aesmael

3. “Strangers On Paradise” by Damon Knight

I think I would have been more impressed by this story if I had read it a decade or so ago.

Humanity’s first interstellar colony is so perfect they don’t even have disease. Buuut- it turns out they’re lying about the indigenous folk having gone spontaneously extinct a few centuries ago, and almost certainly founded the colony on an act of conscious genocide. Too bad, so sad.

It troubles me that no one who learns of this attempts to publicise it, as if the fact of a colony founded on genocide is shocking enough to make a story, as if this isn’t normally done wilfully, consciously. Although the protagonist does release a set of possibly immortal rabbits into the wild; I overlooked that initially as at least some sort of action against this colony and their starry-eyed dreams of limitless expansion.

I did like the device of travelling off-world to research a biography of a famous poet. I like that sort of ordinary tale in science fiction setting. Makes me nostalgic too.