The idyllic vision of the first paragraph is not the fate of the protagonist, though, the title character named for an adjective by the creatures whose planet she lands on after thousands of years spent in the womb of the wounded Great Ship that once carried her parents and other rich immortals on a millennium-long tour of the galaxy. If you've read Reed before, you've probably encountered his Great Ship, the mysterious remnant of a lost culture, an important prop in a series of stories he has been writing for over a decade, a series that includes his novel Marrow and the upcoming The Well of Stars (many of the stories in the series are available in the Golden Gryphon collection The Dragons of Springplace). In the afterword to Mere, Reed says that Mere herself will play an important role in The Well of Stars, and this seems clear from the ending of the novella, which is not so much a conclusion as a transition to a different tale.

Despite being a common trope of SF, immortality is a difficult subject, because if the story covers the long, long years of the immortal's life, details are likely to dissipate, emotion may be lulled into ennui, and the story might more sigh than arc. Mortality is a writer's best friend; it paints purpose onto certain moments, distinguishing them in the caravan of days that make up a life. On the other hand, immortality can solve many logical problems (think of how extended lifespans allowed Kim Stanley Robinson to keep his characters continuous through the Mars trilogy), and it offers a way to ground a vast story within the experience of one protagonist.

Mere both benefits and suffers from the title character's inability to die. When it comes to millennium-spanning concepts, Reed is simply one of the best writers currently at work, and Mere's immortality plays to this strength, because through the course of the story we see entire civilizations rise and fall. The problem is that see is the wrong verb -- the incidents move along so rapidly that at best we glimpse these planet-shattering events.

For all its imaginative zest, then, Mere reads like a treatment for a movie -- a good, detailed, and compelling treatment, indeed, but it lacks weight and heft, its scenes are more summary than drama, more promise than consummation. As a prologue to a novel, it might have been satisfying, but as a story published as its own book with its own cover and its own retail price, I couldn't help but feel that, by the end, mere was, alas, an appropriate adjective for the book itself.