Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Arrow (1972), Edition: paperback / softback, Paperback
Description
You didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man's shape and chemistry before he was born. And the pantropists didn't stop there. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe.
User reviews
LibraryThing member iansales
Back in the early 1980s, I was a big fan of Blish’s fiction – possibly because Arrow had repackaged them with Chris Foss covers – and bought and read a dozen or so. I still have them. But one I’d missed was The Seedling Stars, so I tracked down a copy on eBay a few years ago – with, of
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course, the Foss cover art – and stuck it on the TBR. I had a feeling I might have read it before – certainly, ‘Surface Tension’, the penultimate story in the collection wasn’t new to me, although I’m not sure where I’d previously read it. But the other two novellas and one short story didn’t ring any bells. All four are about “pantropy”, which is genetically engineering humanity for environments rather than terraforming worlds. In ‘Seeding Program’, Earth has sent an agent to infiltrate a colony on Ganymede created by the leader of the pantropy movement and whose inhabitants have all been engineered before birth to survive on the Jovian moon’s frozen surface. It’s not in the slightest bit convincing, and the plot could just have easily been translated to any random Earth location. In ‘The Thing in the Attic’, the theocratic society of the gibbon-like humans of Tellura is causing them to stagnate, but when one freethinker is exiled he and his companions trek over the mountains and discover a starship of humans who have come to see how the colony is doing. Solid nineteen-fifties science fiction, perhaps a little preachy in places, and not especially memorable. ‘Surface Tension’, however, is memorable. In this novella, tiny humans have been seeded in a series of ponds on the one small piece of land on a water world. Again, a freethinker (male, of course) persuades his fellows to build a special vehicle to explore the world “above the sky”. The sentient amoebas are a little hard to swallow (so to speak), but it’s a fun setting and Blish makes good use of it. The final story, ‘Watershed’, is very short and takes place on a starship heading for Earth. The crew are baseline humans and the passenger is an engineered human from another world. The crew are also hugely racist toward their passenger. Who points out that baseline humans are now the minority among the colonised worlds. I suspect I would have enjoyed this collection a whole lot more if I’d read it back in the early nineteen-eighties when I read all those other Blish books… Show Less
LibraryThing member RGKronschnabel
Contains one of my favorites: "Surface Tension". Short stories about the human race spreading to the stars and modifying itself to the conditions present as opposded to modifying the conditions.
LibraryThing member majackson
For sure, each of these stories could have been expanded into larger volumes; but, sadly, they didn’t write like that back then.
Taken in the proper order, “A Time to Survive” (1955) describes the attempts of the powers on Earth to destroy the secretly created human zygotes transformed to
Anyway, they escape and go on to transform more zygotes on more planets as “humans” proliferate throughout the galaxy until we see the “Thing In the Attic” (1954) describing one of their successes on another strange planet.
Then we have two more stories… the original inspiration for the Pantropy series, “Sunken Universe” (1942), where people are microbe-sized trying to survive amongst amoebas and paramecia, etc. to build a civilization…followed by “Surface Tension” (1952) telling a tale of microscopic exploration into other ‘worlds’ of pond scum.
And finally “Watershed” has the descendants of these prolific pioneers return to an Earth (that has been environmentally destroyed by normal humans) in order to colonize it with some form of human that can survive on the decimated desert planet.
While the premise is extremely intriguing, the brevity detracts from the promise of the premise and the totality is slightly unsatisfying. Still, for all its flaws, I enjoyed the book
Taken in the proper order, “A Time to Survive” (1955) describes the attempts of the powers on Earth to destroy the secretly created human zygotes transformed to
Show More
survive on Ganymede. Whether such a thing is really possible or not, the idea is to modify people to live on strange planets, rather than to terraform strange planets to support normal homo sapiens.Anyway, they escape and go on to transform more zygotes on more planets as “humans” proliferate throughout the galaxy until we see the “Thing In the Attic” (1954) describing one of their successes on another strange planet.
Then we have two more stories… the original inspiration for the Pantropy series, “Sunken Universe” (1942), where people are microbe-sized trying to survive amongst amoebas and paramecia, etc. to build a civilization…followed by “Surface Tension” (1952) telling a tale of microscopic exploration into other ‘worlds’ of pond scum.
And finally “Watershed” has the descendants of these prolific pioneers return to an Earth (that has been environmentally destroyed by normal humans) in order to colonize it with some form of human that can survive on the decimated desert planet.
While the premise is extremely intriguing, the brevity detracts from the promise of the premise and the totality is slightly unsatisfying. Still, for all its flaws, I enjoyed the book
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Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1957
Physical description
192 p.
ISBN
0099067102 / 9780099067108
Other editions
The Seedling Stars by James Blish (Paperback)