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Semiosis by Sue Burke
Jun. 15th, 2020 09:13 pmSemiosis
3/5. Scifi about a tiny group of pacifists who found a colony on an alien world, only to discover that it already has intelligent life in the form of plants.
Strange and chewy. This is about adaptation and co-existence and a really complicated, compromised definition of peace. It plays with perspective, not only in swapping between human and, eventually, alien plant, but also in shifting the reader uncomfortably across several boundaries where you think you've formed a solid judgment of something frightening, but then . . . is it really? No wait, it definitely is. No, wait . . . And who is cultivating whom, again?
So yeah, this is ambitious and cool. There's a sequel, but I'm not in the mood right now for something quite this complex, or for something spanning so many generations that the only more or less constant main character is the fuckin' plant. But as creative, wild scifi goes, this is up there.
Content notes: Rape, violence, infant mortality.
3/5. Scifi about a tiny group of pacifists who found a colony on an alien world, only to discover that it already has intelligent life in the form of plants.
Strange and chewy. This is about adaptation and co-existence and a really complicated, compromised definition of peace. It plays with perspective, not only in swapping between human and, eventually, alien plant, but also in shifting the reader uncomfortably across several boundaries where you think you've formed a solid judgment of something frightening, but then . . . is it really? No wait, it definitely is. No, wait . . . And who is cultivating whom, again?
So yeah, this is ambitious and cool. There's a sequel, but I'm not in the mood right now for something quite this complex, or for something spanning so many generations that the only more or less constant main character is the fuckin' plant. But as creative, wild scifi goes, this is up there.
Content notes: Rape, violence, infant mortality.