She draws closer, her gleaming, faceted eyes nearly touching skin. “She encircles her daughter in a gleaming, clicking embrace, rests the flat of a blade against that fragile face, and flicks her mandibles twice in an expression of love. With that kind of history, it’s no surprise that Sarya keeps an exceedingly low profile, her loving and protective adoptive mother Shenya the Window, part of an insectoid warrior race who are known for their vicious efficiency in battle, passing her off as a race known as the Spaal.
Sarya the Daughter, resident of the Watertower station which spends its massively days scooping H2O from the rings of a gas giant, is technically a human, the last she is told, of a fearsomely dangerous race who rampaged their way across the known worlds, killing billions, before they were stopped in a rout that led to their much-welcomed genocide. Oh, there are millions of other species, of all shapes, colours, form and cultural disposition, on their homeworlds or on massive space stations known as Blackwaters that, rather impressively, encircle entire stars and have 4 trillion spaceships waiting to dock at any one time (just remember that the next time you are, post COVID-19, stuck in traffic) … but no people.Īlthough like just about everything, that’s not strictly speaking true. Oft times we are the leading light of the universe, other times reviled but we are always there, somewhere, Terrans in the mix who make the galaxy go round.īut Jack Jordan’s The Last Human people are nowhere to be seen.
If you take a look at the vast majority of sci-fi tales, humanity is everywhere … and in multitudinous profusion. (cover image courtesy Hachette Australia)
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