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Natural History
A daring and original new novel from one of sci fi’s most provocative voices, Natural History is a stunning work of bold ideas, unforgettable characters, and epic adventure as one woman seeks to explore what may be the greatest mystery of all....
IMAGINE A WORLD...
Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpion–and just as dangerous. Her claim that she’d found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity who’d created and once enslaved them.
IMAGINE A FATE...
It was on behalf of the “unevolved” humans that Professor Zephyr Duquesne, cultural archaeologist and historian of Earth’s lost worlds, was chosen by the Gaiasol military authority to uncover the truth about this second “earth.” And her voyage, traveling inside the body of Isol, will take her to the center of a storm exploding across a spectrum of space and time, dimension and consciousness.
IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE...
On an abandoned planet, in a wrinkle of time, Isol and Zephyr will find a gift and a a power so vast that once unlocked, it will change the universe forever. With civil war looming, Zephyr’s perilous journey will lead her to a past where one civilization mysteriously vanished...and another may soon follow.
IMAGINE A WORLD...
Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpion–and just as dangerous. Her claim that she’d found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity who’d created and once enslaved them.
IMAGINE A FATE...
It was on behalf of the “unevolved” humans that Professor Zephyr Duquesne, cultural archaeologist and historian of Earth’s lost worlds, was chosen by the Gaiasol military authority to uncover the truth about this second “earth.” And her voyage, traveling inside the body of Isol, will take her to the center of a storm exploding across a spectrum of space and time, dimension and consciousness.
IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE...
On an abandoned planet, in a wrinkle of time, Isol and Zephyr will find a gift and a a power so vast that once unlocked, it will change the universe forever. With civil war looming, Zephyr’s perilous journey will lead her to a past where one civilization mysteriously vanished...and another may soon follow.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
63 people are currently reading
1255 people want to read
About the author
Justina Robson
65 books287 followersJustina is from Leeds, a city in Yorkshire in the north of England. She always wanted to write and always did. Other things sometimes got in the way and sometimes still do...but not too much.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 92 reviews
April 28, 2022
Natural History is New Brit Space Opera, a la Banks & MacLeod, and Robson has clearly done her sfnal homework. I particularly liked her elegant use of [then] current M-space theory (the 11 dimensions of branespace) as the physical background for her, um, Stuff....
Her setup, by contrast, is classical: The Forged, vat-born cyborg posthumans who do most of the heavy lifting in the 26th century, are getting tired of kowtowing to the Old Monkeys, the Unevolved guys who created them: us. As the book opens, Voyager Lonestar Isol has just made a disastrous First Contact with a mysterious alien artifact on her way to explore Barnard's Star....
Let us pause a moment, as you will be doing repeatedly as you read Natural History, to digest a bit of what Robson's doing here. "The Forged" -- what a wonderfully two-edged name. Character and artifact names are a Big Deal in her book: The Heavy Angels. Corvax, who was once a Roc. The Abacand® pocket-brains, sentient but not, well, street-smart. The chilly (but polite) Shuriken Death-angel.... Man, I love this kind of stuff. Especially when it doesn't take itself too seriously. She put exploding spaceships in, too.
OK. My point is that Natural History is a book to be savored rather than gulped. Robson's put a lot of hard work, and hard thinking, into her backstory -- but she doesn't spoon-feed the reader -- or, worse, drop in great expository lumps, and some readers won't like the extra skullwork they'll have to do to keep up. Well, too bad for them. Robson can write rings around 90% of all the novelists I've ever read, both inside & out of the SF genre. She's benefiting from UK bookdom's wise refusal to stuff SF into an airtight box, cut off from the winds of Greater Fiction....
Alright, I'm getting carried away here, but this lady can *write*. Trust me. This is certainly not a perfect novel, and I can (kinda sorta) see why it's taken her awhile to find a US publisher. She's writing for *adults*, and avoiding the cartoonish simplicity of, well, 90% of SF books currently in print. So she's not (sigh) likely to find a mass market -- but for those few brave souls who seek science fiction written with thought and substance, Natural History is for *you*, me buckos. You know who you are. What are you waiting for?
Reviewed in 2005 for SF Site, https://www.sfsite.com/05a/nh199.htm
2020 reread:
Holds up really well -- I'm kicking it up a half-star, and rounding up to 5 stars. The best parts are thrillingly strange, and left me breathless, as only the very best SF can do. Mind, this is far from a perfect book. Parts of it are a bit of a slog, and you can safely skim the sophomore philosophizing. But the ending is pitch-perfect. And the book opens and closes with lines from Don McLean's classic "American Pie." If you've never tried the book, well, you should!
Her setup, by contrast, is classical: The Forged, vat-born cyborg posthumans who do most of the heavy lifting in the 26th century, are getting tired of kowtowing to the Old Monkeys, the Unevolved guys who created them: us. As the book opens, Voyager Lonestar Isol has just made a disastrous First Contact with a mysterious alien artifact on her way to explore Barnard's Star....
Let us pause a moment, as you will be doing repeatedly as you read Natural History, to digest a bit of what Robson's doing here. "The Forged" -- what a wonderfully two-edged name. Character and artifact names are a Big Deal in her book: The Heavy Angels. Corvax, who was once a Roc. The Abacand® pocket-brains, sentient but not, well, street-smart. The chilly (but polite) Shuriken Death-angel.... Man, I love this kind of stuff. Especially when it doesn't take itself too seriously. She put exploding spaceships in, too.
OK. My point is that Natural History is a book to be savored rather than gulped. Robson's put a lot of hard work, and hard thinking, into her backstory -- but she doesn't spoon-feed the reader -- or, worse, drop in great expository lumps, and some readers won't like the extra skullwork they'll have to do to keep up. Well, too bad for them. Robson can write rings around 90% of all the novelists I've ever read, both inside & out of the SF genre. She's benefiting from UK bookdom's wise refusal to stuff SF into an airtight box, cut off from the winds of Greater Fiction....
Alright, I'm getting carried away here, but this lady can *write*. Trust me. This is certainly not a perfect novel, and I can (kinda sorta) see why it's taken her awhile to find a US publisher. She's writing for *adults*, and avoiding the cartoonish simplicity of, well, 90% of SF books currently in print. So she's not (sigh) likely to find a mass market -- but for those few brave souls who seek science fiction written with thought and substance, Natural History is for *you*, me buckos. You know who you are. What are you waiting for?
Reviewed in 2005 for SF Site, https://www.sfsite.com/05a/nh199.htm
2020 reread:
Holds up really well -- I'm kicking it up a half-star, and rounding up to 5 stars. The best parts are thrillingly strange, and left me breathless, as only the very best SF can do. Mind, this is far from a perfect book. Parts of it are a bit of a slog, and you can safely skim the sophomore philosophizing. But the ending is pitch-perfect. And the book opens and closes with lines from Don McLean's classic "American Pie." If you've never tried the book, well, you should!
January 4, 2020
About 3/4 of the way through this book I realized I had lost the plot, or maybe never had it to begin with, but I was enjoying reading it, so I kept going.
I can't really tell you what happened in it because I don't know. There were some humans, they weren't all that important, some type of augmented humans, some totally AI constructs, and I guess a 1st Contact situation with something they called Stuff.
Stuff is kind of like a group mind life form thing, and if you interact with it, it will absorb you, but only if you want it to.
Or something like that.
I didn't get it, but I read it, and it wasn't bad.
Lambie just asked me if this book was speculative anthropology. In thinking about it, this book is a lot more than I first thought. She (Lambie) and I have been talking about the possiblities, conflicts, etc. present, that I have changed my rating from 3 stars to 5.
I think I will revisit it in a few months.
I can't really tell you what happened in it because I don't know. There were some humans, they weren't all that important, some type of augmented humans, some totally AI constructs, and I guess a 1st Contact situation with something they called Stuff.
Stuff is kind of like a group mind life form thing, and if you interact with it, it will absorb you, but only if you want it to.
Or something like that.
I didn't get it, but I read it, and it wasn't bad.
Lambie just asked me if this book was speculative anthropology. In thinking about it, this book is a lot more than I first thought. She (Lambie) and I have been talking about the possiblities, conflicts, etc. present, that I have changed my rating from 3 stars to 5.
I think I will revisit it in a few months.
February 12, 2013
Originally published on my blog here in February 2004.
While Alastair Reynolds and Richard K. Morgan seem to have become established as forming the vanguard of a new school of British science fiction writers, Justina Robson has yet to gain such a level of recognition. Perhaps her novels, while sharing many of the concerns of these writers, have so far proved just a little less inventive.
