Una de las primeras expediciones interestelares sufre un accidente cuyas causas se ignoran. La nave Beta-2 queda confinada en un lejano rincón de la galaxia, junto con la colonia humana que transportaba. Siglos después, Beta-2 y su Pueblo Estelar son ya leyenda. Los viejos lobos del espacio le cantan en Puertotierra, bajo los neones de las tabernas. Los profesores recogen los fragmentos de la antigua epopeya. Y los estudiantes se inclinan sobre ella para desentrañar la verdad de lo ocurrido.

Delany, Samuel R. The Ballad of Beta-2. Orion, 1965. Gateway, 2012.
Even in his earliest novels, Samuel R. Delany was always stretching the boundaries of science fiction. The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965) is more comfortably in the genre than Nova or Babel-17, but it, too, would really rather be something else—an invented myth or a future bardic epic. Here is the science fiction premise: in the far future, an anthropology student researching the meaning of an ancient ballad, originated on an early interstellar colony ship, visits its wreck, still traveling through space. To his surprise, he finds the wreck still inhabited by the much-changed descendants of its original crew. In the end, the reader may learn more from the ballad and its story than the graduate student does. It has always struck me as ironic that in his middle age Delany became a professor. I wonder if he would now look at the limitations of his protagonist more sympathetically than he did in his early 20s. ( )

A riff on "pale fire" and a meditation on the relationship between history and language but also there are big spaceships and stuff. Very sick

URANIA COLLEZIONE NR. 148

Really seemed like a short story. Author could have explored the topic in more depth. ( )