The Last Planet
In August, Sunday Morning Transport authors Naomi Kanakia, Jim Kelly, Meg Elison, and Elizabeth Bear share stories from far and wide. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.
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For this month’s first, free, story Naomi Kanakia shares a science fictional tale woven throughout with myth, wonder, and reality.
~ Julian and Fran, August 3, 2025
The Last Planet
by Naomi Kanakia
A planet on the edge of the galaxy was guarded by a lone starship. The planet was inhabited by people who’d fled the wreckage of a vicious war. They’d come to this icy marginal world, and they’d built tall domes that trapped the heat, and they’d settled down to the business of surviving.
Although these people tried not to think about it, they knew they were doomed. Their enemies hated them utterly, and those enemies had sworn to exterminate the human race to the last man, woman, and child. Only the vast interstellar distances had so far saved them. This planet might not contain the last human beings in existence—others might’ve escaped—but they had no way to come together, no way to assemble. Meanwhile, once their enemies assimilated the remnants of the human resource base, they’d no doubt flood the galaxy with cheap drones designed to find and eradicate the remnants of mankind.
So the last human beings did the natural thing—they gave themselves over to decadence. They’d brought all kinds of treasures with them—marvelous technology, delicious food and wines, substances that altered and reshaped the nervous system. They had a never-ending party where they tried not to think about death.
Up in the starship, there existed one officer whose drug of choice was dreaming of a glorious death. He spent his days modeling various last stands by which he could eke out a few more days of survival for the human race. He was particularly fond of the idea that if an advanced alien ship appeared, then they could end the threat by crashing into it with their own vessel.
“We are not going to practice ramming maneuvers,” his captain said.
The people of this starship had military ranks, but it really wasn’t a very formal place. The ranks and positions were hereditary. The starship itself barely ran—most of the parts weren’t replaceable. When the captain undertook drills, she was lucky if half the roster showed up. Some crewmembers hadn’t come to a meeting in years. Like, what were you gonna do? Deport them to the surface? Where would they live? And forget about punishing them—nobody wanted discipline. Everyone on the ship was breaking regs. The captain herself had made a fortune using the ship’s launch to haul people around on the surface. She was in no position to argue.
“I think people would be into the ramming maneuvers,” the dreamer said. “I’ve modeled the scenario a few times, and it’s something we could do that would potentially be effective.”
The captain was one of the few people on the ship who’d fought in the last war, and she was sympathetic to the dreamer. She’d never thought war was a horrible thing. War was natural, war was enjoyable and meaningful, and, especially if war was conducted from within powerful starships with climate control and fuzzy carpeting, war wasn’t a particularly taxing endeavor. But the purpose of war wasn’t to die gloriously—they weren’t pagans. They didn’t believe in a life after death. There was no Valhalla, no afterlife. Certainly no racial afterlife, since their race was coming to an end. They likely wouldn’t even live in the memory of their opponents, a peaceful, almost pacifistic, people who reviled human beings for their aggressiveness.
“The purpose of fighting is to expand, to capture territory, to gain prestige and riches, nothing else,” the captain said. “All such opportunities are closed to us.”
“But . . . is there nothing higher?”
“Not particularly,” the captain said. “Vegetarian societies believe in subsuming your own interests to the greater good—it’s all foolishness, all nonsense. The purpose of life is right here, look at this marvelous ship, look at the foodstuffs we’ve stored, look at the soft fabrics we can touch—it’s our home, our gift. Why would we destroy it gratuitously, with no chance of finding something better?”
“But . . . wars cannot be fought this way,” he said. “If . . . if the enemy comes, won’t we fight?”
“The enemy came once, on a distant planet, and we chose to run,” the captain said. “Our force disintegrated, most of them were cut down fleeing, I and a few others were the only ones to escape.”
“But if you had fought . . . or retreated in an orderly fashion . . . if one ship had stayed behind to cover the retreat . . .”
The dreamer was only now piecing together things he’d read about the final battle—the one that had preceded their flying route, their escape to this world. He was now recalling the distinct lack of glorious last stands in the narrative of that battle.
“Yes,” she said. “That would indeed have resulted in greater survival, but to what end? Who would have stayed? And why?”
“I would have,” he said. “How could you—” The dreamer couldn’t even formulate his words. It just occurred to him that the captain had possessed the opportunity for which he’d dreamed. She could’ve sacrificed herself to cover the rest. They would’ve sung of her for a thousand years, and instead . . . instead she’d run away. And she wasn’t even ashamed!
“Is there a life that’s not worth living?” he said.
“Capture,” she said. “Slavery. Forced obedience. I fear death, but not at all costs.”
The dreamer came to realize that his entire society was sick. And their decadence was not merely a product of defeat! Rereading the history of the recent war, he realized now that his people were at all times the aggressors. That they had provoked the vegetarians, and that the vegetarians were in all respects the superior society: more peaceful, more organized, more cooperative.
