Co-Winner (with Robert Walton's VIENNA STATION) of the first Galaxy Project Long Story Contest, Forest's novelette is (as Judge Robert Silverberg writes) a rigorously worked novelette in the grand tradition "which would have delighted Galaxy's great editor Horace Gold". Humanity has dispersed throughout the cosmos in post-apocalyptic space flight; the colony on the planet Faela has terraformed the planet unsuccessfully, an indigenous biological virus has over the generations shrunk the numbers of the settlers and threatens their further existence. How the protagonist scientist, comes to terms with this seemingly ordained doom, and what this struggle implies for the continued, wider perpetuation of humanity are at the center of this carefully paced and brilliantly logical extrapolation.ABOUT THE AUTHORSusan Forest, a Canadian, has published science fiction intermittently since 1990...a Y,A fantasy published that year won recognition in her country. Subsequently, she has been a finalist for Canada's Aurora Award (for the best work of short fantasy or science fiction by a Canadian) and has recently sold to Analog and Asimov's Magazines. A retired teacher, she is presently writing full time and is an active blogger and member of several writers groups.ABOUT THE SERIESHorace Gold led GALAXY magazine from its first issue dated October 1950 to science fiction's most admired, widely circulated and influential magazine throughout its initial decade. Its legendary importance came from publication of full length novels, novellas and novelettes. GALAXY published nearly every giant in the science fiction field.The Galaxy Project is a selection of the best of GALAXY with new forewords by some of today's best science fiction writers. The initial selections in alphabetical order include work by Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Robert Scheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn (Phillip Klass) and Kurt Vonnegut with new Forewords by Paul di Filippo, David Drake, John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Robert Silverberg. The Galaxy Project is committed to publishing new work in the spirit GALAXY magazine and its founding editor Horace Gold.