Wayland's Principia
Book Details
Author(s)Richard Garfinkle
PublisherAchronal Press
ISBN / ASINB0053DLJOA
ISBN-13978B0053DLJO8
Sales Rank581,120
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
Alien: Unlike in appearance, history, and thought.
Alien: Distant, too distant to reach, too far to travel in a universe bound by the speed of light.
Alien: They did not come, but they sent word, words so strange that humans would have to devote their lives to mimicking alien appearance, taking in alien history, and following alien thought in order to understand them.
No longer so human, generation by generation these Humans-Reaching-to-the-Alien become Guests on their own world.
Guests learning to think like five alien species so strange that they do not have names for names, let alone names for themselves.
Guests bringing gifts, the thoughts, ways of life, and technology of beings who share nothing in common with humanity or each other but the need for survival, the ability to think, and senses that look outward on the universe.
Earth grew used to these gifts delivered by alien voice and human hand, to alien medicine, alien power sources, alien social organization, alien mathematics.
Earth grew comfortable with its Guests.
Until some of the aliens on a ship in a long, slow two-hundred-year arc from world to world announce that they are coming to Earth to welcome their hosts and Guests.
Hearing of this, one voice cries out a different word for Alien:
Monster
***
Richard Garfinkle is an award-winning author of science, science fiction, and fantasy who has published with Tor, DAW, Benbella Books, and the University of Chicago Press. His first novel, "Celestial Matters", won the Compton Crook award for best first science fiction novel of 1996 and a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. He has written numerous fiction and nonfiction works on his interests of history, science, imagination, and the preternatural. Garfinkle grew up in New York and now lives in Chicago with his wife and children. More information can be found at www.richardgarfinkle.com.
Alien: Distant, too distant to reach, too far to travel in a universe bound by the speed of light.
Alien: They did not come, but they sent word, words so strange that humans would have to devote their lives to mimicking alien appearance, taking in alien history, and following alien thought in order to understand them.
No longer so human, generation by generation these Humans-Reaching-to-the-Alien become Guests on their own world.
Guests learning to think like five alien species so strange that they do not have names for names, let alone names for themselves.
Guests bringing gifts, the thoughts, ways of life, and technology of beings who share nothing in common with humanity or each other but the need for survival, the ability to think, and senses that look outward on the universe.
Earth grew used to these gifts delivered by alien voice and human hand, to alien medicine, alien power sources, alien social organization, alien mathematics.
Earth grew comfortable with its Guests.
Until some of the aliens on a ship in a long, slow two-hundred-year arc from world to world announce that they are coming to Earth to welcome their hosts and Guests.
Hearing of this, one voice cries out a different word for Alien:
Monster
***
Richard Garfinkle is an award-winning author of science, science fiction, and fantasy who has published with Tor, DAW, Benbella Books, and the University of Chicago Press. His first novel, "Celestial Matters", won the Compton Crook award for best first science fiction novel of 1996 and a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. He has written numerous fiction and nonfiction works on his interests of history, science, imagination, and the preternatural. Garfinkle grew up in New York and now lives in Chicago with his wife and children. More information can be found at www.richardgarfinkle.com.