Natural History is her third novel, and is her take on the ancient science fiction plot of the first alien contact. This pivotal event happens in an unusual and, as far as I know, an unprecedented way: the discovery of alien technology is made by an interstellar probe which is a combination of human and machine consciousness. The human background to the discovery is that large numbers of such human/machine hybrids (the "Forged") exist, mainly engineered for environments which are not suitable for basic human beings, who are disparaged as the "Unevolved". Many of them have been seeking freedom from the demands put upon them by the human race, and the being who discovers the alien technology is one of them. The discovery suggests to her the possibility of independence for the Forged, with their own planetary system far away from Earth; the technology she discovers turns out to be in part an instantaneous transport mechanism, which she uses accidentally to go to what is presumably the home planet of the aliens who built it. The problem is, this planet seems now to be devoid of life, though full of signs of recent occupation - oxygen in the atmosphere, and so on. The rest of the novel is about investigating this planet in the face of the complications provided by the different ideas of the Forged about how to go about becoming independent.
There are many nods to the classics of the science fiction genre, from the name Tanelorn given to a citylike structure on the new planet (see Michael Moorcock), to Star Trek, to clear influences from Iain M. Banks, and even to Casper the Friendly Ghost. There are also names adapted from those associated with real life SETI projects. This is one of the many reasons why this particular novel fits in better with those of writers like Reynolds and Morgan than Robson's earlier ones.
There are two sides to this novel - the quest to find out about th vanished aliens and their technology, and the relationship between the Forged and the Unevolved. Though the first of these strands is what brings on the crisis in the second, the two are not really as integrated as they could be. Towards the end, chapters set on the eerie alien planet - which is really well done - are more or less alternated with ones set back on Earth where no one has any idea what is happening to the explorers. This means that there are constant, abrupt changes in atmosphere, and this is Natural History's biggest flaw.
The whole novel works up to the revelation of what the alien material - which becomes known as "Stuff" - actually is. This sort of climax is quite common in the science fiction genre; since many of its stories revolve around strange objects, the discovery of their true nature is often the most important moment. However, it is often poorly handled technically; such a climax needs careful preparation, with tantalising hints to hold the reader's interest along the way which don't let slip too much of the answer, which must still be novel and surprising when it is revealed. (This is basically the same kind of construction as is involved in revealing the identity of the killer in a murder mystery.) Here, it is handled superbly well, and the answer is a fascinating one that I would like to discuss but won't because it would ruin the novel for anyone who wants to read it.
Natural History is a fascinating, well thought out piece of science fiction, and it's about time that Justina Robson got some of the wider recognition that she deserves.
While Alastair Reynolds and Richard K. Morgan seem to have become established as forming the vanguard of a new school of British science fiction writers, Justina Robson has yet to gain such a level of recognition. Perhaps her novels, while sharing many of the concerns of these writers, have so far proved just a little less inventive.
Natural History is her third novel, and is her take on the ancient science fiction plot of the first alien contact. This pivotal event happens in an unusual and, as far as I know, an unprecedented way: the discovery of alien technology is made by an interstellar probe which is a combination of human and machine consciousness. The human background to the discovery is that large numbers of such human/machine hybrids (the "Forged") exist, mainly engineered for environments which are not suitable for basic human beings, who are disparaged as the "Unevolved". Many of them have been seeking freedom from the demands put upon them by the human race, and the being who discovers the alien technology is one of them. The discovery suggests to her the possibility of independence for the Forged, with their own planetary system far away from Earth; the technology she discovers turns out to be in part an instantaneous transport mechanism, which she uses accidentally to go to what is presumably the home planet of the aliens who built it. The problem is, this planet seems now to be devoid of life, though full of signs of recent occupation - oxygen in the atmosphere, and so on. The rest of the novel is about investigating this planet in the face of the complications provided by the different ideas of the Forged about how to go about becoming independent.
There are many nods to the classics of the science fiction genre, from the name Tanelorn given to a citylike structure on the new planet (see Michael Moorcock), to Star Trek, to clear influences from Iain M. Banks, and even to Casper the Friendly Ghost. There are also names adapted from those associated with real life SETI projects. This is one of the many reasons why this particular novel fits in better with those of writers like Reynolds and Morgan than Robson's earlier ones.
There are two sides to this novel - the quest to find out about th vanished aliens and their technology, and the relationship between the Forged and the Unevolved. Though the first of these strands is what brings on the crisis in the second, the two are not really as integrated as they could be. Towards the end, chapters set on the eerie alien planet - which is really well done - are more or less alternated with ones set back on Earth where no one has any idea what is happening to the explorers. This means that there are constant, abrupt changes in atmosphere, and this is Natural History's biggest flaw.
The whole novel works up to the revelation of what the alien material - which becomes known as "Stuff" - actually is. This sort of climax is quite common in the science fiction genre; since many of its stories revolve around strange objects, the discovery of their true nature is often the most important moment. However, it is often poorly handled technically; such a climax needs careful preparation, with tantalising hints to hold the reader's interest along the way which don't let slip too much of the answer, which must still be novel and surprising when it is revealed. (This is basically the same kind of construction as is involved in revealing the identity of the killer in a murder mystery.) Here, it is handled superbly well, and the answer is a fascinating one that I would like to discuss but won't because it would ruin the novel for anyone who wants to read it.
Natural History is a fascinating, well thought out piece of science fiction, and it's about time that Justina Robson got some of the wider recognition that she deserves.
August 28, 2011
For those interested in SF, this is a fantastic read. I'm only giving it three stars because I'm finding myself increasingly less drawn to this kind of SF -- I'm not so interested in technology and singularities and post-humanism. I'm less interested in a character's final physical transformation and more interested in the almost totally silent voice in this narrative, her penpal who has some romantic feelings for her. I want to know how he reacts, and I never got to find out.
The technology is exciting, makes sense, and the appeal and the horror of it came through quite well to me. The world Robson builds is amazing, too, deftly drawing up a society of modified humans and their conflicts with the Unevolved. All in all, it's interesting, but the story just wasn't the sort I get deeply involved in.
Recommended for those who enjoy space opera, technology-based SF, that kind of thing.
The technology is exciting, makes sense, and the appeal and the horror of it came through quite well to me. The world Robson builds is amazing, too, deftly drawing up a society of modified humans and their conflicts with the Unevolved. All in all, it's interesting, but the story just wasn't the sort I get deeply involved in.
Recommended for those who enjoy space opera, technology-based SF, that kind of thing.
November 20, 2019
A superb but complex read, heavy going but I enjoyed it. The concepts, characters and story line are indicative of the creative mind of the author seen in all of her books. I recommend this book with no hesitation or qualification. Go on, read it.
February 11, 2017
I really enjoyed this book and am so glad it's a standalone. Therefore I knew it would have at least some sense of closure before I started. The pace of the book keeps it from getting too bogged down in technical details but that doesn't mean it's shallow. With shades of Leviathan Wakes, Lock In, and Ilium, this book seamlessly welds a lot of different ideas and concepts together in one.
At times philosophical, political, technological, and a bit of straight-forward action/adventure I was quite impressed and look forward to trying more from this author. Definitely worth a try.
At times philosophical, political, technological, and a bit of straight-forward action/adventure I was quite impressed and look forward to trying more from this author. Definitely worth a try.
October 28, 2020
Isol is a hyper human in the form of an space ship who believes she has finally found what all Forged humans have been searching for: an Earth like planet they can call a second home.
Robson's novel is far easier to read than the one sentence synopsis might suggest. The writing flows and twists to keep the reader's interest, but its broad scope is not for the faint of heart.
Robson's novel is far easier to read than the one sentence synopsis might suggest. The writing flows and twists to keep the reader's interest, but its broad scope is not for the faint of heart.
December 6, 2016
In Natural History man has created a sentient organa-mechanical workforce—the Forged—of human DNA merged with mechanical technology. The Forged have evolved to the point where they now seek to break away from humankind and define their own destiny. Far from earth, Voyager Lonestar Isol, a Forged designed for deep space exploration, has found an earth like planet hosting alien technology that appears to offer the Forged both a home world and the means to leap from their current limits of Form and Function to be anything they might desire.
The first part of Natural History can be read from a variety of perspectives each providing food for thought. At its simplest, it is a parent vs child story. Man created the Forged. Like young adults, they now wish to separate and define their own path, rebelling against the pull of their parents which they see as confining and limiting.
On a darker level, there is a master-slave relationship. The Forged were created to be servants. They have evolved into a potential physical and economic threat to Man’s master-servant way of life. Man wishes to hold onto this relationship. The Forged wish to break free of their servitude.
Finally, there is an over-arching theme of race/class relations. In the same way a person of one ethnicity may struggle to understand a person of another ethnicity whose life experiences, challenges and desires are very different, Man struggles to understand the Forged. Man's human lens has become insufficient. The Forged have become other. The challenge expands when Man and the Forged seek to understand the even more alien technology found by Lonestar Isol. It is so alien that even their shared perspectives are initially inadequate.
