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2011 Locus Award for Best Novella (nominee)
The solar system will be terraformed, and Simon is going to enjoy the best vantage point. Disasters are coming as well as great successes, and in the end nothing will be the same. Not the planets, and certainly not the humans who only believe that they're in charge.
"The boy's thoughts were shifting quickly, clinging to no single idea. He was telling himself that he wasn't even three-years-old. On the earth he would already be four, and every four-year-old that he knew enjoyed large, impressive opinions. But if he lived near Neptune, he wouldn't be a month old and his father would never take him riding along on his working trips. And if this were Mercury, then Simon would be many years old, and because of certain pernicious misunderstandings about calendars and the passage of time, he believed that on Mercury he would be an adult. He was thinking how people liked to tell him that he would grow up tall and handsome. It was as if adults had the power to peer into the future. They didn't admit to children that they had this talent, but truth often leaked out in careless words and unwanted glimpses. Simon liked the idea of peering into the future. Right now, he was trying to imagine himself living in some important, unborn century. The nearly three-year-old boy wanted to be a grown man entrusted with some very important job. But for the time being, riding with his father seemed important enough. That was all just part of what he was thinking when he handed back that precious and very expensive seed, grinning as he said, "It's delicious, Dad." He had never happier than he was just then."
Robert Reed is the author of hundreds of published science fiction stories as well as a respectable stack of novels. He won the Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella, "A Billion Eves."
Genre: Science Fiction
"The boy's thoughts were shifting quickly, clinging to no single idea. He was telling himself that he wasn't even three-years-old. On the earth he would already be four, and every four-year-old that he knew enjoyed large, impressive opinions. But if he lived near Neptune, he wouldn't be a month old and his father would never take him riding along on his working trips. And if this were Mercury, then Simon would be many years old, and because of certain pernicious misunderstandings about calendars and the passage of time, he believed that on Mercury he would be an adult. He was thinking how people liked to tell him that he would grow up tall and handsome. It was as if adults had the power to peer into the future. They didn't admit to children that they had this talent, but truth often leaked out in careless words and unwanted glimpses. Simon liked the idea of peering into the future. Right now, he was trying to imagine himself living in some important, unborn century. The nearly three-year-old boy wanted to be a grown man entrusted with some very important job. But for the time being, riding with his father seemed important enough. That was all just part of what he was thinking when he handed back that precious and very expensive seed, grinning as he said, "It's delicious, Dad." He had never happier than he was just then."
Robert Reed is the author of hundreds of published science fiction stories as well as a respectable stack of novels. He won the Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella, "A Billion Eves."
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Robert Reed's A History of Terraforming