And Side by Side They Wander
For most of the month of April I was in a terrible reading slump. Everything I picked up that I thought I would enjoy immediately turned out to be bad, or I was just deeply uninterested within a few pages. Thankfully as the saying goes, this too shall pass, because May has been filled with an abundance of books that I’ve really enjoyed.
And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer is a novella that I learned about from Andrew Liptak’s great Transfer Orbit newsletter. The premise of the story hooked me just from reading the blurb about it. In the near future Earth is visited by an alien race that highly values art in its physical forms. In exchange for world-altering technology, the aliens, named the Celerians, take a large selection of humanity’s greatest pieces of art for safe keeping to put on display in a giant space museum they manage, until Earth is safe enough to house them again. The story opens a few hundred years after humans have agreed to this deal, a deal that still left them with exact duplicates of what the Celerians took. Humanity has asked for the originals to be returned, but the aliens have politely declined. Not wanting to cause an intergalactic incident, the government of Earth has just accepted this state of affairs, but some private citizens have decided to take matters into their own hands.
What follows is a short and fast paced space heist adventure, filled with insect alien smugglers, multi-bodied hired muscle and an art preservation trained synthetic sentience. Despite its short length, there is a lot of impressive world building on display, as we learn more about what the Earth is like since the Celerians “solved” our problems. The novella also has a lot to say about what makes art have meaning at all. Obviously there is something intrinsic about the real pieces, seeing as how even though exact duplicates were left behind for all of humanity, at least some humans aren’t satisfied with that, and the Celerians themselves also don’t want to return the real pieces. I think there is a lot to think about in those regards, as we enter a period in our own world where creating “art” has never been easier through the use of generative AI. I’m hopeful that like the humans in the story, people will care more for art that is created by actual human effort and creativity, rather than a similar looking but soulless simulacrum.
Beyond all the deep questions, I really loved the world that Tanzer has created. I hope that she visits this universe again in the future even if it’s with other characters, because I think it’s a setting ripe for more adventures.
- ← Previous
The Franchise