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FTD
Since: Dec, 2014
19th Jun, 2018 04:41:23 AM
Do you remember if the writer/writers were Russian or from the former Soviet Union? Sounds maybe like the Noon Universe (Strugatsky Brothers) but I haven't read their whole canon.
This was from a sci-fi anthology omnibus I read many, many years ago, but this one story stuck out in my mind particularly.
As far as I can remember, it involved an alien civilization on a distant planet that was going through its industrial revolution. One female alien who's some kind of struggling playwright discovers fossils of extinct creatures and becomes a sort of Charles Darwin equivalent, travelling around her planet and collecting evidence to support the theory of evolution while debating her theories with various religious types. At the end of the story, she stages a play about the evolution of their species, and becomes a big success.