Starswarm
Reviewed date: 2025 Sep 19
159 pages
Starswarm is a collection of stories set in the same universe. The stories vary in style and do not fit into an overall narrative. Therefore I'm categorizing this as a collection rather than a fix-up novel.
My enjoyment of the stories varied widely. A Moon of My Delight is heartbreaking and may be the best story I've read all year. Shards is drivel. The rest are somewhere in between, but on the whole, they weren't my sort of story.
Sector Vermillion
a kind of artistry
Derek is an Abrogunnan which means he’s brave and competent, enough to make first contact with an alien life form and win the admiration of the elites of the Starswarm—but he’s an Abrogunnan which means his life is ruled by a matriarch who he serves as little more than a slave.
Sector Gray
hearts and engines
A colonel in an eternal war dreams of going on a mission and returning to meet a woman. But there is no woman and he is only a sergeant.
Sector Violet
the underprivileged
Saton and Corbis, immigrants from
Istinogurzibeshilaha, arrive on the planet Dansson, where nobody is ever unhappy. They are inoculated against unhappiness by the immigration agent and taken to live in Little Istino, where—being happy—they don’t realize they are basically preserved specimens in a cage. The planet Dansson is museum/zoo, collecting all endangered species in the galaxy.
Sector Diamond
the game of god
On the planet Kakakakaxo, cayman-headed natives keep two kinds of pets, dubbed bears and pekes. But who is the real intelligent species on Kakakakaxo?
Sector Green
shards
Six pages of incomprehensible dribble about creatures in Mudland is explained in the final two pages: this is an experiment to adapt humans to live as aquatic creatures so they can infiltrate a group of invasive, aggressive aquatic aliens who have take up residence in Western Ocean and threaten the human residents of the planet.
Sector Yellow
legends of smith's burst
Stranded on the backward planet Glumpalt, a trader must escape from slavery, find his way to Ongustura and catch the only spaceship headed off-planet. On the way he encounters raiders, magicians, antigravity rocks, a warlord and his daughter, and of course the Black Sun whose dark rays smother all light from Glumpalt’s three other suns.
Sector Azure
a moon of my delight
The planet Tandy Two’s entire equator is ringing with a braking system for FTL spaceships. It’s an ingenious idea, and the poignant, sad story that Aldiss writes about the people who live in its shadow is the best story I’ve read all year.
The Rift
old hundredth
On an earth populated by the resurrected recreations of extinct animals, a megatherium (giant sloth) named Dandi Lashadusa wanders around riding a baluchitherium (giant hornless
rhinoceros) and communicating telepathically with a blind Mentor who we later learn is a dolphin. She fights a bear, abandons her relics that came from humans, and turns herself into music. This story is so dumb.