth, but the other 5 colonists find a filmed recording that she made, describing her telepathic contact with the aliens during the course of her pregnancy.

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

Devolution?
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

I suppose we are not supposed to fully understand exactly what has happened to these hapless human colonists and their descendants. Could a laboratory rat understand the experiments conducted on it by humans? The last paragraph of the story suggests that the super-advanced angel-like aliens constantly move from galaxy to galaxy, collecting creatures like we humans, taking them to artificial laboratory planets like Verdis where their genes can be explored, tested, recombined and reduced to "spores" that can, in turn, be seeded onto new planets.

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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