The Fix | Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Description

And indeed they have. The book opens with “Boojum” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, a space pirates story. Black Alice is a sailor on the Lavinia Whateley, a Boojum or living ship. Her description is beautiful and deserved a Stephan Martiniere illustration:

(…) her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.

Black Alice has a good relationship with the Boojum, a relationship that can ultimately save her from a terrible battle with the alien race known as the Mi-Go who attack the ship in order to rescue the dangerous cargo their captain stole and that should not be there: human brains for the black market. When Black Alice has to go outside to fix a kind of “inflammation” in the body of the ship, the Mi-Go attack. ...

Original URL

http://thefix-online.com/reviews/fast-ships-black-sails/

http://thefix-online.com/reviews/fast-ships-black-sails/