The dreamer attempted some reforms of his people, but nobody was into it. He realized very vividly that the only path forward was to capture the war criminals, like the captain, and to seek out the vegetarians, to beg for forgiveness, and to throw themselves at their mercy—to assimilate and absorb their superior culture, in other words.
At first, this idea seemed absurd, but the dreamer learned to describe the vegetarians in more and more glowing terms—they were the apex of civilization, the apex of mercy. They would surely forgive mankind for its sins! Eventually, after many years of campaigning (and after the passing of the starship’s captain), he was given control of the starship, and he was deputized to seek out the vegetarians and plead humanity’s case for mercy.
The dreamer was very conscious that he held his peoples’ last hope in his hands. And in his travels toward the center of vegetarian civilization he stayed on the edges of their star systems. He’d expected to see the scars of the recent war: bristling fortifications, fleets of ships at the ready. But instead he saw empty shipyards and decommissioned fortifications. He contacted a vegetarian admiral, and he was kept waiting for several days—they accepted his apology and told him to come back in several years perhaps, as right now all efforts were directed inwardly, toward the construction of a new super-sphere habitat at the center of the galaxy. Or, oh!—actually, he could visit the sphere, if he wanted!
But the dreamer was well aware of his duty, so instead of viewing the center of civilization, as he dearly wished, he returned home to his little planet on the outskirts of the galaxy and reported all he’d seen.
The jubilation was overwhelming. Humanity had been reprieved from its stay of execution! They’d lived for so long under the threat of a foreign invasion that it was almost impossible for them to process the truth: Nobody was coming. They were not being hunted anymore!
The people of this small icy planet shook themselves free from their torpor. They built tiny starships and streamed into the galaxy, seeking out little nooks and crannies, looking for profit. And in his final years, the dreamer took his ancient starship on the long-awaited voyage into the center of the galaxy, where he was ushered into the super-sphere the vegetarians had constructed for mysterious purposes of their own.
He was feted for three days by the senate of his peoples’ old foes, and he was given many villas and amenities. The vegetarians were a long-lived people, and some veterans of the last war yet remained. One of these veterans came to see the dreamer—the veteran was eager to finally speak to one of the hated foes.
The veteran said, “I am glad I’ve lived to see this, the rapprochement of our two peoples. I . . . I have felt guilt . . . I . . . have felt guilt for the policies I enacted, for the hunts I conducted. For the human planets that I scorched.”
After many hours and days of discussion, the dreamer realized that this veteran had been present at the final encounter between humanity and the vegetarians, the battle where the captain had fled with her one starship.
“Nothing could have restrained us,” the vegetarian said. “We chased those ships down to the edges of the galaxy. I am astonished your captain survived—she must have been quite wily, quite wise.”
“She was,” the dreamer said. “She saved us. She saved mankind, I suppose. For I’ve looked far and wide across this galaxy, and I’ve not found another world inhabited by human beings. She saved us with her courage and her skill. And so, I suppose, did I.”
“You seem confused, my friend.”
“I wish that I understood the meaning of it all. This is the grace that I prayed for as a youth—the opportunity to do great deeds—to sacrifice myself for a higher cause. But I didn’t even need to sacrifice. I did nothing. My captain did nothing. We only operated with our own skill and ingenuity. To think the human race depended on her ability to hide or on my ability to conduct politics—this is really quite obscene somehow, no? We chose well. We did the right thing. And yet, it is so easy to choose poorly. The first admiral I met, he could have destroyed me out of hand. Or, earlier, I could’ve chosen to believe in humanity’s rightness—chosen to believe us blameless for the late war. When I was young, we believed ourselves doomed. I grew up in an atmosphere of doom, thinking that every day perhaps a starship might appear that would wipe out the human race. I was so certain that my only option in life was to die gloriously, and when my captain told me that the purpose of life was to live and enjoy, I thought her silly and weak and decadent. And yet . . . and yet . . . she was right. I simply don’t understand by what grace everything has turned out so beautifully.”
The veteran said, “Our children these days are prone to reevaluating the late war. They ask if it was necessary, if it needed to be so brutal, if in fact we weren’t to blame. Other people claim in response that life is always brutal and self-interested and amoral and that we are doomed to eternal conflict. But you and I and your captain all struggled to survive and to live well, and we succeeded, and it is a good thing! Soon we will die, and others will struggle, and perhaps they shall not survive, but I think it is good for them to remember that good things do in fact sometimes occur.”
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Naomi Kanakia is the author of four novels, over sixty short stories, and a forthcoming nonfiction guide to the Great Books. However, she’s most well-known these days for writing a (somewhat) popular literary newsletter, Woman of Letters, that’s recently been praised by The New Yorker and New York magazine.
“The Last Planet,” © Naomi Kanakia, 2025.
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