When Heaven Fell by William Barton - SF - SFBookcase.com - Reference of Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels/Authors.

Series: Misc
Genre: SF
ISBN: 0446601667
Pages: 343 pages
Publisher: Warner Books
Price: $5.00
Reader Rating: Not rated

When Heaven Fell by William Barton

Description: omewhere up there, beyond this tawny and dust filled sky, an armed warship of the Master Race floated in orbit, bearing its cargo of software and little blue poppits, the beings who'd conquered us all.

Old stories always imagined alien fanged monstrosities from beyond the stars. It's what we thought the Kkhruhhuft were when they came. Only later, when we were already humiliated, did we discover that we were no more than slaves of the intelligences, who called themselves the Master Race. Not the poppits. Not them at all.

Somewhere far back in time, the little blue frogs built anthill cities, hives that grew complex and more complex still. Hives without mentality that evolved machines, machines that made more machines, machines that learned slowly, ever so slowly, how to think.

You have to wonder just when, and why, the machine servants of the little frogs decided to call themselves the Master Race, then go out and conquer the universe.

WE ARE NOT REAL

No more real than the poppits who made the Masters, who came to rule over all of us. No more real than the Masters themselves.

Hard for people to believe, when the truth came out. Master Race made inadvertently by, what? Bugs? Not quite, these little carnivorous froglets, but close enough. Evolution acting on them across a billion years. As the bugs build build nests and the nests call forth tools and the tools call forth bigger tools, until the tools themselves need intelligence to guide their way.

Hard to imagine.

It was easier for us to believe that, sometime in the far past, an intelligent species just like ourselves had built the Masters as slaves, that the slaves had rebelled and killed their masters.