Lucy

Co-Winner (with Robert Walton’s VIENNA STATION) of the first Galaxy Project Long Story Contest, Forest’s novelette is (as Judge Robert Silverberg writes) a rigorously worked novelette in the grand tradition "which would have delighted Galaxy’s great editor Horace Gold". Humanity has dispersed throughout the cosmos in post-apocalyptic space flight; the colony on the planet Faela has terraformed the planet unsuccessfully, an indigenous biological virus has over the generations shrunk the numbers of the settlers and threatens their further existence. How the protagonist scientist, comes to terms with this seemingly ordained doom, and what this struggle implies for the continued, wider perpetuation of humanity are at the center of this carefully paced and brilliantly logical extrapolation.