Sentient Cephalopods
Jan. 3rd, 2003 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've just finished reading an interesting science-fiction story: Stephen Baxter's "Sheena-5," published in the anthology This Year's Best SF 6. It's set in a bleak near-future Earth, where a squid genetically engineered for intelligence--Sheena, in the title--is sent out to a near-Earth asteroid to supervise the construction of an a mining facility and a rocket to push the asteroid into the Earth orbit.
The critical thing, however, is that Sheena is pregnant, and that enough of her children are also intelligent to let them reproduce. By the time that the asteroid arrives in Earth orbit, it has been converted almost entirely by the imported automated machineries into an ersatz squid homeworld, while the squid themselves are preparing to colonize Earth's oceans. (Not that they're neglecting other worlds--ice moons and comets and asteroids are all receiving squid colonizing missions.) In the end, one suspects that humanity's role in the affairs of the solar system was to prepare the squid for their impending hegemony.
It must be interesting to be an intelligent egg-layer aquatic invertebrate. Baxter didn't quite convey it, I think, but then I wouldn't know it until I saw it so there.
The critical thing, however, is that Sheena is pregnant, and that enough of her children are also intelligent to let them reproduce. By the time that the asteroid arrives in Earth orbit, it has been converted almost entirely by the imported automated machineries into an ersatz squid homeworld, while the squid themselves are preparing to colonize Earth's oceans. (Not that they're neglecting other worlds--ice moons and comets and asteroids are all receiving squid colonizing missions.) In the end, one suspects that humanity's role in the affairs of the solar system was to prepare the squid for their impending hegemony.
It must be interesting to be an intelligent egg-layer aquatic invertebrate. Baxter didn't quite convey it, I think, but then I wouldn't know it until I saw it so there.
