Nancy Kress

Tomorrow’s Kin by Nancy Kress is the first book in a science fiction trilogy that the author based on an award winning novella entitled “Yesterday’s Kin”. Apparently the first third of this book is pretty much the novella, and unfortunately, this was the only part of the book that I liked.

When the book opens, aliens have already landed and set themselves up in New York. They haven’t shown themselves but they are talking to United Nation officials. Dr. Marianne Jenner, a biologist, has just published a paper that the aliens are very interested in and her presence is requested. Earth is then informed that an immense cloud of spores that is carrying a deadly disease is travelling through space and is headed for Earth. In 25 years it will also hit the alien’s planet. It is estimated that this disease will wipe out most of the population. Earth has 10 months to discover a solution.

I have had this book for some time and I was really looking forward to it, but although it promised an excellent story, it just didn’t deliver. I realize that this is only the first part of a trilogy but there should be some satisfaction in each volume, otherwise it just feels like one book that has been arbitrarily divided into three. While the first third of the book dealt with the aliens the rest of the book focused on Marianne and her family. Personally I think it would have been far better to have left the novella as it was instead of padding it to book length. Slow, unengaging and even boring in parts Tomorrow;s Kin was a book that I wish I had skipped.… (meer)

I found the ideas in 'Probability Moon' intriguing but the writing was a little dry until almost the end of the book. Oddly perhaps, it was the humans in the story who I had difficulty engaging with. I eventually became quite engaged with Enli, the main alien character.

The humans are split into two: a four-person team of anthropologists down on the planet 'studying' the indigenous culture's concept of 'shared reality' and a military ship carrying out the real mission - to acquire what is believed to be an ancient alien weapon in orbit around the planet.

The military mission was more interesting for the physics being discussed and for providing the background on how the interstellar human diaspora, enabled by a network of 'gates' built by an ancient, now vanished, race are at war with an alien species who use the same inherited technology and who no interest in anything except expansion and extermination. The military characters were an unconvincing collection of stereotypes whose main function seemed to be to exposition.

The anthropologists were more interesting. I've never seen classic Persian poetry used as a reference for divining the meaning of events on an alien planet before in the way the Iranian team leader did. There was an American character with an undiagnosed God complex, a woman xenobiologist who seemed to be there to explain the physical differences between humans and aliens and a large jovial German geologist who was the easiest to like and also the least introspective.

At first, I couldn't see any connection between the two human missions. It took longer than it should have done to see that the book title was a clue to the concept behind both military and anthropological missions. This concept linked the apparently sociological phenomenon of Shared Reality with the observer effect in quantum mechanics.

The thing I liked most about the book was seeing the world through Enli's eyes. I liked that when I first met Enli, she was an outsider in her own culture. I quickly learned that she was 'Unreal'. Understanding what that meant and how it worked was, for me, the most interesting part of the book. I thought that Nancy Kress did a great job of making human behaviour seem odd by establishig Enli's people as a baseline for normal.

I enjoyed the ideas in the book but I couldn't engage with the human characters. I wasn't invested in the outcome of the military mission, even when the crew was at risk. The anthropologists were interesting mainly because they demonstrated how hard it is to see another culture clearly when you are unaware of the blindspots created by your own cultural biases.

'Probability Moon' is the first book in a trilogy but I won't be moving on to the other books. I think these stories at too abstract for me.… (meer)

This book was on the sale shelf at the library. I've never read the author before. I'm not even sure I realized it was classified as sci-fi until I was mostly done reading the book.

I still feel like there's more to the book than what I got out of it so far. The plot centers on GMOs. Are GMOs good or bad? Or is that a question that depends on the tools and circumstances? As the book says, a hammer can be used to build or to destroy. The premise seems to be that corporations took over GMOs as a for profit endeavor and therefore did not have the world's safety as the primary goal--a goal that smaller farms using GMOs could place over gigantic profits.… (meer)