AUTHOR’S NOTE
Aliette de Bodard: I don’t remember where I first heard the tale of Dã Tràng and the Pearl, but it’s been rattling around my head for a while. I was always struck by its final few lines: after the loss of the pearl, Dã Tràng exhausts himself looking for it, dies, and is reincarnated as a small sand-digger crab (which bears his name in Vietnamese). I’ve always had a weakness for metamorphosis tales, and this was a particularly dramatic one! I wanted to retell it as a space opera, because it’s what I usually do: a lot of my science fiction has roots both in fairy tales and in science. It seemed pretty natural to me that the equivalent of animals in a fairy tale would be low-level AIs: the remoras, who have formed a parallel society on the edge of the human one; and that Pearl would be not a thing but a living being—a special remora made by a class of beings who kept remaking and modifying themselves as necessity dictated (there’s more than a hint of the golem in Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay in Pearl). Once I had that nailed into place, the story pretty much wrote itself. (Okay, no. There was blood, sweat, and tears, but that’s business as usual!)
PEARL
Aliette de Bodard
SupeR_StaR
15.09.18 в 03:52