The world Robson has created is fascinating but difficult to understand in the first third of the book. The Forged are distinctly alien. Are Corvax and Gritter for example birds augmented with human intelligence and robotics or robots created to look like birds? The author is never clear. A curious choice in a book where the central theme is about how difficult it can be relate to those who are different, that Ms. Robson provides so little explanation of her characters that the reader is left struggling to relate to them. I can imagine many readers giving up at Chapter Two finding the characters and setting too foreign. I almost did.
The latter half of Natural History is more straight up, very good space opera in the vein of Alastair Reynolds and Iain Banks. The alien technology is revealed to be much more than simple mechanics, and the story evolves into an interesting first contact narrative.
Robson’s themes of parent vs child, master vs slave, human vs alien narrow in the final act to a single choice: The Forged can remain individuals in whatever their circumstance or be absorbed into a collective where individuality is not just suppressed but non existent. They can realize their dream of moving beyond Form and Function to become anything possible, but only if they give up all individual choice in what they become and in essence become slaves to a new more alien master. An interesting variation on the question of what would you give up to become everything you might dream?
Overall a good thought provoking read of two stars for the first third of the book, 3.5 for the last half for a net three stars. On my Buy, Borrow, Skip scale: a borrow.
The first part of Natural History can be read from a variety of perspectives each providing food for thought. At its simplest, it is a parent vs child story. Man created the Forged. Like young adults, they now wish to separate and define their own path, rebelling against the pull of their parents which they see as confining and limiting.
On a darker level, there is a master-slave relationship. The Forged were created to be servants. They have evolved into a potential physical and economic threat to Man’s master-servant way of life. Man wishes to hold onto this relationship. The Forged wish to break free of their servitude.
Finally, there is an over-arching theme of race/class relations. In the same way a person of one ethnicity may struggle to understand a person of another ethnicity whose life experiences, challenges and desires are very different, Man struggles to understand the Forged. Man's human lens has become insufficient. The Forged have become other. The challenge expands when Man and the Forged seek to understand the even more alien technology found by Lonestar Isol. It is so alien that even their shared perspectives are initially inadequate.
The world Robson has created is fascinating but difficult to understand in the first third of the book. The Forged are distinctly alien. Are Corvax and Gritter for example birds augmented with human intelligence and robotics or robots created to look like birds? The author is never clear. A curious choice in a book where the central theme is about how difficult it can be relate to those who are different, that Ms. Robson provides so little explanation of her characters that the reader is left struggling to relate to them. I can imagine many readers giving up at Chapter Two finding the characters and setting too foreign. I almost did.
The latter half of Natural History is more straight up, very good space opera in the vein of Alastair Reynolds and Iain Banks. The alien technology is revealed to be much more than simple mechanics, and the story evolves into an interesting first contact narrative.
Robson’s themes of parent vs child, master vs slave, human vs alien narrow in the final act to a single choice: The Forged can remain individuals in whatever their circumstance or be absorbed into a collective where individuality is not just suppressed but non existent. They can realize their dream of moving beyond Form and Function to become anything possible, but only if they give up all individual choice in what they become and in essence become slaves to a new more alien master. An interesting variation on the question of what would you give up to become everything you might dream?
Overall a good thought provoking read of two stars for the first third of the book, 3.5 for the last half for a net three stars. On my Buy, Borrow, Skip scale: a borrow.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 8, 2021
I could just not warm up to this book. The plot wasn't captivating enough and I struggled to keep up with all of the different characters, some of which I didn't even deem necessary. It did turn slightly more interesting towards the end. However, I don't believe I would've finished it if I didn't have to read it for uni.
February 4, 2017
This is a strong metaphysical concept story, but instead of exploring spirituality, it is about a scientific/quasi-emotional fusion idea of oneness, as conceived by a mathematical, multidimensional (as in quantum theory) being(s?) with only one purpose - to find meaning. However, it isn't nice or wonderful. It's more like that Twilight Zone story of contact where things seem a touch wrong, although at first it appears to be simply the risks of progress or of Darwinian evolution, so humans accept the friendly aliens offer to travel to their home planet - only to discover their mission statement, 'To Serve Man' is a cookbook.
I don't know why, but all of the time I was reading this, I kept feeling the same way I do when I'm trying to remember something I've forgotten, like a word or a song 'on the tip of my tongue', as our old Americanism saying goes. I think I was having a metaphysical moment myself, perhaps connecting to the Collective Consciousness of Carl Jung...or maybe I was ionizing.
The first 50 pages or so are challenging to understand, like trying to put coherence into dream fragments upon awakening from sleeping, but then the story breaks into a landscape of description that I recognized. Once it started making sense, I realized this future technical universe of bio-machined humans was amazing, even if it is a touch hellish, but it still is a very plausible human future. Robby the robot, whose fictionalized, movie-humanized body has been translated into the current crop of NASA and Japanese robots in present real-life news, actually feels very limited in invented imagination after finishing this book.
The story:
Spaceships and human/animal people in this fictional universe, who are similar to the car-building robots in Ford Motors factories only with sentience, are humans with tweaked DNA, and they are pissed off. Unevolved Earth humans have been treating the Forged and Degraded (sadly, humans whose creation went wrong in the test tube) with no respect, so not only have the half-humans started to organize, a few of them have become radicals and are SO done with the monkeys!
An unexpected and unknown life form appears to the dying Forged human-spaceship Isol, who thinks it's a new technical engine which will further her cause of breaking away from the human solar system once she has fused with it. When she has healed after fusing with the alien, she decides its time for the revolution - except she has to convince the other Forged, who are all very human in their politics and emotional interests, as well as contend with the unevolved on Earth, still a source of solace and survival for many of the Forged. A history professor, unevolved Zephyr, is enlisted to travel within Isol to a mysterious planet that Isol wants for the Forged's new home. Of course, everyone has misunderstood what the 'engine' stuff really is - Silly putty with motivation. (Play the X-File theme song here).
This is not a silly or a thriller book, actually, but a very fascinating look at a possible future if humanity decides to use DNA changes in order to live in space. I was drawn in because of curiosity and amazement, but I didn't really connect with characters. One of the unusual aspects that fascinated me was how 'people' end up being emotionally maimed or missing emotional human bits, which was unintentional. The Forged end up creating a fantasy computer world, similar to a video game, called the Virtua or Dreamtime, where they can be fully human, to help them live with their angst, and it works as a stopgap. When they exit Dreamtime, the Forged still miss those human bits even while they use their enhanced bodies to make a living and survive the pirates and politics of their actual lives. The Alien is a terrifying entity to me, and I was strongly reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's 'Childhood's End'. The author seems to suggest DNA is why it feels like that to me. Maybe I agree with that.
I don't know why, but all of the time I was reading this, I kept feeling the same way I do when I'm trying to remember something I've forgotten, like a word or a song 'on the tip of my tongue', as our old Americanism saying goes. I think I was having a metaphysical moment myself, perhaps connecting to the Collective Consciousness of Carl Jung...or maybe I was ionizing.
The first 50 pages or so are challenging to understand, like trying to put coherence into dream fragments upon awakening from sleeping, but then the story breaks into a landscape of description that I recognized. Once it started making sense, I realized this future technical universe of bio-machined humans was amazing, even if it is a touch hellish, but it still is a very plausible human future. Robby the robot, whose fictionalized, movie-humanized body has been translated into the current crop of NASA and Japanese robots in present real-life news, actually feels very limited in invented imagination after finishing this book.
The story:
Spaceships and human/animal people in this fictional universe, who are similar to the car-building robots in Ford Motors factories only with sentience, are humans with tweaked DNA, and they are pissed off. Unevolved Earth humans have been treating the Forged and Degraded (sadly, humans whose creation went wrong in the test tube) with no respect, so not only have the half-humans started to organize, a few of them have become radicals and are SO done with the monkeys!
An unexpected and unknown life form appears to the dying Forged human-spaceship Isol, who thinks it's a new technical engine which will further her cause of breaking away from the human solar system once she has fused with it. When she has healed after fusing with the alien, she decides its time for the revolution - except she has to convince the other Forged, who are all very human in their politics and emotional interests, as well as contend with the unevolved on Earth, still a source of solace and survival for many of the Forged. A history professor, unevolved Zephyr, is enlisted to travel within Isol to a mysterious planet that Isol wants for the Forged's new home. Of course, everyone has misunderstood what the 'engine' stuff really is - Silly putty with motivation. (Play the X-File theme song here).
