Pots

by C.J. Cherryh

Short story about authorities and scientists in the far future.
Their civilization has found Voyager and her "Golden Record", and are trying to discover their origin.
First published in 1985, the year before "Star Trek: The Voyage Home".
(Note: In "The Big Book of Science Fiction" (Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, eds), the story is 17 pages long, so that's the page numbers I entered in the details here.)

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction

17 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. She is the author of more than forty novels. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written.

Reviews

[mark propp · Rating 1 out of 5]

by far the worst story in the masterpieces collection. absolutely dull, leaden writing. getting through it was work. absolutely miserable. completely uninteresting, endless conversations that say nothing, do nothing.

i'm not the final authority on anything, but i am baffled by the presence of this interminable & long & grey grey grey grey grey story in this otherwise pretty spiffy sci-fi anthology.

i'd definitely rank this as one of the worst times i've every had reading anything. bleh.

[Adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

*Read as part of the "Masterpieces The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century" by Orson Scott Card*

God why was this story so long. If I could smash this story like a pot and never put it back together, that would be great. Generation ships, dead ancient civilization (hey, it’s us!); I should like this. I don’t.