Meru

So humans fucked up Earth, and then fucked up Mars with piss-poor terraforming, then fucked up with genetics. Sensing a pattern? Well so did their genetic offspring. Their augmented descendants, the Alloys, alter themselves to an environment, not the environment to them, and largely life in space flying around the galaxy? The humans? At best, troublesome children. At worst, a danger to everything else in the cosmos that deserves existence. At least that’s the narrative for the past centuries as humans remain Earth-bound while the Alloys clean up their mess.

But Jayanthi dreams of more, not being stuck on Earth but being able to travel the galaxy and have the rights to contribute to the collected knowledge of their society. Born with sickle cell, Jayanthi figures she and others with the condition would be uniquely suited to surviving on a newly discovered planet, Meru, with elevated oxygen which would be a problem for anyone else. If she can prove she can thrive there, then humans can leave Earth without needing to damage another world through terraforming. It would be an opportunity to show humans have moved beyond their destructive past. But there are plenty of Alloys out to sabotage the experiment.

It had a very sweet forbidden romance and I loved this book’s original take on genetics, both as the huge extent of possible human directed evolution in space and the use of sickle cell as a method of adapting to a different biome. Also, the changes in human culture from having centuries of guilt and infantilisation was interesting, though I’d like to have seen more exploration of it from a human perspective. And the large nonbinary rep throughout was awesome.