This is not a silly or a thriller book, actually, but a very fascinating look at a possible future if humanity decides to use DNA changes in order to live in space. I was drawn in because of curiosity and amazement, but I didn't really connect with characters. One of the unusual aspects that fascinated me was how 'people' end up being emotionally maimed or missing emotional human bits, which was unintentional. The Forged end up creating a fantasy computer world, similar to a video game, called the Virtua or Dreamtime, where they can be fully human, to help them live with their angst, and it works as a stopgap. When they exit Dreamtime, the Forged still miss those human bits even while they use their enhanced bodies to make a living and survive the pirates and politics of their actual lives. The Alien is a terrifying entity to me, and I was strongly reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's 'Childhood's End'. The author seems to suggest DNA is why it feels like that to me. Maybe I agree with that.
January 9, 2010
There is a great deal of potential in this novel, but the potential goes unrealized.
In a future where human minds are combined with machines and animals through genetic engineering (I assume this is how it's done--it's never clearly defined in the book), humans have spread throughout the solar system, mostly by means of creating new beings that can handle different environments. There is a growing pressure for all of these created beings (the "Forged") to achieve some kind of independence.
A forged ship, Isol, makes a discovery (or it discovers her) of "Stuff." This alien substance allows someone who takes it in to travel across the universe instantaneously (or do anything they want? Again, this isn't very clear) and Isol uses it to find a new inhabitable planet, Zia Del Notte, that seems to have once been inhabited but now be empty. She then takes a human anthropologist, Zephyr Duqesne, to the planet to verify whether or not this is a first contact experience.
As the novel goes on, the potential political revolt of the Forged classes becomes stronger and Stuff, of course, as well as the planet that it helped Isol find, prove to be even more mysterious than they originally seemed.
There are enough interesting concepts (Forging, Uluru, Stuff, physics, philosophy of mind and science) and characters in this book for a series or several novels, but as it is, it's muddled. It suffers from the same problems as a fantasy novel with unlimited magic: There are so few limits on the technologies employed that the plot all ends up seeming arbitrary. The characters don't get enough scenes each to coalesce. Most readers will find this book frustrating.
In a future where human minds are combined with machines and animals through genetic engineering (I assume this is how it's done--it's never clearly defined in the book), humans have spread throughout the solar system, mostly by means of creating new beings that can handle different environments. There is a growing pressure for all of these created beings (the "Forged") to achieve some kind of independence.
A forged ship, Isol, makes a discovery (or it discovers her) of "Stuff." This alien substance allows someone who takes it in to travel across the universe instantaneously (or do anything they want? Again, this isn't very clear) and Isol uses it to find a new inhabitable planet, Zia Del Notte, that seems to have once been inhabited but now be empty. She then takes a human anthropologist, Zephyr Duqesne, to the planet to verify whether or not this is a first contact experience.
As the novel goes on, the potential political revolt of the Forged classes becomes stronger and Stuff, of course, as well as the planet that it helped Isol find, prove to be even more mysterious than they originally seemed.
There are enough interesting concepts (Forging, Uluru, Stuff, physics, philosophy of mind and science) and characters in this book for a series or several novels, but as it is, it's muddled. It suffers from the same problems as a fantasy novel with unlimited magic: There are so few limits on the technologies employed that the plot all ends up seeming arbitrary. The characters don't get enough scenes each to coalesce. Most readers will find this book frustrating.
May 18, 2010
My favorite of the three Robson books I've read. I'm glad I read these in order - Robson is getting better, having started out with quite a high bar. This story is dense, thought-provoking, intriguing, populated with characters that - regardless of their origin - are fleshed in the rich, fluid alchemy of Robson's writing. Brilliant.
May 5, 2018
This is a far future story mostly populated with augmented humans, "forged" (biologically and technologically designed intelligent entities developed by humans to do various work), hive societies, etc. Some readers may be put off by the extent of scientific references.
The plot centers around alien technology which allows instantaneous interstellar travel (and other implications realized later) and how many "forged" characters would like to use this to move to a far-off planet to be independent of humans. However, much of the book seemed to be an exploration of the various future possibilities of altered humans, AIs and other intelligences. Perhaps, questions of what constitutes being human and/or a machine - and at what point does a hi-tech machine no longer deserve to be treated as a slave.
One character is an archeologist who is more or less a traditional human form. As an archeologist, she wonders how much she will be able to conclude about alien artifacts on a lifeless world. She knows she would tend to interpret the artifacts based on assumptions from human biological and cultural factors. Her thoughts on this reminded me of the problem of depicting aliens in SF. If an author was successful in having aliens who could not be understood with the help of the reader's background in human biology and culture, the reader might not comprehend the alien characters and would almost certainly not identify with them. Therefore, presentation of genuinely alien characters is unlikely and if accomplished may result in a commercially unsuccessful book. The archeologist also has been corresponding with a "friend" - a possible romantic connection - whom she's never met. She learns that he has a body which has been made in a very non-human biological form. She thinks about this and wonders what it is to be human and whether this should be a significant consideration for her in view of what else she knows about him from their correspondence.
We're shown several examples of intelligent beings which are a combination of multiple individuals and a group unity. One is a "hive" with a queen and many "drone." The drones are usually subordinate / "loyal employees" acting on a common goal directed by the queen, but at the direction of the queen may also join in a group mental effort. There are forged beings which are huge terraforming workers. These terraformers can have many physically separae parts (like a fleet of construction vehicles) each with a lesser subsidiary mind which will later update the central mind with its memories. There's also a sort of "group mind" in which some participating minds might only exist in another state of existence, while others of the minds might be associated with a physical body somewhere.
There are also augmented humans in a variety of body forms.
[spoilers]
Later in the book it is found the alien material allows instantaneous travel by using the 7 extra dimensions hypothesized in some physics models - and that in using the material for such purposes an individual begins a process of becoming permanently linked to a vast network of minds. This is not desired by some people, and greatly opposed by more individualistic beings.
The faraway planet the forged are interested in turns out to be made of alien material. This both means they can't terraform it as intended, and also means it will tend to lead individuals to become part of the mind network. So, there's an element of things not being what they seemed, and questions of individual and group identity.
Some of the characters have something like small tablet super computers with an AI. The archeologist finds she'll be stranded on the distant planet - her only survival option is joining the mind network. Her tablet AI has concluded he/it doesn't meet the criteria to join the mind network (although it would be interested in sharing the network's knowledge.) So, the AI would be left alone. The AI requests it be left in a dark place so its solar cells won't keep it powered indefinitely alone. What kind of mind / entity does this suggest the AI is?
The plot centers around alien technology which allows instantaneous interstellar travel (and other implications realized later) and how many "forged" characters would like to use this to move to a far-off planet to be independent of humans. However, much of the book seemed to be an exploration of the various future possibilities of altered humans, AIs and other intelligences. Perhaps, questions of what constitutes being human and/or a machine - and at what point does a hi-tech machine no longer deserve to be treated as a slave.
One character is an archeologist who is more or less a traditional human form. As an archeologist, she wonders how much she will be able to conclude about alien artifacts on a lifeless world. She knows she would tend to interpret the artifacts based on assumptions from human biological and cultural factors. Her thoughts on this reminded me of the problem of depicting aliens in SF. If an author was successful in having aliens who could not be understood with the help of the reader's background in human biology and culture, the reader might not comprehend the alien characters and would almost certainly not identify with them. Therefore, presentation of genuinely alien characters is unlikely and if accomplished may result in a commercially unsuccessful book. The archeologist also has been corresponding with a "friend" - a possible romantic connection - whom she's never met. She learns that he has a body which has been made in a very non-human biological form. She thinks about this and wonders what it is to be human and whether this should be a significant consideration for her in view of what else she knows about him from their correspondence.
We're shown several examples of intelligent beings which are a combination of multiple individuals and a group unity. One is a "hive" with a queen and many "drone." The drones are usually subordinate / "loyal employees" acting on a common goal directed by the queen, but at the direction of the queen may also join in a group mental effort. There are forged beings which are huge terraforming workers. These terraformers can have many physically separae parts (like a fleet of construction vehicles) each with a lesser subsidiary mind which will later update the central mind with its memories. There's also a sort of "group mind" in which some participating minds might only exist in another state of existence, while others of the minds might be associated with a physical body somewhere.
There are also augmented humans in a variety of body forms.
[spoilers]
Later in the book it is found the alien material allows instantaneous travel by using the 7 extra dimensions hypothesized in some physics models - and that in using the material for such purposes an individual begins a process of becoming permanently linked to a vast network of minds. This is not desired by some people, and greatly opposed by more individualistic beings.
The faraway planet the forged are interested in turns out to be made of alien material. This both means they can't terraform it as intended, and also means it will tend to lead individuals to become part of the mind network. So, there's an element of things not being what they seemed, and questions of individual and group identity.
