But The Sky, My Lady! The Sky!

I finally finished reading Learning the World!

The book is about first contact – the incidence when two alien (with respect to each other) races first meet, like that 1996 Star Trek movie when we first met the Vulcans – told partly through the bio-log (or blog) of a human, or rather post-human, girl named Atomic Discourse Gale. Cool name, huh, wait till you here the name of the ship – But The Sky, My Lady! The Sky! You can call it cool or weird or quirky, but it surely isn’t boringly common like, er, USS Enterprise.

(BTW, before I get flamed by some random Trekkie, the Enterprise is an icon and one cool ship.)

The story is set centuries way into the future, which means a lot of weird stuff like the weird names, which was why I had such a hard time reading the book in the beginning. The humans have traveled for centuries on the But The Sky, My Lady! The Sky! to colonize this new star system, only to find it (or actually one of the planets) inhabited by an intelligent, though not as technologically advanced, species. Now, this alien species look somewhat like bats with wings and all, and fly too (and call themselves humans, how about that?).

The story goes back and forth between what goes on aboard But The Sky, My Lady! The Sky! (I just like to write the ship’s name every single chance I get!) and on the planet (called Destiny II by the newcomers, but simply Ground by the alien bats-that-call-themselves-humans).

The actual contact only happens at the end of the book, and in a refreshingly nice twist, it is the humans (us humans, not those bat-humans) who ends up humbled and surprised.

Ken MacLeod received the 2006 Prometheus Award for Learning the World.

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PS: How can you not read the name MacLeod and think of Highlander?

“There can be only one!”