SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Some discussion questions to open up the full discussion thread!

1. What did you think of the world?
2. What did you think of the messages?
3. What did you think of the characters?
4. What worked or didn't for you?

5. Overall thoughts?

Non-spoiler thread here: First impressions

This the second book by Newitz I have read after Autonomous. I really like her ideas particularly the nature of future/alternate intelligences but her ability to incorporate those ideas into a story leaves me wanting.

I wish the first book was the entire book instead of the 3 sections.

I agree entirely with Hank and Brittany.

I quite liked this one, but I found the change in time spans and characters to be abrupt, especially the first time it happened. Like Brittany, I really wanted the first part to be the whole book (especially when I got to the end of that part, and it jumped forward so far in time - I really liked the characters and story in that part, and I was mad / sad to leave some of them behind).

That said, once I got over my dismay and kept reading, I did enjoy the other parts, too (and I was more prepared for the next big change). I enjoyed how the story explored many interesting ideas around society, technology, and the environment, and I liked the combination of human, animal, and bot characters. I loved the trains and the worms. I'm afraid I've lost a lot of the details because I read this in June.

Annalee Newitz definitely has their own style, and while I've read most of their books and enjoyed them, none of them have been 5-star reads. I think Hank expressed well why that is - I like their ideas, and I've also found many of their characters interesting, but the stories often feel like they are missing something.

Kaia wrote: "I quite liked this one, but I found the change in time spans and characters to be abrupt, especially the first time it happened. Like Brittany, I really wanted the first part to be the whole book (..."

I agree about the ideas and the stories and the characterization not quite always connecting in a satisfying way. I feel like in any really successful work of fiction, it has to *feel* like the characters and story came first and the ideas arose organically out of them. I think for a lot of authors, this is basically a trick they're pulling on the reader. In fact, they had ideas they wanted to explore through characters, but they have to persuade the reader that their characters inspired the ideas. Pulling that off is an art, obviously, and I think Newitz comes close but doesn't quite get there most of the time.

That said, the sections / time jumps didn't bother me at all. I liked meeting new characters and seeing how the world evolved, and I think if she had stayed in the realm of the first section for the entire book it would have worn out its welcome fast.

Unfortunately, I found this rather implausible, I cannot imagine a future where humans think ahead for ten thousand of years even if it is for profit. I found it strange that slavery and poverty was so accepted in an (almost) perfect world where everyone is considered equal regardless of gender or species. I disliked the focus on verbal/written communication to be considered as intelligent - it does not consider other languages nor people with disabilities, which surprised me. Was the aim not to be as inclusive as possible?
I liked some ideas but as others expressed, I did not feel the story or the characters at all. Overall, pretty disappointed, I expected more.

I think this wanted to be sort of like Foundation in scope--how long would it really take to make a world livable and what would be the consequences of a decision from 60,000 years ago.

I...don't think it did a good job but in fairness I don't think Foundation did either. It's such a limited view on the ways humanoids can f*ck things up. Capitalism for 60,000 years?? Slavery of sapient beings for 8000?? Pull the other, they've got bells on. Nothing we have of humanity has lasted even remotely that long.

That said, I friggen loved the sapient nonhumans and the idea that intelligence can't really be accurately measured by human tests. My druid-loving heart yearned for a world where everything in balance is the goal, and I liked seeing the world and what all those different cultures ended up doing to it.

It was the most gentle book about enslaved persons I've ever read and the angriest book about moose and cat rights.

I liked it because I found it gentle and weirdly inoffensive for a book about genocide but I'm also sitting with the strange sensation that there's a comfortable book about genocide?

rangers and moose and cats and trains, what's not to love?

Idk but I think I will be more critical of the book when I reread it.

the time jump was fine for me too, but I won't mind having a whole book on Destry.

Allison wrote: "I liked it because I found it gentle and weirdly inoffensive for a book about genocide but I'm also sitting with the strange sensation that there's a comfortable book about genocide?"

This times a thousand! You put into words my discomfort with this book so perfectly. I liked the book, but I struggled with exactly this aspect (which I hadn't been able to articulate myself).

BJ wrote: "This times a thousand! You put into words my discomfort with this book so perfectly. I liked the book, but I struggled with exactly this aspect (which I hadn't been able to articulate myself)...."

