Short Science Fiction Story Review Brian Aldiss T

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The Friday Project Press – Spoiler alerts 1956 A story that deserves an award for the shortest possible of titles, T, and for its outright weirdness. T isn’t a letter at all, but a symbol on a warship heading a fleet launched by an alien species against Earth from fear that our technological advances will make us a military threat to them. Not wishing to fight humanity, the aliens send T and the fleet into our distant past to wipe us out before life even evolves on Earth. The genetically engineered mindless creature piloting T, as with other vehicles in the fleet, is just an amorphous blob, with a single arm, eye and finger which makes course adjustments in its flying bomb – this is in effect a kamikaze suicide mission. Many of the fleet are wiped out on the epic journey, hitting suns, meteors, etc. The journey is compared with subtlety to that of sperm racing to create life, but T’s purpose is our annihilation. T’s creators may have misjudged though, as in wiping Earth out they may well be setting a cycle of life off on other Worlds more likely to cause the destruction of the World that sent out T and the fleet in the first place. One of the most bizarre and offbeat SF stories ever told, and strangely beautiful. Arthur Chappell