Forever Magazine Issue 4 by Neil Clarke & Juliette Wade & Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke & Juliette Wade & Neil Clarke [Reed, Robert & Wade, Juliette & Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, novella, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short stories, short story
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2015-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Galactic Empires, edited by Gardner Dozois, (2008).

Updated for publication in The Greatship, by Robert Reed (2013).

A Few Words with Robert Reed

What was the inspiration for this story? / Where did it come from?

I had an assigned topic: Galactic empires. I don’t devote a lot of bandwidth to the old-fashioned faster-than-light Romes that SF loves, but one of my major playgrounds begged for some treatment of the subject. The Great Ship is undeniably ancient, but if the early universe can produce enough intelligence and willpower to build such an object, where has that intelligence gone? And more to the point of “Golden Balloon,” what about those billions of years between the Great Ship’s birth and the present day? Ask Quee Lee and Perri. The general consensus is that the first wave of civilizations vanished quickly, for this reason or that reason . . . but I have to wonder: Is that a respectable conclusion?

With those questions in mind, I built an empire out of invisible buttresses. A subtle, half-defined empire whose story is told through a narrator with his own subtle, half-defined nature.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.