Hugo 2024 Novella: “Seeds of Mercury”, Wang Jinkang / 水星播种, 王晋康, translated by Alex Woodend

I liked this a lot more than the other entry from Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers. They both shared (at least in translation) an air of classic 1950’s US sci-fi but this story was less prone to info-dumps and had an original premise.

A man inherits the work of a genius scientists only to discover that the inheritance is likely to cost him a fortune. In an attempt to make a more efficient way of creating nano-robots, the scientist has created metallic micro-organisms that live in pools of liquid metal. Luckily, with the aid of a billionaire they find a new home for the organisms: the Planet Mercury.

Meanwhile, leaping forward in time we learn about the beliefs and superstitions of the now sentient creatures that have evolved to live on Mercury. It rapidly becomes apparent that not only were the original creatures released onto the planet but that steps were taken to guide their evolution and teach the eventual sapient descendants about their history.

The story alternates between the human steps to bring the metallic amoebas to Mercury and events in their future history. Eventually a scientific expedition by the Mercury creatures to the north pole of the planet seeks to confirm the myths from their holy books only to run afoul of the powerful religious orthodoxy.

Stories that ask you to imagine a society of metallic creatures living on Mercury and trying to make sense of the humans who created them has the air of a Stanislaw Lem story. I think Lem would have made their society more alien but even picking holes in a story like this shows the power of speculative fiction in inciting thought.

I have my doubts about the translation though. There were some odd word choices (the character refering to his wife as “wifey”?) and other aspects of the story that were clumsy in how the represented people.