Surface Tension

In this acclaimed short story, a human colonization ship crash lands on a distant planet where the only landmass is completely covered in shallow puddles of water. The planet is uninhabitable to humans, so the crew must genetically engineer their descendants into something that can survive.

Originally published in
Galaxy Science Fiction (August, 1952)
, a revised version of "Surface Tension" that incorporated material from Blish's earlier story, "Sunken Universe," was published in his 1956 collection, The Seedling Stars.