2025 science fiction. The corporate plundering mission meets an
enigma: a gas giant's moon, with obscuring toxic atmosphere and so much
radio noise that they can't even get a map of the terrain. Of course,
no human should go down there… Mild spoilers.
This is planet-puzzle SF, in the tradition of books like Mission
of Gravity or Dragon's Egg. How can anything live here, how has it
influenced its environment, and so on. On the other side, we have the
humans inserted into the situation, after an accident to their craft
leaves three of them crashed in prototype exploration pods, with no
idea where on the planet they are or how to communicate with the
locals.
And that's all fine, but there are things that irk. The humans'
culture is a post-crash corporate dominance, always focused on getting
more and climbing up with your boot on someone else's face. They've
known nothing but company propaganda for their whole lives. And yet
they feel exactly as resentful as a modern person in the real world
faced with an incompetent manager, and when the survivors return to
that culture they have come to sympathise with the locals with no real
tension or soul-searching as they abandon everything they have ever
been taught to believe. I could believe in a spontaneous enlightenment
after exposure to something outside their propaganda bubble, in a
revulsion of feeling and consequent rebellion, but not in one that
just happened without a bit of agonising first.
And there are technical details that smell wrong. Nothing specific, it
just seemed that everything lined up exactly they way it needed to for
the situation in the moment, rather than flowing from a technology and
environment that had been worked out in advance.
That said, I enjoyed the main section, the trek across the alien
world. There's a good array of environmental hazards, as well as some
fascinating aliens with a mode of thought that, while it needs a
fairly specific environment to happen, makes a good deal of sense
(even if it has been done before with minor variation), and there's a
prolonged inability to communicate which frustrates but also feels
thoroughly realistic.
It's one of the tropes of these things that we see interactions from
both sides, from the humans' and the aliens' points of view, and that
works well. But every so often there is an Interlude that gives much
more background detail than the humans have worked out so far; this
confirms what the observant reader has realised already. When, at the
end, the aliens prove unexpectedly resistant to having their resources
harvested to the greater glory of the corporate state, this set of
Interludes is apparently the message that will persuade the human
exploiters to make peace. (This after the aliens have demonstrated
their ability to win a conflict, which frankly seems more
convincing.)
But how is that going to work? The humans, apart from the tiny
proportion of rebels, don't care about the fascinating aliens (they've
repeatedly made that clear); they just want the rare elements. Even if
these humans were to become convinced, what about the next lot who
will be arriving and expecting those elements to build places for them
to live? This is not a conclusion; at most it's a shift from the
exciting planetary action to diplomacy and treaty-making which frankly
ought to be just as fascinating but harder to write, and for
Tchaikovsky to end the book with the reference back to those
Interludes—not even mentioning the human reaction to it—feels as
though he's got bored and found something else to do rather than write
a proper ending.
It's not a bad book. It's overlong and sometimes annoying, but the
central section in particular is solid. But this thing was a Hugo and
Locus finalist, and there was nothing about it to suggest it was of
the very high grade that I like (perhaps foolishly) to associate with
such recognition.