2023 SF. Destry is a terraformer on the planet Sask-E, which over
thousands of years is being made into a luxury resort by the company.
Then an anomaly shows up…
Moment to moment this book is lovely: interesting people, hard
things to say about sapience and property. But step back a little and
it looks a bit more shaky: if Destry has been created as property for
the company, why does her mindset (entirely controlled by them) even
include the concept of not obeying orders?
And the book's divided into three sections, separated by hundreds of
years; some characters carry through from one to another, but most
don't. And none of the characters in the latter two sections ever
quite gets to the level of complexity that Destry managed.
I found myself reminded of A Half-Built Garden: there's a similar
idea there of trying to take on opinions from everyone in an
environment, though here it's been done by the Great Bargain, in which
most animals have been uplifted to sapience (if not particularly
human sapience, which would after all be missing the point),
generally with computer assistance.
(So how do you do that for an earthworm and still have something the
size of an earthworm? When it's 1% original creature and 99% computer,
how can you possibly built a computer that meaningfully preserves
anything of the original when there's so much you just have to
invent?)
You could get a whole book on the idea of the limiters which the
company has applied to creatures it wants to be lower forms, like the
one that clamps vocabulary size or the one that prevents any
utterances which don't involve food or cooking. But this isn't that
novel.
There's mind-bogglingly advanced technology. Antigravity lifters are
implanted into animals and can apparently be powered from their
metabolisms. But the social patterns and taboos seem strangely
contemporary (and North American). Again like A Half-Built Garden
there's that message that the only possible good system of
decision-making is everyone thrashing out every decision until one
side gives up in exhaustion; and most people just don't want to live
like that!
Everyone in the foreground is either Good (and vegan, naturally, never
mind if they were originally obligate carnivores, I'm sure that won't
change their fundamental mindset so profoundly that it would be stupid
to regard them as the same species as the animal they were uplifted
from) or Bad in everything they do. There are some nuanced characters,
but they never take centre stage. In the end it's a polemic; it's a
good polemic, but it's not much of a story.
The first and perhaps the last sections might have made decent
stand-alone novellas, but that's not how they were published.
Still, thinking about the moose entangled in romantic melodrama
lightened her mood a bit. At least some people were getting a little
frisky distraction.
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