Organisms
{5/5} “All that remained was to find the right partner: another interstellar entity who’d complete the Union’s life. An entity who was smart and fun to be with. An entity whose component orgs were carbon-based. (Some of the Union’s best friends were silicon-based, but still…) What the Union was looking for was an entity with its own natural resources, and ideally, a sharp new space fleet.”
Organisms by James Alan Gardner, published in 2018
In “The One with the Interstellar Group Consciousnesses” an interstellar entity goes looking for a mate. In “Eight-Fold Career Path” Kublai Khan tells Marco Polo tales of the far future that he heard from a Shaolin monk. In “All the Cool Monsters at Once” Canadian monsters like Ogopogo, ghost pirates, and the Sleeping Giant all wake up and head for Winnipeg. In “Shopping at the Mall” a professional liquidator has trouble selling the monuments of Washington DC to people who don’t know what they used to be.
This is a collection of Gardner’s short fiction, available only as an ebook. His previous collection, Gravity Wells, was brilliant.
Gardner’s boundless imagination and superior sense of humour are on fine display. Every story is ingenious and several are hilarious.
I’d read a couple of these stories before.
I’ve read 10 of Gardner’s books. I previously reviewed Vigilant.