Mirabile by Janet Kagan

[lightreads]

Stories from a cryptobiologist on the isolated colony world Mirabile. The book explains it thoroughly in the first five pages, so suffice it to say that Annie's job is a bit complicated seeing as how planting a tulip on Mirabile might produce a butterfly, and the butterfly might lay an egg that hatches a wasp.

Another mosaic novel, each piece a snapshot of introducing unstable Earth plant and animal life into the alien ecology of Mirabile. Sweetly transparent, simple, startlingly wholesome. Startling because I liked it; I was thoroughly charmed, actually. Seriously -- Kagan telegraphs every outcome five pages in and dropped an enormous infodump at the beginning by having Annie explain things to a character who couldn't possibly not already know them. And yet I was charmed. Otters that give birth to Odders -- ooh, and Mabob (as in thinga--) for an alien pet. It's one of those times where science actually does look like magic, and that's really cool. (Usually when people say that they're talking about quantum mechanics, and I'm like 'uh no, that just looks like science that you don't understand'.)

Totally a comfort book, sweet but not saccharine.

Comments

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

It really put me in the mood for biogenetics, so I picked up Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio. Very different sort of thing -- it's hard SF about the actual mechanism of punctuated evolution in humans. I think you'd like it -- the science is very clever.