★★

Meta: isfdb. This outer space SF shortstory appeared first 2014 in Edge of Infinity. Additionally, it will appear in his anthology Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction.

Synopsis: A spaceship needs to be motivated to journey further on by telling it about the planet it has passed.

Review: This story is not about character or plot but about structure which resembles the classic Italo Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities” where Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss 55 city ideas. Rajaniemi changes the topic to SF by exchanging cities with planets and the historical persons with a ship’s mind and sub-mind. I can live with that experiment if Rjaniemi didn’t expose weaknesses – e.g. with linguistics – in the planet characterizations.