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.

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

read by Scott Brick

This book interested me because I heard that it featured a triad—a stable romantic partnership involving three individuals. It was one of a handful of examples of polyamorous relationships in science fiction that a group of friends on Facebook were able to come up with. Since I also enjoy dipping into the odd New Wave hard sci fi novel, and Asimov is of course one of the greats, I decided to give this one a go. 

It doesn’t start in a promising way. Basically a cadre of in-fighting, nerdishly vicious, and highly competitive white-guy scientists discover a source of infinite free energy, and they fight and fight and fight about it. Who really discovered it, who gets how much credit, whether it’s dangerous in any way and how shall we discredit and ruin the career of anyone who dares to ask that question, and so on. This, and the discovery that the energy source is actually a parallel universe with slightly different laws of physics than our own and that this may cause the sun to blow up, take up the first third of the book.

In the next third of the novel, we get to visit the alternate universe. This is where, for me, the book gets interesting. The species that has initiated the energy transfer (which goes two ways and thus benefits the civilization utilizing it in each universe) consists, in its immature form, of three genders: Rational, Emotional, and Parental. Every relationship consists of a triad including one individual of each gender, and they blend their essences to produce exactly three children, one of each gender. After that, they go on to the next phase of their existence.

All of this is interesting enough in theory. But what hooked me was Asimov’s gritty, unsentimental but not unsympathetic depiction of the everyday reality of these beings. He paints a vivid picture of the way their society is shaped by being comprised of three genders with very distinct roles and personality types, how that affects relationships and thought patterns, what this kind of relationship feels to someone who is in it and how that differs by gender. 

The day-to-day happinesses and compromises and failures to communicate and generosities of any romantic partnership, as transformed by the triune nature of relationships in this society, don’t have to be imagined by the reader. Asimov shows us both the differences and the similarities between that form of relationship and the two-person sort that most of us are more accustomed to and he does it with a very… I can’t say human touch here, can I? With a portrait painter’s eye for the homely, telling detail.

In the third part of the book we get on with the business of saving the universe, and for me it becomes somewhat less interesting. I mean, of course I’m all for the universe being saved, especially when saving it means flipping a highly humiliating bird at the forces of greed and egotism that got us in that mess in the first place. The pacing, once you figure out who’s who and what their agendas are, is good. The characters are interesting, the lunar society depicted is interesting, and there’s even a well-written central female character. It’s a good story and a fine final third. But for my taste, Part 2 is what this book is all about.

Verdict: read it! Just be prepared to do some eye rolling for the first hundred pages or so. Your patience will be rewarded.

An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock

This is the first book in the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, though I read it (and read and re-read it numerous times as a teen and young adult) as a stand-alone book.

As the story begins, the universe is millions of years older than it is now and humanity has at last ceased to take itself seriously. It has also shrunk to a relative handful of individuals—but they are near-immortals with enormous amounts of power over their environment, their bodies, and, up to a point, matter itself. (Think of Q from Star Trek.) They use this tremendous power to sculpt fanciful landscapes and city-sized follies in which to throw parties and/or have sex, often at the same time. The point to all this being pleasure, and bonding, and to fight the one enemy left to them: boredom.

Into this ultimately decadent world arrives an alien, Yusharisp, from the far edge of the galaxy. He brings with him a dire warning: the universe is coming to an end. His own planet, in fact, has already been swallowed by the coming universal apocalypse, and he is traveling ahead of the wave of doom to warn as many planets as he can. 

What he has failed to predict (and could not have imagined) was that humanity was a species too fatally jaded to really believe his warning or to truly care if it is true—or perhaps too infantilized by millennia of any lack of real consequences for any action or event to truly understand the concept of finality. Also, humanity is, in this century, prone to keeping collections of captive aliens and time travelers. Yusharisp is snapped up by a colllector, preventing him (much to his baffled despair) from continuing his mission.

At about the same time, an inadvertent time traveler named Mrs. Ameila Underwood, from Victorian England, becomes part of someone else’s menagerie. Her captor brings her to a party to be shown off; there she’s spotted by our protagonist, Jherek Carnelian. His current obsession happens to be the 19th century, and he immediately becomes determined to fall in love with her.

Hijinks ensue, the plot thickens, and a Machiavellian individual’s machinations are slowly sensed by the reader—but not by poor Jherek, who ends up traveling to Victorian England, where he’s helpless as a newborn (though delighted by how friendly everyone is). Saying more would spoil the plot for you, so this is where I stop.

I don’t think anybody but Moorcock could have pulled this off. The wit, the vivid descriptions, the world-building--think Oscar Wilde meets Douglas Adams in the Q Continuum as painted by Salvador Dali. Like Q, these end-times humans have no concept of morality—how can they, when there are never any real consequences to anything, and what would be the point?  

With all their literally earth-shattering power, these people have created a surprisingly small world for themselves. Their only concerns are their own pleasure and the oddly conformist society they’ve created; they’ve lost their curiosity and turned inward to a remarkable degree, for a people with a historically unparalleled ability to satisfy their curiosity. And for all their access to knowledge, they’re shockingly ignorant about anything that doesn’t affect them directly (and much that does).

Jherek, meantime, is such an intriguing character--maybe the only truly interesting one on his planet. He’s the only person alive to have been actually born, in the old-fashioned sense, and maybe for that reason he’s a bit of a throwback. At the same time, he’s very much a creature of his time, an amoral, self-centered hedonist with no concept that there’s any other way to be. But Mrs. Underwood seems set to change that…

Well worth a read, especially as it’s both very much a period piece and oddly relevant to our times. It’s still my third-favorite Moorcock book (after Gloriana and The Warhound and the World’s Pain), and that still says a lot, even after all this time.

Home (Binti #2) by Nnedi Okorafor

read by Robin Miles

A worthy successor to Binti, this is a short, intriguing novel that ends on a seriously wrenching cliff-hanger. It takes us to personal and sociological depths left unexplored in the first book, filling out the characters and the world-building in a super satisfying way.

We follow Binti back to Earth for her first visit home since starting at Oomza University. Out there, she’s a hero for ending the war between humanity and the Meduse (well, technically between the Khoush, but who’s counting?). But back where she came from, she’s unwomanly and disloyal for having left home at all, and gets no sympathy, much less admiration.

The fact that she’s coping with PTSD after all she’s been through is purely her fault for having left in the first place. The fact that she has tentacles like the Meduse now (technically okuoko, but again, who’s counting) is seen as somehow her fault, too; nobody cares that she never asked for them and nearly died in the process of receiving them. And nobody seems interested in being welcoming or even showing basic politeness toward her Meduse friend, Okwu—never mind that the war has been over for some time now.

Just as it’s really hitting Binti that you can’t go home again, the unbelievable occurs, and… nope, I won’t say more and spoil it for you. 

If you liked Binti, even (or especially) if you liked it but found it a little shallow, read this book! It’s great. But keep the third one in the series (The Night Masquerade) handy ahead of time, or you may want to toss this one across the room when you hit that super abrupt cliffhanger ending.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Narrated by Robin Miles

You know that old saw, you can never go home again? That’s definitely going to be true for our protagonist, Binti, when or if she ever does go back to Earth. She’s the first member of her community to go to university, and it’s going to change her in ways that even other folks who have also traveled off-planet for school couldn’t have predicted. Her trip to Oomza University is also going have a bigger effect on interspecies relations than anybody could have imagined.

This compact little Hugo- and Nebula-winning novella—an easy one-afternoon read—packs a lot into not very many pages. The central idea is that diverse peoples and individuals all have their own unique gifts to bring to the world (or worlds!), and that there can be terrible danger in ignoring that, and in behaving in a colonialist fashion. Binti is super smart and brave, going out to study at university in spite of her family’s (and her technologically savvy but highly insular community’s) displeasure at her departure and perceived disloyalty.

Binti is nothing if not loyal, though--to her father and the skills he taught her, to her community’s traditions, to the new friends she makes, to the university that has accepted her, and even to the agreement she makes with the warlike aliens that attack her transport. And being Binti, a highly skilled harmonizer, she finds a way to make potentially divided loyalties not divide her at all, but instead… well, I’ll stop right there or I might give away too much.

This is a good read. If you’re not used to novellas, the pacing is a little odd--far too much backstory and setup for a short story, but the resolution is much too fast for a novel. It reminded me of the pacing of a children’s book, though the content is definitely not for children. Then again, if you’re not used to novellas, maybe it’s time you tried one! This would be a fine place to start. Also a fine place to start with afrofuturism, if you’re not familiar with it.

(What? You haven’t seen Black Panther? Go out and watch that, too!  Speaking of which, if you liked Black Panther and you like this book, you’ll be pleased to know that Ms. Okorafor co-wrote a recent installment of the Black Panther comic series with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Which makes a lot of sense: Binti reminds me of a younger, less-self-assured Shuri.)

And speaking of trying things, do listen to the audiobook version if possible; Robin Miles does an incredible job narrating.