Re: Colony Critical Mass

At 17:41 21/11/97 -0700, you wrote:
>On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Rob Paul wrote:
>
>> years, and then intelligence arose in a fairly short time.  Perhaps
the
>> intelligence of the locals might be in doubt- I recall finding (in
the early
>> '70s) a disgusting reference in a children's encyclopaedia to the
extinction
>> of the "near-human" Tasmanians.
>
>Hey this reminds me.  I recall a sci-fi story where the humans find
some
>rather corpulent and disgusting lifeforms on another planet who played
in
>their own feces and all that.	The humans wind up disliking them and
>eventually causing their annihilation.  But it turns out that they were
>great thinkers and philosophers... go figure.	Can anyone remember any
>more detail about this one?

	That sounds like the utods from Brian Aldiss' "The Dark Light
Years"- well worth reading.  The utods were symbiotic with space-going
trees
(!) called ammps.  Utods resembled a segment of an orange with 3 pairs
of
retractable limbs and a number of sensors and orifices.  In their
history,
prior to the story, a cleanliness heresy had arisen, leading to anarchy,
but
eventually "law and ordure were restored..."

Rob

"Rob Paul

Dept of Zoology
Oxford University
South Parks Road
Oxford
(01865) 271124
----------------------------------------------
"Once again, villainy is rotting meat 
before the maggots of justice!"
"