Some of the characters have something like small tablet super computers with an AI. The archeologist finds she'll be stranded on the distant planet - her only survival option is joining the mind network. Her tablet AI has concluded he/it doesn't meet the criteria to join the mind network (although it would be interested in sharing the network's knowledge.) So, the AI would be left alone. The AI requests it be left in a dark place so its solar cells won't keep it powered indefinitely alone. What kind of mind / entity does this suggest the AI is?
January 12, 2022
After reading four YA science fiction space opera books in a row, I decided I wanted an adult one and this book certainly delivers. Nominated for the British SF, Philip K. Dick and John W. Campbell awards.
A new (apparently deserted) planet is discovered and the Unevolved (human) and multiple factions of the Forged (post-human) pit themselves against each other, to decide what should be done with it. Smart, intelligent plotting. Clever, witty dialogue and commentary. Lots of politics and morally dubious characters. Multiple POV's (some of them minor).
It's one of those books where, on a re-read, I'm sure you'd find lots of details that you missed.
A new (apparently deserted) planet is discovered and the Unevolved (human) and multiple factions of the Forged (post-human) pit themselves against each other, to decide what should be done with it. Smart, intelligent plotting. Clever, witty dialogue and commentary. Lots of politics and morally dubious characters. Multiple POV's (some of them minor).
It's one of those books where, on a re-read, I'm sure you'd find lots of details that you missed.
December 1, 2008
Justina Robson's Natural History is a mix of great ideas, cool creations and mediocre characters that was a fun read, but ultimately not terribly satisfying. Her book is set some centuries hence where humans have created the Forged, genetically re-designed humans made to excel at certain tasks. Robson presents a more interesting take on the Cylon problem, how does created life deal with its creators? In this case, one member of the Forged stumbles onto a new technology that both reveals a potential home for the Forged as well as providing a means of getting there quickly. Of course the technology is more than it seems.
Many of Robson's creations are astounding. Some of the Forged are giant, including living spaceships, hive minds and, most fascinating, the terraforming class. These giants crawl over worlds like the Moon and Mars and slowly convert the environments into ones habitable for Earth life.
The problem with the book is that the story isn't very interesting overall. There is a political drama but it is never fully developed. The ending is rushed and is wrapped up a bit too tidily. You could do worse than this book, as Robson is certainly creative and thougtful, but I think you could do a lot better.
Many of Robson's creations are astounding. Some of the Forged are giant, including living spaceships, hive minds and, most fascinating, the terraforming class. These giants crawl over worlds like the Moon and Mars and slowly convert the environments into ones habitable for Earth life.
The problem with the book is that the story isn't very interesting overall. There is a political drama but it is never fully developed. The ending is rushed and is wrapped up a bit too tidily. You could do worse than this book, as Robson is certainly creative and thougtful, but I think you could do a lot better.
November 6, 2021
Forty pages in and I don't know what type of entities Isol and Corvax are. Are they ships with AI? Human? Alien? Chapter one seemed like it could have been one page and given me info that the fifteen poetic pages didn't give me. The descriptions of Isol are like a ship, but with human emotion. At the end of the chapter she dies...or doesn't.
OK. Isol, etc. are Forged humans. Human consciousness in an engineered body. The Forged were created to serve particular functions, but now they are kind of doing their own thing. Isol almost died, was saved by some alien tech that allows her instantaneous travel, found a new planet. I'm not sure what the end game is. Does she want it for the Forged, so they can move away, or what? We got a glimpse into the origin of Corvax but that chapter was confusing and more of a slog than the rest of the story. Almost half way through. I might as well finish it.
Done. I guess there is some sort of a plot, What is this alien matter? How is it doing all of these amazing things? But for me it's way too existential. Two stars, maybe two and a half. The plot didn't grab me, neither did the characters. The writing must appeal to someone else, it's not my taste.
OK. Isol, etc. are Forged humans. Human consciousness in an engineered body. The Forged were created to serve particular functions, but now they are kind of doing their own thing. Isol almost died, was saved by some alien tech that allows her instantaneous travel, found a new planet. I'm not sure what the end game is. Does she want it for the Forged, so they can move away, or what? We got a glimpse into the origin of Corvax but that chapter was confusing and more of a slog than the rest of the story. Almost half way through. I might as well finish it.
Done. I guess there is some sort of a plot, What is this alien matter? How is it doing all of these amazing things? But for me it's way too existential. Two stars, maybe two and a half. The plot didn't grab me, neither did the characters. The writing must appeal to someone else, it's not my taste.
September 21, 2012
How did I miss this? I think in 2003 I was still trolling the shelves of our local Borders for new books, and this being of British origin just wasn't there - and how did it not get nominated for a Hugo / Nebula when clearly inferior novels were? But thanks to Goodreads I finally have the pleasure of Ms Robson's nicely paced exploration of humans, post-humans, and hybrids meeting up with "stuff" in a very entertaining - space opera? hard scifi? - probably a mixture, nicely seasoned with very quirky characters somewhat reminiscent of Banks's Culture. The setting and events are complex, I had to start again after I realised at chapter 3 that I was totally lost, but then the originality and depth of the characters and ideas gripped me and I was swept along by the narrative.
I look forward to more of her works.
I look forward to more of her works.
December 28, 2022
Highly competent Hard-ish Space Opera about what it is to be human when form is almost infinitely malleable... and then, on encountering a sublimed alien race, what it is to be human when form isn't even necessary.
Remember the Flintstones? With dinosaurs adapted to almost every form of drudgery to save to cavemen the work? Here we have that -albeit in a much more complex and usually far grander fashion- applied to humanity now spread across the Solar System and slowly moving out to the stars. And, though colourful, insightful, and often just downright fun, like the cartoon, it's not entirely believable. I don't quite buy Robson's timeline getting from where we are now to the -obviously fractious- society of the future where self-aware and highly intelligent minds are given menial tasks of transportation, (space craft, surface-to-orbit lifts, aircraft), or have been devolved into a grubby sub-human existence.
But, like I said, it's FUN. It's quite original. The pages turn with alacrity and you are kept guessing as to outcomes. Most promisingly, by the time I reached the end, I both wanted to read more by Robson and more set in this particular world. Recommended.
Remember the Flintstones? With dinosaurs adapted to almost every form of drudgery to save to cavemen the work? Here we have that -albeit in a much more complex and usually far grander fashion- applied to humanity now spread across the Solar System and slowly moving out to the stars. And, though colourful, insightful, and often just downright fun, like the cartoon, it's not entirely believable. I don't quite buy Robson's timeline getting from where we are now to the -obviously fractious- society of the future where self-aware and highly intelligent minds are given menial tasks of transportation, (space craft, surface-to-orbit lifts, aircraft), or have been devolved into a grubby sub-human existence.
But, like I said, it's FUN. It's quite original. The pages turn with alacrity and you are kept guessing as to outcomes. Most promisingly, by the time I reached the end, I both wanted to read more by Robson and more set in this particular world. Recommended.
September 29, 2020
If a choice is easy, is it worth making?
I really enjoyed this - I've always been a sucker for transhumanism themes and space operas. There's an amazing cast of characters and world building (one character is literally a world-building terraformer) and lots of great questions.
I think I was digging for similar books to Children of Time/Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky and I definitely found one in a similar mold.
I really enjoyed this - I've always been a sucker for transhumanism themes and space operas. There's an amazing cast of characters and world building (one character is literally a world-building terraformer) and lots of great questions.
I think I was digging for similar books to Children of Time/Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky and I definitely found one in a similar mold.
July 3, 2025
Muy bueno. Creo que explora una idea interesante, la de la sociedad de los humanos no evolucionados y los forjados, que ya de por sí daría para una buena novela. Pero además introduce una idea, un conflicto adicional que podría asociarse con la trascendencia y que permite introducir el sentido de la maravilla... Me ha parecido una escritora muy buena, que no abusa de complejidad innecesaria y con momentos brillantes.
March 17, 2014
Natural History is writing of the first order.
Here there is an entirely revised system of technology, biology, psychology, and attendant politics. Here there is a broad cast of people, where not only their characters have arcs, but so do their relations and their beings, and so does the very ground of the world. Here there is quartz, which is a painting of Shinjuku Library, which is an alien planet, which is a watching extradimensional stuff. Here there are riches of creative writing.
The encounter with the alien, first contact, is among the best I have ever read. When human characters walk on the alien planet, its physicality and metaphysicality are vividly disconcerting. The human characters experience its difference, then its familiarity; then they worry about apophenia; then they worry that what they are experiencing is beyond apophenia, that the planet may be structuring itself according to their own desires. Even before this, there is no seventeenth-century question of non-interference: every breath, every touch contaminates the environment. As the environment perhaps changes them also, they fear being consumed, but perhaps the catastrophe has already happened, perhaps they are already simulation, or perhaps mathematics is incomplete and the universe is incoherent and none of this is supposed to make sense.
