Three stories centered on twin planets, each with her own indigenous life, colonized by Earth:

The first story, morbid, distasteful, but otherwise likely. A boy grows up carefully sheltered with a mad scientist father figure and robot tutor/nanny, only to eventually discover his own dark past and (it seemed to me, anyhow) darker future.

The second story, full of thought-provoking qualia of what it might be like to be a human animal, or (and) a being of memories, aether and starshine.

The third story, a dreadfully post-modern collection of disorganized notes, journals, and letters. I appreciated the metastory of the government official in charge of evaluating the case, but setting the inner bits as out-of-order chronologically and characterwise as they were -- that's just being difficult.


Delightfully speculative, but too pessimistic (or, perhaps, honest).