HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Loading...

The Seedling Stars (1957)

by James Blish

Other authors: See the other authors section.

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
482850,714 (3.46)9
You didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man's shape and chemistry before he was born. And the pantropists didn't stop there. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe.… (more)
None
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 9 mentions

English (5)  Spanish (1)  Italian (1)  French (1)  All languages (8)
Showing 5 of 5
For sure, each of these stories could have been expanded into larger volumes; but, sadly, they didn’t write like that back then.

Taken in the proper order, “A Time to Survive” (1955) describes the attempts of the powers on Earth to destroy the secretly created human zygotes transformed to survive on Ganymede. Whether such a thing is really possible or not, the idea is to modify people to live on strange planets, rather than to terraform strange planets to support normal homo sapiens.

Anyway, they escape and go on to transform more zygotes on more planets as “humans” proliferate throughout the galaxy until we see the “Thing In the Attic” (1954) describing one of their successes on another strange planet.

Then we have two more stories… the original inspiration for the Pantropy series, “Sunken Universe” (1942), where people are microbe-sized trying to survive amongst amoebas and paramecia, etc. to build a civilization…followed by “Surface Tension” (1952) telling a tale of microscopic exploration into other ‘worlds’ of pond scum.

And finally “Watershed” has the descendants of these prolific pioneers return to an Earth (that has been environmentally destroyed by normal humans) in order to colonize it with some form of human that can survive on the decimated desert planet.

While the premise is extremely intriguing, the brevity detracts from the promise of the premise and the totality is slightly unsatisfying. Still, for all its flaws, I enjoyed the book ( )
  majackson | Dec 22, 2022 |
Another one for my Year of Nostalgic Re-reads, and I really enjoyed this re-read. I'm pretty sure that 40 plus years ago I did not know this was a collection of four previously published short stories, but I do recall being enamored of the imagination of James Blish and the science fiction that this was/is...Adapted Men instead of terraforming! Brilliant!

"The Seeding Program" is both quite good and not quite so good. I liked the concept, though the execution at the end wrapped in cliches and naïveté. Still, a good story.
As a stand alone story, "Thing in the Attic" would have made a good Twilight Zone episode. In this collection, the impact is lessened, but it was still engaging.
"Surface Tension" is the story I remembered most from those forty odd years ago. Silly when thinking of the scale, it was nonetheless quite imaginative.
And "Watershed" is, well ... preachy and cliched. And thankfully, short.

To be sure, I have a slightly different reference frame reading it as an adult, and as such am less enamored than as a child, but the memories are good as is the fiction. ( )
1 vote Razinha | May 23, 2017 |
Back in the early 1980s, I was a big fan of Blish’s fiction – possibly because Arrow had repackaged them with Chris Foss covers – and bought and read a dozen or so. I still have them. But one I’d missed was The Seedling Stars, so I tracked down a copy on eBay a few years ago – with, of course, the Foss cover art – and stuck it on the TBR. I had a feeling I might have read it before – certainly, ‘Surface Tension’, the penultimate story in the collection wasn’t new to me, although I’m not sure where I’d previously read it. But the other two novellas and one short story didn’t ring any bells. All four are about “pantropy”, which is genetically engineering humanity for environments rather than terraforming worlds. In ‘Seeding Program’, Earth has sent an agent to infiltrate a colony on Ganymede created by the leader of the pantropy movement and whose inhabitants have all been engineered before birth to survive on the Jovian moon’s frozen surface. It’s not in the slightest bit convincing, and the plot could just have easily been translated to any random Earth location. In ‘The Thing in the Attic’, the theocratic society of the gibbon-like humans of Tellura is causing them to stagnate, but when one freethinker is exiled he and his companions trek over the mountains and discover a starship of humans who have come to see how the colony is doing. Solid nineteen-fifties science fiction, perhaps a little preachy in places, and not especially memorable. ‘Surface Tension’, however, is memorable. In this novella, tiny humans have been seeded in a series of ponds on the one small piece of land on a water world. Again, a freethinker (male, of course) persuades his fellows to build a special vehicle to explore the world “above the sky”. The sentient amoebas are a little hard to swallow (so to speak), but it’s a fun setting and Blish makes good use of it. The final story, ‘Watershed’, is very short and takes place on a starship heading for Earth. The crew are baseline humans and the passenger is an engineered human from another world. The crew are also hugely racist toward their passenger. Who points out that baseline humans are now the minority among the colonised worlds. I suspect I would have enjoyed this collection a whole lot more if I’d read it back in the early nineteen-eighties when I read all those other Blish books… ( )
1 vote iansales | Dec 31, 2015 |
Short stories about the human race spreading to the stars and modifying itself to the conditions present as opposded to modifying the conditions.

Contains one of my favorites: "Surface Tension". Humans land on a water/swamp planet and decide the only was to survive is to reduce themselves to the size of the creatures in the puddles. Maybe this story stuck with me because I first read it while studying rotivers in our farm pond ( )
  RGKronschnabel | Dec 1, 2010 |
The Seedling Stars works better in it's original state, as a standalone novella, as opposed to being a part of this uneven fixup novel.
You can find it in a number of anthologies, most notably "The Best of James Blish". ( )
1 vote arthurfrayn | Aug 3, 2008 |
Showing 5 of 5
no reviews | add a review

» Add other authors (5 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Blish, Jamesprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Dillon, DianeCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Dillon, LeoCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
First words
Information from the Italian Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
Intorno a Sweeney l'astronave aveva ripreso a ronzare.
Quotations
Last words
Information from the Italian Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

None

You didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man's shape and chemistry before he was born. And the pantropists didn't stop there. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.46)
0.5
1 2
1.5
2 7
2.5 1
3 7
3.5 7
4 18
4.5 3
5 4

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,187,604 books! | Top bar: Always visible