Robson's achievement is all the greater because she has not set herself the task of illuminating a binary, human/alien (or man/other). For the humans of her world include those much like us (though the primary such character is a black woman) but they are described in a single, highly suggestive and overdetermined word: Unevolved. As well, there are humans who are cyborgs and others who are engineered in ways that would make them unrecognisable to us as people. There are small insect-like people that carry messages, jellies that work deep beneath the sea, psychological isolates who voyage through space, and five-kilometre-wide modular monsters that terraform worlds. People engineered not just in form, but in function too, so it is to Robson's extra credit that she doesn't take the easy way out of making each character typical of its type. She renders each one's personhood as finely as the physics of their situation.
This is a radical novel, in form and function. It strobes across its subject matter, efficiently progressing across dizzying vistas of new information. It is decentring and denaturalising. Yet it is also a social novel, Dickensian. Robson is keenly aware of her literary history. I was struck by the way that Natural History read (in the small) like a Victorian novel with its large number of capitalised verbs, adjectives, and common nouns. There's also a lot of exposition and characters aren't above telling people things about themselves that the others should know, even using the dreaded adverbial clause, 'as you know'. Late in the novel, there is a nested story, still told in the third person, but set in a different typeface, which seems odd until the viewpoint character starts musing on the word 'unquiet' in relation to the alien planet.
Yes, Robson has a sense of humour too, sometimes cute, sometimes wicked, sometimes black, and sometimes easy. Because, she seems to say, this is all great fun.
Here there is an entirely revised system of technology, biology, psychology, and attendant politics. Here there is a broad cast of people, where not only their characters have arcs, but so do their relations and their beings, and so does the very ground of the world. Here there is quartz, which is a painting of Shinjuku Library, which is an alien planet, which is a watching extradimensional stuff. Here there are riches of creative writing.
The encounter with the alien, first contact, is among the best I have ever read. When human characters walk on the alien planet, its physicality and metaphysicality are vividly disconcerting. The human characters experience its difference, then its familiarity; then they worry about apophenia; then they worry that what they are experiencing is beyond apophenia, that the planet may be structuring itself according to their own desires. Even before this, there is no seventeenth-century question of non-interference: every breath, every touch contaminates the environment. As the environment perhaps changes them also, they fear being consumed, but perhaps the catastrophe has already happened, perhaps they are already simulation, or perhaps mathematics is incomplete and the universe is incoherent and none of this is supposed to make sense.
Robson's achievement is all the greater because she has not set herself the task of illuminating a binary, human/alien (or man/other). For the humans of her world include those much like us (though the primary such character is a black woman) but they are described in a single, highly suggestive and overdetermined word: Unevolved. As well, there are humans who are cyborgs and others who are engineered in ways that would make them unrecognisable to us as people. There are small insect-like people that carry messages, jellies that work deep beneath the sea, psychological isolates who voyage through space, and five-kilometre-wide modular monsters that terraform worlds. People engineered not just in form, but in function too, so it is to Robson's extra credit that she doesn't take the easy way out of making each character typical of its type. She renders each one's personhood as finely as the physics of their situation.
This is a radical novel, in form and function. It strobes across its subject matter, efficiently progressing across dizzying vistas of new information. It is decentring and denaturalising. Yet it is also a social novel, Dickensian. Robson is keenly aware of her literary history. I was struck by the way that Natural History read (in the small) like a Victorian novel with its large number of capitalised verbs, adjectives, and common nouns. There's also a lot of exposition and characters aren't above telling people things about themselves that the others should know, even using the dreaded adverbial clause, 'as you know'. Late in the novel, there is a nested story, still told in the third person, but set in a different typeface, which seems odd until the viewpoint character starts musing on the word 'unquiet' in relation to the alien planet.
Yes, Robson has a sense of humour too, sometimes cute, sometimes wicked, sometimes black, and sometimes easy. Because, she seems to say, this is all great fun.
August 3, 2014
Natural History is a space opera, though it's fairly different from many others in the genre. For one thing, it's shorter, which means Robson has to fit a whole lot of science, politics, and (of course) history into just a few pages. Her brevity likely makes some readers happy and grateful that they don't have to wade through miles of scientific jargon, but it could frustrate those who like a little more explanation. I'm not saying I wish the book were 300 pages longer, but I did find some plot points and characters' decisions a little too pat, and was annoyed by some ends left loose.
It is pretty awesome, though, that the two most highly developed characters are female, and arguably both are minorities. Voyager Isol is one of the Forged, half-machine and half-human, basically a sentient spaceship equipped to travel massive interstellar distances with just her own body. Because all her mechanical spaceship parts are like organs of her body, the opening scene in which she is damaged by flying debris is fascinating—she feels real pain as her systems shut down and her engine fails. It's a really creative and effective way for Robson to establish that the Forged are human despite their machinelike aspect.
Isol is miraculously saved when a mysterious substance bonds with her failing engine and not only heals her, but makes her into a super-spacecraft that can travel anywhere in the universe instantly. No longer in her death throes, she explores a nearby Earthlike planet that looks like it once supported life. Isol returns to Earth, intent upon making the new planet a home and refuge for the Forged—a place where they won't be beholden to their human creators, where they will be able to live freely and make their own choices.
People back on Earth, human and Forged alike, aren't sure Isol is telling the truth about this new planet and want to proceed with caution. So they recruit professor of archaeology Zephyr Duquesne, a woman of color and fully human, to accompany Isol back to the mysterious planet for some exploration and analysis. I found Zephyr to be the most interesting and relatable character in the novel. She's out of her element and intimidated by space travel, but her fascination with extinct cultures is too strong for her to resist the opportunity. Who used to live on this faraway planet? And more importantly, what happened to them, that they left seemingly without a trace?
In addition to the Isol/Zephyr storyline, Robson includes sections that follow a strange guy named Corvax, who spends a lot of time in a dreamlike virtual reality, and several other political figures, both human and Forged. Maybe it's because I'm still not a seasoned sci-fi reader, but I found these sections a bit tedious and murky, and wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to get out of them. I was always glad to get back to a chapter that followed Isol and Zephyr.
This book is part of a series on my website, the Summer of Sci-Fi Challenge. You can find the full text of this review, more information about the Challenge, and many other book recommendations at www.readingwithhippos.com.
It is pretty awesome, though, that the two most highly developed characters are female, and arguably both are minorities. Voyager Isol is one of the Forged, half-machine and half-human, basically a sentient spaceship equipped to travel massive interstellar distances with just her own body. Because all her mechanical spaceship parts are like organs of her body, the opening scene in which she is damaged by flying debris is fascinating—she feels real pain as her systems shut down and her engine fails. It's a really creative and effective way for Robson to establish that the Forged are human despite their machinelike aspect.
Isol is miraculously saved when a mysterious substance bonds with her failing engine and not only heals her, but makes her into a super-spacecraft that can travel anywhere in the universe instantly. No longer in her death throes, she explores a nearby Earthlike planet that looks like it once supported life. Isol returns to Earth, intent upon making the new planet a home and refuge for the Forged—a place where they won't be beholden to their human creators, where they will be able to live freely and make their own choices.
People back on Earth, human and Forged alike, aren't sure Isol is telling the truth about this new planet and want to proceed with caution. So they recruit professor of archaeology Zephyr Duquesne, a woman of color and fully human, to accompany Isol back to the mysterious planet for some exploration and analysis. I found Zephyr to be the most interesting and relatable character in the novel. She's out of her element and intimidated by space travel, but her fascination with extinct cultures is too strong for her to resist the opportunity. Who used to live on this faraway planet? And more importantly, what happened to them, that they left seemingly without a trace?
In addition to the Isol/Zephyr storyline, Robson includes sections that follow a strange guy named Corvax, who spends a lot of time in a dreamlike virtual reality, and several other political figures, both human and Forged. Maybe it's because I'm still not a seasoned sci-fi reader, but I found these sections a bit tedious and murky, and wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to get out of them. I was always glad to get back to a chapter that followed Isol and Zephyr.
This book is part of a series on my website, the Summer of Sci-Fi Challenge. You can find the full text of this review, more information about the Challenge, and many other book recommendations at www.readingwithhippos.com.
June 9, 2011
First, you have to love a book that's a serious, hard-SF novel but also has a character that's a living military spaceship called a Shuriken Death-Angel. You also have to admire that Robson can give a character that name and make it sound, in the book's context, genuinely fucking badass, and not like something from a crappy anime.
