Semiosis by Sue Burke

read by Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas Hay

In the wake of ecological catastrophe, starvation, and universal war on Earth, 50 pacifists (and a lot of frozen embryos) are chosen for a privately-funded mission to colonize a distant planet. Traumatized by decades of war, starvation, and despair, they land on a different planet than the one originally planned on. Now they have to find a way to survive: as individuals, as a species, and as a society, with their ideals intact. It’s those ideals that are going to prevent the new planet from going the way of Earth.

It’s going to be harder than anyone imagined, though. The new planet, Pax, is lush and full of unpredictable dangers. It’s also home to two sentient alien species, one native and one not. And the native life-form is such an alien intelligence that the Pacifists come perilously close to failing to recognize it as an intelligence at all. 

As each generation follows the one before it and adapts to life on Pax, new conflicts and opportunities arise. The Pacifists are clinging to viability as a colony, plagued by a lack of understanding of the local plant life, diseases they could have easily cured with their grandparents’ technology, and a crash in male fertility. Paternalistic first- and second-generation colonists hide crucially important things from their adult “children” for their own good, setting the scene for real violence, not to mention revolution.

To what degree do they need to adapt, and when does adaptation become dangerous backsliding into barbarism? What became of the other alien species that also colonized this planet at some point in the past, and left a ruined city behind? And can the rainbow colors of the bamboo grove near the ruins actually be a form of communication?

Burke does a fantastic job of world-building, depicting a human civilization that clearly owes a lot to LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and an alien intelligence that is truly alien, and the struggles and motivations of each to communicate. The structure of this book, divided into sections based on the current generation of the colonists and with a new unreliable narrator/protagonist for each section, doesn’t lend itself to a lot of character development for the human protagonists. But their society does develop, as does the alien intelligence, along fascinating lines.

A ripping yarn that also gives a lot of food for thought. Highly recommend.