The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

This story moves back and forth between a father reading anecdotes to his daughter about the cognition of alien races, and the tale of a mother leaving her family to join a space program. The anecdotes feature the Telosians, who record every stimuli and shed segments with old memories; the Esoptrons, who live in a sea and meet to exchange memories, absorbing each other’s experiences; the Tick-Tocks, a uranium-based lifeform whose thoughts are nuclear reactions; and the Thereals, who sent their children away at speeds approaching that of light to become the last living beings in the universe.

Thinking is a form of compression, the parent says, asking their daughter if she remembers trying chocolate for the first time. The mother says, “We have children because we can’t remember our own first tastes of ambrosia” (194). A memory, says the parent, is a re-creation, a sketch, “precious because it is both more and less than the original” (195).

The father tells the child, your mother wants to leave. He relates how they met and how she said she wanted to go to Mars. She told him about her childhood living on a boat. Her first memory was the boat sinking while they waited for rescue, an event that led to a month-long hospitalization and something valuable: fearlessness.