Anyway, I read Robson's short story Cracklegrackle, which takes place in the same universe, in The New Space Opera 2 and fell in love with the idea of the Forged (genetically engineered cybernetic organisms with human minds but often with physical forms that are wildly different from the standard human body, e.g. the Shuriken Death-Angel). I found Cracklegrackle really unsettling and memorable for reasons that would be spoilers, so I was excited for a whole novel based on the same idea.
I liked most of the characters (I hated Isol, but in a love-to-hate-'em way) and primarily enjoyed seeing events from the perspectives of all the crazy Forged classes, i.e. how their form and adaptations affect their perspective on events and on the world in general. (The terraforming-class "Gaiaforms" were fucking awesome.) Zephyr's subplot bored me sometimes, but overall, I really, really enjoyed this book a lot. Best book I've read in several months.
Anyway, I read Robson's short story Cracklegrackle, which takes place in the same universe, in The New Space Opera 2 and fell in love with the idea of the Forged (genetically engineered cybernetic organisms with human minds but often with physical forms that are wildly different from the standard human body, e.g. the Shuriken Death-Angel). I found Cracklegrackle really unsettling and memorable for reasons that would be spoilers, so I was excited for a whole novel based on the same idea.
I liked most of the characters (I hated Isol, but in a love-to-hate-'em way) and primarily enjoyed seeing events from the perspectives of all the crazy Forged classes, i.e. how their form and adaptations affect their perspective on events and on the world in general. (The terraforming-class "Gaiaforms" were fucking awesome.) Zephyr's subplot bored me sometimes, but overall, I really, really enjoyed this book a lot. Best book I've read in several months.
January 7, 2012
Wow.
Such a good, good read- or rather, such a good book for ME. I freaking love alien biology, embodied knowledge, space travel, philosophy, the ever present failure of cultural relativism, mystery, mystique, beautiful sentences and thought provoking turns of phrase, escape, individualism, letter writing, thought experiments and the transcendental, so this book won my heart from the chapter we first meet Zephyr, a 'cultural archeologist' in love with a (possible) machine-jellyfish hybrid, and kept it fully ensnared till dawn the next day when I turned the last page.
Really, I'm too old to stay up all night reading, but when a book has a plot like this- oh man, it's worth it. I've wondered and quandered over some of the same issues the novel tackles, and reading through it is like visiting the land of answers. Or someone else's answers, at least. I am awed, much like Zephyr upon landing on the new planet, by both the similarities and differences.
And A mother-father named Tupac? How badass is that?
I randomly found this book on a shelf in an underfed used bookstore... It was like finding my name written in an oil spill on the asphalt.
Such a good, good read- or rather, such a good book for ME. I freaking love alien biology, embodied knowledge, space travel, philosophy, the ever present failure of cultural relativism, mystery, mystique, beautiful sentences and thought provoking turns of phrase, escape, individualism, letter writing, thought experiments and the transcendental, so this book won my heart from the chapter we first meet Zephyr, a 'cultural archeologist' in love with a (possible) machine-jellyfish hybrid, and kept it fully ensnared till dawn the next day when I turned the last page.
Really, I'm too old to stay up all night reading, but when a book has a plot like this- oh man, it's worth it. I've wondered and quandered over some of the same issues the novel tackles, and reading through it is like visiting the land of answers. Or someone else's answers, at least. I am awed, much like Zephyr upon landing on the new planet, by both the similarities and differences.
And A mother-father named Tupac? How badass is that?
I randomly found this book on a shelf in an underfed used bookstore... It was like finding my name written in an oil spill on the asphalt.
February 23, 2008
I like Sci Fi but this was incomprehensible. Lots of made-up words and made-up technical jargon. Don't go there.
stricken
July 14, 2014"Frosty-assed and autistic, she was; he didn't want to touch her."
February 15, 2021
DNF. I almost never DNF, but for some reason this one was just unreadable.
December 9, 2022
Space opera that turns the tables on a range of sf tropes on what it means to be human.
Warning: spoiler alerts!!
Set in the middle of the third millennium, Natural History is the first work in Justina Robson’s still evolving series, Natural History (2003-2005?). Humanity has given birth to a multitude of sentient beings, which are leading humanity’s expansion through much of the solar system, indeed are on the verge of supplanting unevolved humans. By introducing an advanced stage of machine intelligence known as Forged, Robson turns the table on the traditional sf trope of man-machine consciousness, interrogating artificial consciousness from the point of view of engineered lifeforms.
The story follows Lonestar Isol, a sentient space ship, as she is shipwrecked on an unnamed planet 27 light years away from Earth. The planet is home to a seemingly abandoned advanced civilisation, and when Isol replaces her engine with an alien artefact it envelops her in multi dimensional space, telling her: “Isol, we were once like you”. She quickly discovers that the engine will allow her to travel anywhere instantly, but instead of bringing the technology back to Earth, she solicits the help from Forged friends of her: Tatresi, a large transport ship, and Corvax, a rogue research station, both of which can instantiate as human-like avatars. Collectively, they dream of breaking away from human control to establish a world for the Forged only, far away from Earth. The newly discovered planet quickly becomes the focal point of Isol’s aspirations, drawing in the the openly political Forged Independence Movement.
Similar to other Forged entities, Isol was originally designed for a single purpose. As an extra-solar explorer, she can process information and experience many times faster than an unevolved, allowing her for example to listen to old songs at high speed and still enjoy them in real-time. It took her only two years to listen to Earth’s entire music repertoire. Like all Forged, Isol was raised in a virtual AI nursery known as Virtua before she was embodied as a space ship. Designed according to human evolutionary principles of childhood development, instilling human sentiments in the process, she, like many other Forged, often have a sense of melancholy, the humanness deeply seated in her deprived of human stimuli, an existential conflict between her form and function. Marooned, she wants to cry but her design does not include the bodily function of tears, causing her in turn to lament that she has been designed to have human emotions. All-too-human, she is not human enough. The Forged’s longing for what essentially amounts to lost childhoods is such that many choose to visit illegally repurposed versions of the Virtua, which offer them a sense of wholeness. Corvax operates one such virtual environment known as Dreamtime of Uluru. Deeply troubled himself, he has become something of a therapist for the Forged, restoring sex to the sexless, friends to the friendless and social contact to the isolated. Quite literally, the Forged are ghosts in the shell.
The relationship between Forged and unevolved has never been defined by open hostility though, and the Forged Independence Movement is not planning a violent break. The Forged feel they have little to fear from humans whom they have nicknamed Old Monkeys, waiting for them to die like an old grandmother. They see themselves as the natural heirs to humanity on the evolutionary ladder. Natural History in many ways pushes the narrative of Rudy Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy (1982-2000) to the next level in natural selection. From the opposite side of the table, the unevolved are in awe of the more advanced, rarer Forged, almost as if they were gods, recalling the notion of machine godhood in much postmodern space opera.
Isol’s planetary discovery contains the seed to Living Next Door to the God of Love (2005), the following work in Robson’s series. The completely barren, yet entirely preserved planet, as if it had only been abandoned yesterday, is home to a mysterious alien intelligence which the Forged can sense but not see. It is clear that the alien entity operates beyond known dimensions, a transcendental hive-construct that recalls Greg Egan’s polises in Diaspora (1997).
Warning: spoiler alerts!!
Set in the middle of the third millennium, Natural History is the first work in Justina Robson’s still evolving series, Natural History (2003-2005?). Humanity has given birth to a multitude of sentient beings, which are leading humanity’s expansion through much of the solar system, indeed are on the verge of supplanting unevolved humans. By introducing an advanced stage of machine intelligence known as Forged, Robson turns the table on the traditional sf trope of man-machine consciousness, interrogating artificial consciousness from the point of view of engineered lifeforms.
The story follows Lonestar Isol, a sentient space ship, as she is shipwrecked on an unnamed planet 27 light years away from Earth. The planet is home to a seemingly abandoned advanced civilisation, and when Isol replaces her engine with an alien artefact it envelops her in multi dimensional space, telling her: “Isol, we were once like you”. She quickly discovers that the engine will allow her to travel anywhere instantly, but instead of bringing the technology back to Earth, she solicits the help from Forged friends of her: Tatresi, a large transport ship, and Corvax, a rogue research station, both of which can instantiate as human-like avatars. Collectively, they dream of breaking away from human control to establish a world for the Forged only, far away from Earth. The newly discovered planet quickly becomes the focal point of Isol’s aspirations, drawing in the the openly political Forged Independence Movement.
