The Pace Ship’s Long Hawl Flight

WITHOUT LUNGS OR LIMBS TO STAY by Shauna O’Meara

“But not all fish who crawled onto land became mammals.”

Despite my being over-awed by this substantive work, I somehow sense, in my reading gut, that it could very well evolve into being an SF classic given the synergous evolution of readers alongside it, readers that happen or choose to read it in the future. A work that all of us should today factor into our thought patterns. It has that feel about it.
It is indeed so utterly poignant, telling of a ‘generation ship’ slowly plunging into the stars with its cryogenised crew being used for other purposes of body exploitation without waking them up as originally intended, that is, exploited by the ‘living’ crew that are themselves evolving beyond the original intentions of the voyage and the ever-changing conditions of survival within the ship, ever onward into space, like a Zeno’s Paradox.
When one of the cryogenised called Chrissie is woken up as an experimental need of curiosity by one of the ‘living’, still evolving crew, it is almost unbearable to watch this fitful, wounded waking up and potential dying of Chrissie alongside watching videos of her life and her interactions with other people and hopes and reasons for embarking on this voyage as filmed just before the voyage commenced….and so much more I can’t cover in a short review. A Pace Ship.
I am sure this story is an experience you will never forget during whatever ‘Gates’ of future evolution as a living being you journey through, especially in the context of all the fiction in this beautifully handleable book as INTERZONE journal. A book also with SF articles and fulsome and sensitive artwork illustrations throughout the fiction.

“; but watch enough frozen people over the years and you get the sense that water isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
— Shauna O’Meara

Full context of above here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/29/interzone-290-291/