Winner Lose All-Jack Vance short story
Winner Lose All -Jack Vance short story AKA: The Visitors (author’s preferred title) The Visitors is a 15 page short story that was originally published in December 1951 in Galaxy Science Fiction under the title "Winner Lose All." This is a very imaginative story that features a very inventive, bizarre alien. Humans visit a newly discovered planet and encounter an alien called a “ unigen ” who arrived before they did. The unigen is “an intelligent organism, though its characteristics included neither form nor structure. Its components were mobile node s of luminous substance which was neither matter nor yet energy. There were millions of nodes and each was connected with every other node by tendrils similar to the lines of force in macroid space . The unigen might be compared to a great brain, the nodes corresponding to the gray cells, the lines of force to the nerve tissue.” While the human’s explore the planet and its vegetation, the unigen searches ou...