Similar to other Forged entities, Isol was originally designed for a single purpose. As an extra-solar explorer, she can process information and experience many times faster than an unevolved, allowing her for example to listen to old songs at high speed and still enjoy them in real-time. It took her only two years to listen to Earth’s entire music repertoire. Like all Forged, Isol was raised in a virtual AI nursery known as Virtua before she was embodied as a space ship. Designed according to human evolutionary principles of childhood development, instilling human sentiments in the process, she, like many other Forged, often have a sense of melancholy, the humanness deeply seated in her deprived of human stimuli, an existential conflict between her form and function. Marooned, she wants to cry but her design does not include the bodily function of tears, causing her in turn to lament that she has been designed to have human emotions. All-too-human, she is not human enough. The Forged’s longing for what essentially amounts to lost childhoods is such that many choose to visit illegally repurposed versions of the Virtua, which offer them a sense of wholeness. Corvax operates one such virtual environment known as Dreamtime of Uluru. Deeply troubled himself, he has become something of a therapist for the Forged, restoring sex to the sexless, friends to the friendless and social contact to the isolated. Quite literally, the Forged are ghosts in the shell.
The relationship between Forged and unevolved has never been defined by open hostility though, and the Forged Independence Movement is not planning a violent break. The Forged feel they have little to fear from humans whom they have nicknamed Old Monkeys, waiting for them to die like an old grandmother. They see themselves as the natural heirs to humanity on the evolutionary ladder. Natural History in many ways pushes the narrative of Rudy Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy (1982-2000) to the next level in natural selection. From the opposite side of the table, the unevolved are in awe of the more advanced, rarer Forged, almost as if they were gods, recalling the notion of machine godhood in much postmodern space opera.
Isol’s planetary discovery contains the seed to Living Next Door to the God of Love (2005), the following work in Robson’s series. The completely barren, yet entirely preserved planet, as if it had only been abandoned yesterday, is home to a mysterious alien intelligence which the Forged can sense but not see. It is clear that the alien entity operates beyond known dimensions, a transcendental hive-construct that recalls Greg Egan’s polises in Diaspora (1997).
May 30, 2017
As I've probably mentioned already, I've been making a conscious effort to read more SFF by women writers recently, and Justina Robson was someone I'd seen mentioned as being worth trying, so when I spotted this in the Oxfam bookshop last summer I thought I'd give it a try*.
Natual History is an exploration of ideas of transhumanism. It's set in a future where "the human race" has expanded to include the Forged, human minds in biological-mechanical hybrid bodies, some mimicking animals, others machines (two of the central characters are basically spaceships, one a solo exploration vessel and the other a cargo carrier). Even among the "Unevolved", many people have technological augmentations. There are longstanding tensions between the Forged and the Unevolved around the Forged's place in society, particularly those who may have outlived their original purpose (such as the vast terraformers who made the Moon and Mars habitable).
On top of this background, Robson adds a classic first contact story. Isol, a deep-space explorer, encounters a strange lump of "Stuff", apparently inert at first but which allows her to create an instantaneous travel engine, and then discovers a mysterious Earth-like planet which appears to be its origin, and the novel follows several characters as the human race attempts to understand the nature of the Stuff and deal with the consequences of its discovery.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. Partly this is because I really struggled with the worldbuilding; unlike when I read Too Like the Lightning and found it exhilarating to try to understand the strange new world Ada Palmer had created, reading Natural History felt like hard work. There was a lot of invented jargon, different types of Forged humans and institutions and processes and I really struggled to take it all in and make any sense of it at all. I also felt that the pacing wasn't quite right; it's quite a short book, at just under 400 pages, and there was a lot of setup to create a number of plot threads which all then seemed to be resolved very quickly, so I couldn't help feeling that it might have been better with more space to develop the story (or perhaps less setup; I definitely enjoyed the last hundred pages or so, once the plot really started moving, more than the start). Most of the characters feel very underdeveloped, and even the two who are given more time don't quite seem fully realised. This is a novel that's full of interesting ideas, but I didn't think the execution quite lived up to the concept.
*How many of my book reviews start "when I spotted this in the Oxfam bookshop"? Probably most of the ones that aren't reviews of Kindle books...
Natual History is an exploration of ideas of transhumanism. It's set in a future where "the human race" has expanded to include the Forged, human minds in biological-mechanical hybrid bodies, some mimicking animals, others machines (two of the central characters are basically spaceships, one a solo exploration vessel and the other a cargo carrier). Even among the "Unevolved", many people have technological augmentations. There are longstanding tensions between the Forged and the Unevolved around the Forged's place in society, particularly those who may have outlived their original purpose (such as the vast terraformers who made the Moon and Mars habitable).
On top of this background, Robson adds a classic first contact story. Isol, a deep-space explorer, encounters a strange lump of "Stuff", apparently inert at first but which allows her to create an instantaneous travel engine, and then discovers a mysterious Earth-like planet which appears to be its origin, and the novel follows several characters as the human race attempts to understand the nature of the Stuff and deal with the consequences of its discovery.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. Partly this is because I really struggled with the worldbuilding; unlike when I read Too Like the Lightning and found it exhilarating to try to understand the strange new world Ada Palmer had created, reading Natural History felt like hard work. There was a lot of invented jargon, different types of Forged humans and institutions and processes and I really struggled to take it all in and make any sense of it at all. I also felt that the pacing wasn't quite right; it's quite a short book, at just under 400 pages, and there was a lot of setup to create a number of plot threads which all then seemed to be resolved very quickly, so I couldn't help feeling that it might have been better with more space to develop the story (or perhaps less setup; I definitely enjoyed the last hundred pages or so, once the plot really started moving, more than the start). Most of the characters feel very underdeveloped, and even the two who are given more time don't quite seem fully realised. This is a novel that's full of interesting ideas, but I didn't think the execution quite lived up to the concept.
*How many of my book reviews start "when I spotted this in the Oxfam bookshop"? Probably most of the ones that aren't reviews of Kindle books...
April 8, 2018
This is a very imaginative science fiction story -- the kind of risk that might work magnificently or fail catastrophically. It fell somewhere in the middle for me.
Robson conjures a future in which genetic engineering has allowed the human race to intentionally evolve special purpose types -- creatures who can do the work barred by human limitations but who remain human at their core. The "forged" have been specially engineered to travel through space or mine asteroids or terraform planets. As time goes along, the interests of the forged diverge from those of the "unevolved", and, of course, there are the downsides of lives devoted entirely to special purposes. The forged do remain human at their core, and they have the needs, ambitions, and desires of humans. But their fate, which of course they didn't choose -- they were engineered from conception or birth -- precludes much of that.
The book's plot takes that situation and inserts a discovery by the forged of an alien technology -- something that would allow them to separate from the unevolved and build a civilization of their own, one tuned to their own needs rather than to the service of the unevolved.
The aliens themselves seem absent, but in fact, they are presenting the forged (and one unevolved) with a choice. The use of their technology requires a choice to give up something maybe more fundamental to human life than any of the things that the forged miss in their current world and seek in a new one.
I think the story is a good one, a really ambitious one, and it's great to see science fiction that takes the risks that this story does. And it raises great questions.
It may be unavoidable that, in reading, finding my way through the world that Robson imagines detracts a bit from the focus on the question that she raises about what makes us human and what we would or would not give up. A less risky story would keep as much of the world familiar as possible in order to focus the reader's attention on the question it raises. Robson pays special attention to what is different -- the appearances and abilities of the forged -- though because it is part of the question. How much can we change and still remain ourselves? How much would we really be willing to change?
Robson conjures a future in which genetic engineering has allowed the human race to intentionally evolve special purpose types -- creatures who can do the work barred by human limitations but who remain human at their core. The "forged" have been specially engineered to travel through space or mine asteroids or terraform planets. As time goes along, the interests of the forged diverge from those of the "unevolved", and, of course, there are the downsides of lives devoted entirely to special purposes. The forged do remain human at their core, and they have the needs, ambitions, and desires of humans. But their fate, which of course they didn't choose -- they were engineered from conception or birth -- precludes much of that.
The book's plot takes that situation and inserts a discovery by the forged of an alien technology -- something that would allow them to separate from the unevolved and build a civilization of their own, one tuned to their own needs rather than to the service of the unevolved.
The aliens themselves seem absent, but in fact, they are presenting the forged (and one unevolved) with a choice. The use of their technology requires a choice to give up something maybe more fundamental to human life than any of the things that the forged miss in their current world and seek in a new one.
I think the story is a good one, a really ambitious one, and it's great to see science fiction that takes the risks that this story does. And it raises great questions.
It may be unavoidable that, in reading, finding my way through the world that Robson imagines detracts a bit from the focus on the question that she raises about what makes us human and what we would or would not give up. A less risky story would keep as much of the world familiar as possible in order to focus the reader's attention on the question it raises. Robson pays special attention to what is different -- the appearances and abilities of the forged -- though because it is part of the question. How much can we change and still remain ourselves? How much would we really be willing to change?
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