Mon 17 Apr 2017
SF Stories I’m Reading: ELEANOR ARNASON “Ruins.”
Posted by Steve under Science Fiction & Fantasy , Stories I'm Reading[3] Comments
ELEANOR ARNASON “Ruins.” First published in Old Venus, edited by Gardner Dozois & George R. R. Martin (Bantam, hardcover, 2015). Reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s Griffin, trade paperback, 2016).
The stated goal of the anthology Old Venus is to showcase new stories based on the vision that SF writers had of the planet back in the 40s and early 50s; namely, a water-drenched planet with all kinds of exotic flora and fauna, a world where humans could live, but it would be a struggle.
I don’t own a copy of that book, a companion edition to a similar anthology called Old Mars, but now that I’ve read this story in editor Dozois’s most recent best of the year anthology, which I’m slowly working my way through, I know I need to have it.
In “Ruins” a young female photographer named Ash Weatherman is hired by a representative of National Geographic to put together a small guided tour of some of the more interesting locales on Venus. She agrees, finds a local crew,and off they go.
This is all great fun. None of the sights and sounds the group comes across would out of place in an old back issue of Planet Stories, to pick a most obvious example. But all is not what it seems, neither with the people she hires as guides, or with the story itself. The crossbreeding of Terran wildlife with that on Venus was caused by a meteor glancing off Earth and hitting that other planet, or was there a second one as well?
There are also two factions on Venus that ring strangely out of place. The CIA has a strong outpost there, with their primary protagonists being remnants of the Soviet Union, which collapsed economically by trying to keep their colony on the planet going, and this new expedition finds themselves caught up in the crossfire.
Nor is this all that they find, hence the title. This is the kind of story, extremely well-written, that gave science fiction its grand sense of wonder in the past. It’s good to see that there are authors who can still provide us the same thrills today.
April 17th, 2017 at 9:56 pm
Since Leigh Bracket’s “Moon of Comorath” is one of my favorite SF stories (think CASABLANCA on Venus) I’ll have to look this up.
April 18th, 2017 at 11:25 am
This is a great story, and the entire book is excellent. I got it from the library, and liked it so much I bought a copy. OLD MARS is equally good.
April 18th, 2017 at 11:52 am
The local Barnes and Noble never carried either one when they came out in hardcover, and if either came out in paperback, I don’t know about it. (Maybe in England.) So it’s taken me a while to catch up with them. I ordered a copy of OLD VENUS yesterday.
The idea that there may be intelligent races on Mars or Venus, either friends or enemies, has been a staple of hundreds of SF stories over the years. Once astronomers were able prove that neither planet had any life, it was a staggering blow to SF fans, maybe even to the world in general.