《The One With the Interstella 》作者：- James Alan Gardner【EPUB】

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The One With the Interstellar Group Consciousnesses by James Alan Gardner James Alan Gardner is the author of several novels, including Expendable and the others in the League of Peoples series. His most recent book is Gravity Wells , a collection of his short fiction. When he was first getting started as a writer, Gardner won the grand prize in the Writers of the Future contest, then went on to win two Aurora Awards (the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award), one of them for his story “Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream,” which was also a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. About this story, Gardner says that although the protagonist is somewhat unusual, deep down, he’s really just a lonely guy looking for love. Given that this lonely guy is, in fact, an entire interstellar society, you might say that this story is a romantic comedy of cosmic proportions. One day, the Spinward Union of Democratic Lifeforms decided to seek a wife. The Union was roughly two thousand years old—still young by the standards of galactic federations, but no longer a carefree adolescent. It had responsibilities: trade deals with other interstellar entities; mutual defense pacts; obligations to prevent supernovas and gamma ray bursters from blighting the neighborhood; and of course, a quadrillion component organisms who expected the Union to make possible their brief little lives. [The organisms thought they ran the Union . . . and they did, in the same way that a body’s cells run the body. On a low level, each cell leads its individual life; but on a high level, an aggregate identity emerges, and the cells are minuscule parts of an overall system