Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, January 2023

“Bcalli, Singer of the String” by George Guthridge

Reviewed by Geoff Houghton

This first person narrative in this SF story tells of a group of powerful and enormously strange aliens whose responsibility is to interdict a dangerously infected solar system. A measure of their strangeness can be seen when you understand that the first person protagonist, “Ben B Three Divisible,” is a sentient planetoid in the Oort cloud of the infected system, one of millions of similar sentinels whose duty has already lasted hundreds of thousands of years.

The source of this potential contagion is a primitive species that is so potentially dangerous that it must never be permitted to escape and pollute the rest of the peaceful cosmos with its poisonous innovation. You may not be entirely surprised at the identity of these terrifying creatures on their third rock out from a very ordinary yellow dwarf star, or of the nature of their insanely dangerous invention. However, the sheer alienness of these guardians is fascinating and the final resolution of the situation is comfortingly uplifting.

Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for titbits of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.