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characters bestowed on mankind: 'We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.'
Brian W. Aldiss, "James Blish and the Mathematics of Knowledge," This World and Nearer Ones: Essays Exploring the Familiar (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), pp. 4950
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Gary K. Wolfe
James Blish, in one of the classic treatments of human transformation in science fiction, the stories published collectively as The Seedling Stars (1957), gives some account of the lineage of this subgenre:
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The notion of modifying the human stock genetically to live on the planets as they were found, rather than changing the planets to accommodate the people, had been old with Olaf Stapledon; it had been touched upon by many later writers; it went back, in essence, as far as Proteus, and as deep into the human mind as the werewolf, the vampire, the fairy changeling, the transmigrated soul. (. . .)
Blish's The Seedling Stars contains four separate treatments of the theme of transformation, united by the overall notion of a vast "seeding" program undertaken to insure the continuity of the human race by genetically transforming human beings into creatures able to live in various planetary environments. One of the stories in the collection, "Surface Tension," has become something of a science-fiction classic, but all the stories are revealing of how science fiction thinks of humanity, of the importance of barrier imagery to the fundamental structural antinomy of known-unknown, and, perhaps parenthetically, of some of the stylistic problems involved in describing what might be called transhuman cultureshow to describe a society as convincingly human when that society has no physiological or environmental resemblance to any known human culture. (. . .)
Intelligence (. . .) is virtually the only defining factor of humanity in this series of stories (although some mention is made of a common "spirit of rebellion" in "The Thing in the Attic"). Common culture cannot be transmitted through the pantropes, nor can specific memories, though there are apparently traces of racial memory in all the pantropic cultures. Almost as if to make up for the destruction of human culture implicit in his concept

 
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