Allison wrote: "...I liked it because I found it gentle and weirdly inoffensive for a book about genocide but I'm also sitting with the strange sensation that there's a comfortable book about genocide?"


Some problem for me, but leading to me disliking it. Ultimately, this felt like reading an utopia, except for that it was absolutely not.

Is Misha reading all these emails that Ronnie / Verdance Corporation keep sending him?!
😂

DNF at ~25%.

I've been trying to listen to this one, off and on, all year. And it just can't grab me. The narrator isn't working for me, the characters don't interest me that much, and even in just this (apparently first) time/era, nothing makes a whole lot of sense on either time-scale or social behaviors.

There's interesting bones here, but finding them has just.. been a slog.

Oh how I disliked this novel. It was giving me Actual Star flashbacks with it's failure to properly grasp issues like personhood despite it being pretty central to what little story there was.

I'm of the mind to never attempt an Anna Lee Newitz novel again. Their writing just isn't for me, even though I enjoy the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast.

This should have been a novella similar to Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot. A meandering walk that ends before your feet get sore. What it ends up being is a hike through woodlands in flip flops. In the end I appreciated nothing but my own ability to persevere.

Trying to think of something redeeming about the story... There's some discussion about how it's exploitative to create things/people to serve a particularly purpose that's beneficial to the creator, but it didn't really go anywhere with the idea or say anything remotely profound.

'What if your toaster was sentient and decided it didn't want to spend its life toasting your bread?
'I'd grow another toaster but this time make it so that it loves to do nothing more than toast bread.'
'you don't see how that's wrong and not actually consensual?'
*shrug*

Like... that's it? Really? Jo Walton did that better in The Just City. Forget machines, this is an idea I've been thinking about for decades when hearing others discuss their desire for having children. It's absurd to me that so little thought went into a novel that wanted to address such issues.

I finally finished this over Thanksgiving break. It took me longer than usual; it was pretty slow going. I agree with the other complaints but I liked it well enough to give it 3 stars.

Ryan wrote: "Trying to think of something redeeming about the story... There's some discussion about how it's exploitative to create things/people to serve a particularly purpose that's beneficial to the creator..."

I think what I felt redeemed the story above all was the sense that these absolutely horrific crimes were being committed by people with various kinds of power - above all using speech limiters to make it seem as if fully conscience people were more like machines with only one domain of expertise, or to fake a lower level of intelligence - but that the characters in the story couldn't really confront the enormity of these crimes or think their way towards systemic change, even as they threw themselves into a totally different but equally problematic approach to genetic engineering, engineering people to *actually* be primarily interested in one thing, or giving full awareness to earthworms without thinking through what that life experience would be. Everyone is playing God, and no one is up for it, and as a result the world is a nightmare that's constantly pursuading itself it's a utopia. The book is a huge mess, I can't deny that. But I at least thought it was a very interesting mess. And that the author's attempts to be preachy fell totally flat in the face of the bizarreness of the world she created. Like, half her characters were totally convinced that keeping dairy cows is the ultimate crime against humanity, and maybe it's true that what Newitz wanted was to just make a case for veganism in a very strange venue. But what I took away was that the characters couldn't see what was right in front of their faces, which was that their views on consciousness didn't make sense. And if that was a failure on Newitz's part, it was a fascinating one (to me).

ooo! excellent ideas BJ, thanks! I think there's a lot to mine in there

Allison wrote: "ooo! excellent ideas BJ, thanks! I think there's a lot to mine in there"

I was sort of expecting more heated discussion on this one! But maybe it fell too flat for too many people to quite inspire that :) Although I have definitely appreciated many of the comments on this thread!

I shall comment more when I'm able

Allison wrote: "I shall comment more when I'm able"

I'll look forward to it :) I never seem to know which books will inspire more or less discussion online or in person... it's a very different question than how well people like a book!

