What do you think?
Rate this book
Great Ship
The Cryptic Age
An odd, ancient machine with three minds comes to the Great Ship, offering a rare gift in exchange for a home and passage. But the fabled Miocene handles the interview, and this ancient captain is impossible to impress.
"Her long legs waded across the ash and the short, sun-starved grass beneath. The ground dipped very slightly, falling into a broad depression filled with rainwater and wet ash, churned up mud and fresh corpses. The barrel-shaped rhinoceroses numbered in the dozens, the hundreds. One of the rhinoceroses was healthy, standing tall on four legs. She saw him at a distance, and he saw her. His powerful body wore crisscrossing belts and four arms. One pair of arms came from each end of the body. The posterior arms had small busy hands that worked with shifting emblems on some kind of crystalline control panel. The creature’s front arms were thicker, the hands more robust, and those hands wove their fingers together, creating a bowl with the palms."
Robert Reed has written many stories about the Great Ship, plus several novels, including MARROW and THE MEMORY OF SKY.
"Her long legs waded across the ash and the short, sun-starved grass beneath. The ground dipped very slightly, falling into a broad depression filled with rainwater and wet ash, churned up mud and fresh corpses. The barrel-shaped rhinoceroses numbered in the dozens, the hundreds. One of the rhinoceroses was healthy, standing tall on four legs. She saw him at a distance, and he saw her. His powerful body wore crisscrossing belts and four arms. One pair of arms came from each end of the body. The posterior arms had small busy hands that worked with shifting emblems on some kind of crystalline control panel. The creature’s front arms were thicker, the hands more robust, and those hands wove their fingers together, creating a bowl with the palms."
Robert Reed has written many stories about the Great Ship, plus several novels, including MARROW and THE MEMORY OF SKY.
- GenresScience Fiction
37 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 29, 2018
1 person is currently reading
23 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 17, 2021
Robert Reed is known for his Great Ship novels. For those unfamiliar, The Great Ship it is a vessel, bigger than the largest planets in our solar system, that has traveled the universe for billions of years, its purpose and origin unknown, its crew almost immortal. It houses thousands of alien races, millions perhaps billions of individuals, and just as many secrets.
To date Reed has written some fifteen novels and short stories about this intriguing vessel. In this installment, he presents the back story of the ship's captain Miocene, who per the book is 99,000 years old, very very sharp, and extremely jaded. She tells her history as she matches wits with an ancient machine with three minds offering a rare and potentially priceless gift in exchange for passage. The machine quickly learns Miocene is difficult to bargain with.
While Reed excels at big ideas and grand scale -see paragraph one above - I like his short stories best. They are precise and fascinating. And Reed's writing is top notch, on par with many modern masters (Gibson, Banks, Hamilton, Reynolds, Liu, et. al). If you enjoy good, thoughtful sci-fi, give Reed a try. His Great ship short stories like The Cryptic Age are available for as little as $2 each on Amazon or $5 for a kindle collection under the title The Greatship . And don't miss his Great Ship novels beginning with Marrow .
On my buy, borrow skip scale: The Cryptic Age is more than worth its $2 asking price. Buy. After reading this one, I bought the collection.
-P.S. If you read The Cryptic Age, toward the end of the book the single day alien bestows two gifts to Miocene. What is the second gift? Leave a comment below.
To date Reed has written some fifteen novels and short stories about this intriguing vessel. In this installment, he presents the back story of the ship's captain Miocene, who per the book is 99,000 years old, very very sharp, and extremely jaded. She tells her history as she matches wits with an ancient machine with three minds offering a rare and potentially priceless gift in exchange for passage. The machine quickly learns Miocene is difficult to bargain with.
While Reed excels at big ideas and grand scale -see paragraph one above - I like his short stories best. They are precise and fascinating. And Reed's writing is top notch, on par with many modern masters (Gibson, Banks, Hamilton, Reynolds, Liu, et. al). If you enjoy good, thoughtful sci-fi, give Reed a try. His Great ship short stories like The Cryptic Age are available for as little as $2 each on Amazon or $5 for a kindle collection under the title The Greatship . And don't miss his Great Ship novels beginning with Marrow .
On my buy, borrow skip scale: The Cryptic Age is more than worth its $2 asking price. Buy. After reading this one, I bought the collection.
-P.S. If you read The Cryptic Age, toward the end of the book the single day alien bestows two gifts to Miocene. What is the second gift? Leave a comment below.
October 25, 2023
This is a really fine story that travels nicely outside the bounds of the normal Greatship worldbuilding. Indeed, the little tale of a strange tri-AI entity trying to barter passage is hardly anything beside the philosophical question posed about the very nature of reality.
I love it. This is a really smart story.
I love it. This is a really smart story.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews