Review:
Semiosis, by Sue Burke
Series: |
Semiosis #1 |
Publisher: |
Tor |
Copyright: |
February 2018 |
ISBN: |
0-7653-9137-6 |
Format: |
Kindle |
Pages: |
333 |
Semiosis is a first-contact science fiction novel and the first
half of a duology. It was Sue Burke's first novel.
In the 2060s, with the Earth plagued by environmental issues, a group of
utopians decided to found a colony on another planet. Their goal is to
live in harmony with an unspoiled nature. They wrote a suitably
high-minded founding document, the
Constitution of the Commonwealth
of Pax, and set out in cold sleep on an interstellar voyage. 158 years
later, they awoke in orbit around a planet with a highly-developed
ecology, which they named Pax. Two pods and several colonists were lost
on landing, but the rest remained determined to follow through with their
plan. Not that they had many alternatives.
Pax does not have cities or technological mammalian life, just as they
hoped. It does, however, have intelligent life.
This novel struggled to win me over for reasons that aren't the fault of
Burke's writing. The first is that it is divided into seven parts, each
telling the story of a different generation. Intellectually, I like this
technique for telling an anthropological story that follows a human
society over time. But emotionally, I am a character reader first and
foremost, and I struggle with books where I can't follow the same
character throughout. It makes the novel feel more like a fix-up of short
stories, and I'm not much of a short story reader.
Second, this is one of those stories where a human colony loses access to
its technology and falls back to a primitive lifestyle. This is a concept
I find viscerally unpleasant and very difficult to read about. I don't
mind reading stories that start at the lower technological level and
rediscover lost technology, but the process of going backwards, losing
knowledge, surrounded by breaking technology that can never be repaired,
is disturbing at a level that throws me out of the story.
It doesn't help that the original colonists chose to embrace that
reversion. Some of this wasn't intentional some vital equipment was
destroyed when they landed but a lot of it was the plan from the start.
They are the type of fanatics who embrace a one-way trip and cannibalizing
the equipment used to make it in order to show their devotion to the
cause. I spent the first part of the book thinking the founding colonists
were unbelievably foolish, but then they started enforcing an even more
restrictive way of life on their children and that tipped me over into
considering them immoral. This was the sort of political movement that
purged all religion and political philosophy other than their one true way
so that they could raise "uncorrupted" children.
Burke does recognize how deeply abusive this is. The second part of the
book, which focuses on the children of the initial colonists, was both my
favorite section and had my favorite protagonist, precisely because
someone put words to the criticisms that I'd been thinking since the start
of the book. The book started off on a bad foot with me, but if it had
kept up the momentum of political revolution and rethinking provided by
the second part, it might have won me over.
That leads to the third problem, though, which is the first contact part
of the story. (If you've heard anything about this series, you probably
know what the alien intelligence is, and even if not you can probably
guess, but I'll avoid spoilers anyway.) This is another case where the
idea is great, but I often don't get along with it as a reader. I'm a
starships and AIs and space habitats sort of SF reader by preference and
tend to struggle with biological SF, even though I think it's great more
of it is being written. In this case, mind-altering chemicals enter the
picture early in the story, and while this makes perfect sense given the
world-building, this is another one of my visceral dislikes.
A closely related problem is that the primary alien character is, by human
standards, a narcissistic asshole. This is for very good story and
world-building reasons. I bought the explanation that Burke offers, I
like the way this shows how there's no reason to believe humans have a
superior form of intelligence, and I think Burke's speculations on the
nature of that alien intelligence are fascinating. There are a lot of
good reasons to think that alien morality would be wildly different from
human morality. But, well, I'm still a human reading this book and I
detested the alien, which is kind of a problem given how significant of a
character it is.
That's a lot baggage for a story to overcome. It says something about how
well-thought-out the world-building is that it kept my attention anyway.
Burke uses the generational structure very effectively. Events,
preferences, or even whims early in the novel turn into rituals or
traditions. Early characters take on outsized roles in history. The
humans stick with the rather absurd constitution of Pax, but do so in a
way that feels true to how humans reinterpret and stretch and layer
meaning on top of wholly inadequate documents written in complete
ignorance of the challenges that later generations will encounter. I
would have been happier without the misery and sickness and messy
physicality of this abusive colonization project, but watching generations
of humans patch together a mostly functioning society was intellectually
satisfying.
The alien interactions were also solid, with the caveat that it's probably
impossible to avoid a lot of anthropomorphizing. If I were going to sum
up the theme of the novel in a sentence, it's that even humans who think
they want to live in harmony with nature are carrying more arrogance about
what that harmony would look like than they realize. In most respects the
human colonists stumbled across the best-case scenario for them on this
world, and it was still harder than anything they had imagined.
Unfortunately, I thought the tail end of the book had the weakest plot.
It fell back on a story that could have happened in a lot of first-contact
novels, rather than the highly original negotiation over ecological niches
that happened in the first half of the book.
Out of eight viewpoint characters in this book, I only liked one of them
(Sylvia). Tatiana and Lucille were okay, and I might have warmed to them
if they'd had more time in the spotlight, but I felt like they kept making
bad decisions. That's the main reason why I can't really recommend it; I
read for characters, I didn't really like the characters, and it's hard
for a book to recover from that. It made the story feel chilly and
distant, more of an intellectual exercise than the sort of engrossing
emotional experience I prefer.
But, that said, this is solid SF speculation. If your preferred balance
of ideas and characters is tilted more towards ideas than mine, and
particularly if you like interesting aliens and don't mind the loss of
technology setting, this may well be to your liking. Even with all of my
complaints, I'm curious enough about the world that I am tempted to read
the sequel, since its plot appears to involve more of the kind of SF
elements I like.
Followed by
Interference.
Content warning: Rape, and a whole lot of illness and death.
Rating: 6 out of 10