Sublime

This spirited, intelligent, anarchic Eve reminds me of H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, an exemplary New Woman of 1909.

fictional characters.

With luck, some of those seeds will remain viable, inside controlled vaults in the side of a Colorado mountain, until the day when watchful people can return them to the ground. She purses her lips, and pens an addendum. If not, other experiments will go on running themselves, long after people are gone.

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.

do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism, of which mankind is a functional part—the mind, perhaps.

Karel Capek’s wonderful War With the Newts.

sapient

that is a good description not only of the piece itself, but of the characteristic narrative ploy of science fiction: to be sober in imagining and to tell the incredible credibly.

Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?