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The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves
Dr. Arik Kershenbaum
Non-fiction Biology, 2020
From Storygraph:
“Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution – which applies throughout the universe – Cambridge zoologist Dr. Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like: how these creatures will move, socialise and communicate.”
I love a good, accessible science book and this is one of those. If you’re science education isn’t very strong, this covers topics of evolutionary biology and zoology in an engaging, easy-to-grasp way. If you do have a strong science education, this takes really common concepts and recontexualizes them in terms of xenobiology. For someone who does a lot of “alien” building across science fiction and fantasy writing, it was a fun look at different ways of perceiving life, and getting out of your own human-centric headspace.
The Terraformers
Annalee Newitz
Science Fiction, 2023
From Storygraph:
“The Terraformers is an equally heart-warming and thought-provoking vision of the future for fans of Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Martha Wells. Destry is a top network analyst with the Environmental Rescue Team, an ancient organization devoted to preventing ecosystem collapse. On the planet Sask-E, her mission is to terraform an Earthlike world, with the help of her taciturn moose, Whistle. But then she discovers a city that isn’t supposed to exist, hidden inside a massive volcano. Torn between loyalty to the ERT and the truth of the planet’s history, Destry makes a decision that echoes down the generations. Centuries later, Destry’s protege, Misha, is building a planetwide transit system when his worldview is turned upside-down by Sulfur, a brilliant engineer from the volcano city. Together, they uncover a dark secret about the real estate company that’s buying up huge swaths of the planet—a secret that could destroy the lives of everyone who isn’t Homo sapiens. Working with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and a very angry cyborg cow, they quietly sow seeds of subversion. But when they’re threatened with violent diaspora, Misha and Sulfur’s very unusual child faces a stark choice: deploy a planet-altering weapon, or watch their people lose everything they’ve built on Sask-E.”
I really struggled to figure out how I felt about this book as I was reading it, and I think it was actually reading other people’s reviews that helped me put better words to it. I don’t generally like to speak poorly of books unless there’s something grievously terrible, but this one’s a very solid sort of “meh” for me. However, they might really connect with the way the sci-fi concepts are played together and might not be bothered by the same things.
The essential issue for me, I eventually sort of figured out, is that the book isn’t particularly evolutionary, revolutionary, or realistic in the way it presents the ripple effects of its advanced technologies on social systems and personal values. We have sentient robots, can alter our appearance at will, advanced genetic technologies, can speak with animals, yet we fall into the same traps of hyper-capitalism and corporate interests that we still literally live under. By the end of the story, there are sentient trains, yet the talking cat can’t pay his rent because gentrification raised the rates. So while this is regularly explored in depth in cyberpunk settings, this is simply not that.
Early in the narrative, the characters are given chances to make truly revolutionary changes to the current regime, and just don’t take them, opting instead for discussion, journalism, and gentle democracy. So, in the end, we’re left with something that feels a little flat in terms of anti-capitalist revolution. I described it on TikTok as “white middle class, ” and that still feels right.
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