Probability Moon by Nancy Kress

[lightreads]

Probability Moon by Nancy Kress

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It’s weird, considering how much scifi I read, that I don’t actually like aliens much. We get into someone’s made-up extra-terrestrial culture, I glaze over. And alien point-of-view chapters, oh man. Pretty close to a death knell. A lot of people use the same stupid author tricks on aliens that they do on minorities – ‘here are my aliens! They are all monolithically the same!’ ‘Here are my aliens! Their function is to make you review this book and say how it made you think deeply about humanity!’ ‘Here are my aliens! They’re here because I think stuntwriting is just so fucking cool and I want to spend three hundred pages referring to everything in the neutral gender! Suck it!’ “Here are my aliens! They turn me on!’



These aliens, though, these aliens were pretty cool. She pulls off the ‘there is only one major difference between this race and humanity’ thing, and it actually works. The difference is that this is a neurobiological monoculture. There is a biological mechanism preventing intergroup discord because it requires concurrent understanding of what is ‘true.’ So they can’t war with each other, oh, and they also slaughter their analogs for the mentally disabled, those who don’t have the accordance mechanism and who can’t participate in shared society.



It should be didactic and heavy-handed, but it really isn’t. There’s no glory here, or vilification. Just a culture, and how it works. This is one of those books about an anthropological expedition with, oops, military motives, and that sort of thing usually bores me, but this one had something extra to it. It’s thinking about normative understandings, and how they work, and what happens when someone’s mind goes howling off at a perpendicular. And I’m not 100% sure I’m cool with a particular plot point involving a mentally ill character, but it’s been a few weeks and I’m still thinking about it, so that’s something right there.





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