O - Short Works
I believe this is part of the novel The Alien Years.
A young space merchant marine falls in love with an alien girl. His captain does his best to persuade the boy it'll never work. The subject is treated somewhat shallowly, but with a bit more sensitivity than you might expect for 1957.
This was the first piece of short fiction Silverberg wrote after the sabbatical, written at the urging of Ben Bova and Robert Sheckley at Omni. Using fossil DNA, scientists have brought dinosaurs back to life and put them on an island to study them. There's dissent among the scientists whether they should allow tourists to visit the island. Sound familiar? But this Dino Island is an L5 space station, so the creatures can't escape and harm anyone. Or can they? The main issue in this story is this: if dinosaurs dominated the planet for so many millions of years, who's to say they didn't have a kind of civilization? Our human cultures are so centered on buildings and other physical manifestations of technology that we can't imagine a civilization not based on manipulation of the environment.
As a result of an ancient spaceship crash, a planet is inhabited by two groups of humans with a kind of Hatfield-McCoy separation.
One of the "Roma" stories. (Check out the Themes entry for details.) 2200 years after the founding of Rome, a clash between the Western (Roman-influenced) and the declining Eastern (Greek-influenced) empires.
Public pressure has led to the inclusion of a small contingent of archeologists on a military exploration ship searching for anything that could lead to a strategic advantage home on Earth, where a kind of Cold War drags on endlessly. The scientific types force a delay on a planet covered with ancient ruins--nothing of military import here--or is there? Not bad for one of the earlier stories, and even a situation that bears following up on. Sequel, anyone?
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Last updated October 21, 2002
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