RogerBW's Blog

2022 SF. The climate catastrophe has happened, and the survivors are rebuilding, whether it's the hollowed-out remnants of nation-states, the corporates on their bunker-islands, or the dandelion networks that are trying to make the environment back into something compatible with human thriving. None of them is expecting the alien scout ship.

So it's a first contact story, and a cultural clash story on multiple levels: most obviously, the aliens, already a two-species coalition, are ready to welcome humanity into their fold, and bring them to their space habitats and Dyson sphere in progress… and can't take seriously the humans' idea that they might like to stay on the planet that they're fixing. The aliens have already found three dead species whose ecosystems collapsed before the aliens could reach them. Living on planets clearly isn't a safe or sane thing to do!

At the same time, the aliens' culture has a strong element of ambassadors being mothers with small children, which makes it convenient that Judy Wallach-Stevens (narrator for the majority of the book), who happens to be the first person to find the aliens while following up on a report of unexpected pollution, has a child of her own. (This is a book with a lot of breast-feeding and nappy changes.) But the aliens are very much gender-essentialist, to the point of deprecating the possibility of male child-care or leadership roles.

And then there are the corporates, perhaps too obviously the villains of the piece, constantly playing status games. They'd be quite happy to take marketing to a new star system, and they don't mind leaving those eco weirdoes behind to do it.

The frictions and interactions of these factions and philosophies were lovely; but the book was spoiled for me to some extent by the dandelion networks themselves. This not-government is a leaderless software-based discussion and consensus-finding system, one that gives weight to non-sapient considerations (e.g. the effects of something on the health of a river) as well as to human desires. Somehow. The software assigns weights to things, somehow. And to this cynical old techie that sounds like a writer who's got all excited by forum-based communities and not understood just how much work moderators have to do to keep things going: this isn't just your special interest group, this is the equivalent of Nextdoor, where That Asshole has to be allowed to participate just as much as the people who actually think about things.

And that primed me for the California post-hippie ecofeminism that's the dominant culture. I don't know these communities in real life but I've met some of the people who straddle the space between them and SF fandom, and this is clearly a book by a sympathiser: yes, the only way to resolve something is to have a house meeting and talk it to death, and eventually even the bad guys will join in the consensus. (Also, the only religious people mentioned are Jewish, there's mild polyamory, and while people have various skin tones there's nobody human who doesn't think and talk like a North American. Yeah, there are other networks in other places, but somehow they never seem to become important.)

"No climate mitigation strategies that you can imagine accompanied by maniacal laughter, please."

It was an irk, not because I don't like it but because it was presented as unquestionably the only good way to be. (OK, not as much of an irk as when a male SF writer says the same thing about unconstrained capitalism being the only good way to be, and there are plenty of those.) The slow pace was also something of an irk; the last third or so, in particular, felt like an attempt to take the existing tentative resolution and shake it up arbitrarily just to keep things moving.

In the end, though, I enjoyed it. I've read plenty of first contact stories where one side is Right and the others are Wrong; I'm much more interested in ones where people need to reach a mutually acceptable position without betraying their baseline ethics. I have quibbles, but there is at least enough here to quibble with, rather than concepts being plunked down whole and unexamined. Recommended, if you're in the mood for a slow and meditative book.