Tideline (short story)

"Tideline" is a science fiction short story by American writer Elizabeth Bear, published in 2007. It won the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Short Story[1] and the 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Award (tied with "Finisterra" by David R. Moles). "Tideline" appears in the twenty-fifth volume of Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction anthology. In 2020 "Tideline" was read by LeVar Burton for the Stitcher Radio podcast "LeVar Burton Reads."[2]

"Tideline"
AuthorElizabeth Bear
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Science fiction
Published in Asimov's Science Fiction
Publication typeMagazine
Publication dateJune 2007

Plot summary

The story follows a sentient war machine, Chalcedony, which is the lone survivor of a previous and highly apocalyptic war that has reduced the human population virtually to cavemen and hunter gatherers. As Chalcedony combs the beach looking for trinkets it can make into memorials for its fallen comrades, she develops a friendship with an orphaned boy.

When her power cells have completely worn down, the machine hands the trinkets to its now matured companion, telling him to spread the memory of those who fought.

gollark: Your knowledge of modern computer things isn't too useful unless you are in a time with microcomputers. You can't make those without large scale integration of semiconductors, which I'm pretty sure you know very little about.
gollark: You need to teach everyone everything, you need to know a lot of earlier stuff you probably *don't* about how your shiny new knowledge of electromagnetism and whatever were derived, and you need to make people actually able to use it, which is really hard.
gollark: You're constrained by manufacturing.
gollark: The future is like now, except Macron was developed.
gollark: I probably know more maths things™ than people from around then generally did, but not much of the history or motivation or how they did things without modern calculators and such.

References
  1. 2008 Hugo Award Winners List
  2. "'Tideline' by Elizabeth Bear". Stitcher. 2020-01-27. Retrieved 2020-02-05.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.