The Stars Change by Mary Anne Mohanraj

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Stars Change by Mary Anne Mohanraj

Comments

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

Doomed lovers would make an interesting story, but how do you write it so it's not too sad? Dark humor, perhaps.

[johnreiher.livejournal.com]

Considering the myriads of ways Earth animals reproduce themselves, human-alien "courtship" may have to use adapters for a successful connection...

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

"the various intelligent races seem to be implausibly plug-compatible. They are all basically tetrapods and they all approach sex in broadly similar ways."

The last two could be related. If two intelligent races are both tetrapods that recently (in evolutionary terms) became bipedal and experienced a rapid increase in brain size, the resulting constraints could drive convergent evolution to make the plug compatibility plausible, if not necessarily likely.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

I'm currently reading mainstream romance author Jenny Colgan's sf novel, written as Jenny T Colgan (which I choose to believe, with no evidence whatsoever is a tribute to Iain M Banks [/headcanon] ), Resistance is Futile, and she mentions the plug compatibility issue early on by having an alien respond to the human heroine's enquiries in that direction by asking her: "Well, are you full of a thousand million eggs?" and mentioning four sexes. Being a romance novel they manage anyway... with a certain amount of authorial cutting away to waves on the beach (probably a knowing reference).

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

The story in which everyone else is sexier than we are, and tragedy ensues, was of course written by Tiptree/Sheldon.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

I don't quite get the bit about numbers - humanity outnumbers all the alien races put together?

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of the Quark episode in which the obligatory Gratuitous Space Babe has set her sights on a member of the crew who is, awkwardly, a humanoid plant. One thing leads to another and they wind up laying flat on their backs, fully clothed, in a meadow...

Him: And now we wait.
Her: For what?
Him, lustfully: The bee!

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a fun read, at least.

(A tall, lean, pedantic chap -- with unruly light-colored hair, a great many pockets overflowing with markers, pens, and slips of paper, and a striped scarf that brushes the floor at both ends -- approaches thnidu and asks to take over the keyboard for a few moments.)

     Actually, that would be Ad Astra Per Libidinem.

(He bows and departs, leaving a card inscribed
Dr. Whom
Consulting Linguist, Grammarian
Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody
)


Ad Astra Per Libido