These characters appear in the short work ""Worlds Enough, and Time". Owing to the very simple nature of the piece, they have been placed on a single page.
The Family[]
A family of four visited a planet in its formative stages at the father's insistence; the mother had no interest in barren worlds, but humored her husband. Their son and daughter shared their mother's view.
The planet's oceans supported primitive plant and animal life, but its land did not. While the father enjoyed such planets, its lack of life on dry land disappointed him. After a brief period standing on the lifeless beach, he and his wife were preparing to leave when their son informed them that the environmental unit of their aquarium had died, and that they'd forgotten the spare. Their daughter, attached to the creatures that inhabited the aquarium, pleaded wither her father to release them into the ocean. The mother and the boy supported her.
While against their civilization's rules, the father gave into the pressure from his family. The result was an explosion of biodiversity on the planet.
Jack Conway[]
Jack Conway was a science teacher, specializing in pre-history. He did a PowerPoint presentation on the abrupt appearance of new species at the beginning of the Cambrian, 543 million years ago, noting that this sudden appearance was unexplained, but that interesting theories abounded.
The actual reason for the sudden appearance of life in the Cambrian period was due to a family of intergalactic travelers that arrived on pre-historic Earth and released their aquatic pets into the planet's environment.
Literary Note[]
The name of this character appears to be an allusion to English paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, an acquaintance of Harry Turtledove. In 1979, Morris named and described Hallucigenia, one of the species described in the story.
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