Screenshot of a book page. Text: I can only send for another cold one, musing on Althea. What suns will Captain Esteban’s sloe-eyed off-spring, if any, look upon? ‘Get in, Althea, we’re taking off for Orion.’ ‘A-okay, Mother.’ Is that some system of upbringing? We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine … I’m used to aliens … She’d meant every word. Insane. How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say good-bye to her home, her world?
CW for spoiler. A recent conversation on here led me to reread Ursula K. Leguin's novelette The Women Men Don't See, which anticipated the man/bear encounter question by many years with extraterrestrial creatures instead of bears, but the moral is the same.
