Seeds of Memory — J. Richard Jacobs

SPACE...once believed to be a vast and vacant void, has been found, in fact, to be filled with all sorts of things?things that roam freely and at random.  Our little spaceship Earth is no longer as secure as we once thought it to be.  There are clouds of dust and gas so hot that their mere passing would scour our little system of planets with a breath of death and destruction complete.  Clouds so massive that just their passing could throw all our little planets from of their peaceful orbits into the deep cold of a sunless darkness and fling our star out and on its way to being one of the eternal roamers of our galaxy, or even throw it into an intergalactic journey to who-knows-where?  Black holes; blazars; blasts of deadly radiation from nearby super-novae; stars; burned out hulks of stars; super-dense neutron stars; rocks (small or incredibly large), and a host of other things?none of them welcome visitors. IN THIS INCREDIBLE, SWEEPING SAGA across thousands of years and hundreds of light years we come face to face with our fears and deep prejudices. It is here, in SEEDS OF MEMORY, that we get an idea of what it means to be "HUMAN" and what "HUMAN" really means. It is here, in SEEDS OF MEMORY, that we are confronted with the need to know colliding head-on with reality. Are we, HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS, truly the only form that humans can take, and is our history the only history? Might there not be others, or others created out of the very stuff of life who are, after all, our brothers and sisters?kith and kin? In this story we find that the lines that divide have indistinct, fuzzy edges, and that we are the ones who make those divisions. Here we discover humanity at its magnificent best, its seething worst, and everything imaginable between, while we make an uncertain attempt to reunite two peoples separated by time and space...and other things... One of those unwelcome visitors has arrived and we are pitifully unprepared.  This is a speculative look into a far-flung future disaster that could actually happen (and well might, someday) and how the human species reacts to it. It could even be said that it is a look at a future history?a history we might not be able to survive.