I finished The Terraformers a few days ago. I agree with most of the other group members in that it had some interesting ideas that didn't quite come together into something coherent. In a lot of ways it reminds me of classic sci fi in that the characters are flat cutouts that are hung on a group of big ideas that tried to become a plot. Even the way the time jumps made the book more like a group of related short stories harkens to the way a lot of classic sci fi was short stories, and the books feel episodic. I have a hard time believing that a private company would terraform a planet--that's a lot of risk and resources for an extremely delayed payout. I was amused by how they were marketing the planet as a Pleistocene earth, even though none of the animals or environments seemed to be Pleistocene and the first thing they did was build resorts, casinos, and strip clubs, none of which are Pleistocene either. I couldn't process the dichotomy of a world with these socialist environmental rangers with a strong ethos of recognizing the rights of all life, keeping things in balance, and peaceful democratic government, and they are also all corporate slaves. I thought there was a lot of bigotry displayed by all sides, and wondered if the author was deliberately showing how all societies have blind spots. I wish there had been more information about the terraforming process and mechanisms. I think my favorite character was the sentient flying train, just because it's a cool concept. Overall, it was maybe a 3 star read for me, which is okay. I don't regret reading it, but probably won't be reading it more than once.

BJ wrote: "Ryan wrote: "Trying to think of something redeeming about the story... There's some discussion about how it's exploitative to create things/people to serve a particularly purpose that's beneficial ..."

That's an interesting thing, that we are more "comfortable" confronting the harms of capitalism as slaves, literal or otherwise, to it. I think you're on to something in that I did feel it was a "well hey, I do what I can, what else do you want me to do" sort of scenario that I think all of us sort of inhabit and internalize. And I do think the author played with this somewhat in having people outside the "system" and people who play the system for what the others need and all that.

What I'm left with is...was this lazy? Or was it very purposefully part of the story?Are we meant to go "yep, it do be like that" or "fuck, I hate how I rationalize that."

For me it was more the former because of how infrequently we confront well, enslavement. Those limited by the intelligence tests are oppressed, literal cloned slaves are free and have the ability to oppress or free others.

Agree, not sure if we're meant to see cows in a different light for vegan reasons or just to juxtapose what sorts of life forms we accept as limited.

I do, for example, believe strongly that whales, elephants, squids/octopodes, dolphins and likely pigs are people with sapience and sentience both. And if them, probably others. Anna would admonish me about this, and she's right, the limits of this is addressing them as people whenever I have cause to meet one, and not to eat them which is inarguably a shitty way for me to stand for their humanity. I guess I kind of do the same for humans, but comparatively we're "more free" in the terms the book sets, so I'm still on that journey. Anyways, I could see wanting to confront their liberation if we accept human oppression, but yeah...not sure this got there for me!


Jessica, I had the same thought! Where were the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers!

Jessica wrote: "I couldn't process the dichotomy of a world with these socialist environmental rangers with a strong ethos of recognizing the rights of all life, keeping things in balance, and peaceful democratic government, and they are also all corporate slaves."

I thought that was one of the most interesting parts of the beginning of the book, because it was really smart, I thought, on how a sort of inscrutable combination of idealism / genuine belief and desire to have profitable access to a particular domain of useful knowledge led the corporation to bake these egalitarian ideas into their very profit-oriented plans. I think that that reflects how capitalism intersects with various charitable causes and political ideologies in our world today in a very observant way. Viewing the corporate and global elite class's investments in charity and political projects aimed at improving the world purely from the perspective of cynical personal gain obviously doesn't explain what's going on. At the same time, rich people don't run global philanthropic movements purely out of the goodness of their hearts either. The intersections between ego, self-image, personal profit, social capital, literal capital, can be totally entangled and can in fact lead to all kinds of strange bedfellows.

But then I felt like the second half of the book dropped the ball on this complexity as the corporate element became flatter and less interesting and more purely "bad guys".

Allison wrote: "Jessica, I had the same thought! Where were the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers! "

I third this! And it was such a lost opportunity, too, with all the talking animals! It could have been a pleistocene world in the first part and then by the third part an *urbanized* pleistocene world which is something I don't think has been done yet that I know of?!?!

Allison wrote: "What I'm left with is...was this lazy? Or was it very purposefully part of the story? Are we meant to go "yep, it do be like that" or "fuck, I hate how I rationalize that.""

I think this book was an absolutely impossible to untangle combination of lazy story telling and smart story telling. I think that just sums it up. The laziness (falling back onto contemporary social and political ideas in a purely instrumental and often heavy-handed way rather than developing a politics organically out of the material of the world building) and the intelligence (really smart juxtapositions of different ways of being embodied and an extremely clever analysis of the ways in which people accommodate themselves to injustice) were so mushed together that the result managed to be incredibly unsatisfying and also incredibly thought-provoking at exactly the same time.