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The Deeps of the Sky is a short story by Hugo Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear and appears in the anthology Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. It tells the story of Stormchases, a being that sky-mines a gas giant. Sky-mining is dangerous enough with Deep Storms, but when he sees something alien that looks to be fighting against the storm to survive, going in to rescue could be downright suicide.
One thing that should be said, is that this is hard science-fiction. There is a lot of terminology used that the average non-science-fiction reader might not be able to handle. Or even the casual science-fiction reader for that matter. But that doesn’t mean this story wasn’t a good one.
Stormchases is someone has the job of a Sky-Miner. They go into various sections of the atmosphere of gas giants and mine the different gasses and minerals that are there. The more he gets, the better he appears to a Drift-World, or a Mothergrave, which if accepting of Stormchases, creates a life-long symbiotic relationship.
The various types of miners each have different characteristics that prevent them from going anywhere in the atmosphere, each has their place or they will burn up or will not be able to maintain their flight.
While filling his capsules with the various elements he sees a creature that is fighting against the storm. He decides to go in and try for a rescue against all odds of getting himself killed, and not being accepted by the Mothergrave.
Once rescued the alien and Stormchases have an interesting conversation about their species and you start to understand that perhaps the alien, is a human. They talk about the differences between the species, and how humans pass their knowledge from one generation to the next rather than physically becoming part of of something and any experiences would be inherited by the offspring.
The story itself was a little slow paced for my taste, but picked up when Stormchases saw the alien entity, and the conversations began. I think the setting of a gas giant that wasn’t particularly named or even stated if it was in our solar system was on purpose (my guess was Jupiter). I think the author wanted you to focus more on the underlying story rather than exactly where the story took place.
It was a neat dissertation on how parents pass information from one generation to another, and is one way better than another, and is it possible to become something so far from what you used to be.
My thought on this is that perhaps Stormchases and the Mother-graves had at one time been human, or close to it. But through some sort of circumstances and how information was passed from one to another, they either evolved or became something entirely different over the generations, and when meeting the alien and being able to communicate, he starts to realize that they weren’t that different from each other.
I was thinking about this story for a while before I sat down to write this review. And while I still have a hard time describing it, the story stayed with me, and it made me think. Really, that’s all any science-fiction tries to get you to do. Look at things about your life, and things around you from just a slightly different point-of-view.
Come back on February 12th, 2013 for our Tuesday Ten with the author of this short story, Elizabeth Bear!
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This short story is available FREE and in it’s entirety at http://io9.com/5971160/sky+mining-is-dangerous-enough-but-when-a-deep-storm-comes-its-suicide
You can purchase the anthology Edge of Infinity at the following retailers:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
