I, alien

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, science fiction, space aliens, space fiction

Continuing and concluding Tuesday's review of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, the book finishes with five stories and a novelette:

• Just Peace – One one level, a set piece contrasting three cultures that have arisen on a remote colony planet. It explores, just a little, the alienness we can feel among our own species. On another, the archetypical "I have to deceive you to save your life" story of love and seeming betrayal. Written with William Rupp, this is one of Vinge's rare collaborations.
• Original Sin – How do you define "sin" when your life cycle requires murder and cannibalism? Does it help or harm to bring human-style religion to you?
• The Blabber – One of the more delightful treatments of a multi-bodied entity, sort of a "secret princess" tale.
• Win a Nobel Prize! – A story in the form of an advertisement, published as part of a series by the journal Nature. Another treatment of the brain enhancement theme that so fascinates the author.
• The Barbarian Princess – Is this young girl, who becomes so skilled at portraying a warrior princess, a real goddess?
• Fast Times at Fairmont High – The newest piece in the volume, written in 2001 and first published here. Vinge, who is also fascinated by the prospect of an imminent "technical singularity", brings us close to that point with a gaggle of eighth-graders who find multi-layered connectivity in an intelligent environment as normal as today's youngsters find life with smart phones, Facebook and Twitter.

This collection particularly showcases the author's ability to get inside aliens of all kinds and give us a glimpse of life from inside their skin. Yet perhaps the most alien, to each other, are the two extreme cultures of "Just Peace", one much stiffer than early American Puritanism, and one a few steps more hedonistic than Rome in the depths of its moral collapse. Clearly, we already know a lot more about "alien contact" than we are willing to admit.