Search Results for: why-do-birds

It’s the early 21st century. Ed Stone says he’s been in suspended animation since the 1930s. He says he was kidnapped by aliens. He says they sent him forth on a mission: to convince the nations of the world to build massive vault, a mile on each side, in which humanity’s billions will lie in suspension and survive the impending destruction of the Earth.

Ed Stone says all these things, and the strangest part is that people believe him – ordinary people and powerful people alike. So begins Why Do Birds, a classically science-fictional novel of ideas and quite possibly Damon Knight’s most haunting work, a terrifying tale of deceit and human folly.

Whenever disaster wipes its bloodstained hands on the pages of human history man asks why?
Before the dawn of science primitive man believed in the intervention of weird supernatural powers. Omens were consulted. Oracles were read. Did these things bode good or evil?
Science has explained many of the olden day terrors in terms of ergot poisoning, static electricity, delusion and hypnosis. Some stubborn facts remained unexplained and inexplicable.
Do ghost armies march across the sky while their physical counterparts bleed and die below them? At what strange frontier do fact and fiction blend?
To the terrified watchers below, the thing in the sky looked like a man, carried by a gigantic eagle. But as it descended they could see no space between the man and the bird.