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An intriguing followup to Semiosis that weaves several drastically different sentient species (both plant and animal) into a story about factions, community, freedom, communication and war.

In the centuries since the human colonists left for Pax, Earth's civilization collapsed and a fascist patriarchy took control and has rebuilt things to the point that they can check in on some of those outer-space colonies from before the fall.

Like the first book, each chapter is told from a different character's point of view (including Stevland, of course!), though this time around it's all focused on the arrival of the new expedition and the events leading up to it. The psychology of the bamboo's and the Glassmakers' perspectives is notably different from the humans', and of course each species has its factions, and each faction has its priorities, and each person has what they do and don't know and assume. (The chapter in which the Earth expedition arrives at the colony has the narrator repeatedly making and revising assumptions.)

And there are more factions in a war fought on plant timescale.

Despite it being more tightly compressed in time, it feels less focused than the first book. There's a side expedition late in the story that's both necessary thematically and narratively awkward. I'm not sure how I feel about the epilogue as an epilogue, but as I put the finishing touches on this review I've just discovered that Burke wrote some related short stories set during Semiosis...and a third book that picks up on those threads and was published just last year.

Cross-posted from my website.

I think this may have been the first place I saw the "great filter" concept named (the idea that somewhere between a planet having the conditions for life and a spacefaring civilization there's at least one step that's extremely unlikely or difficult). They'd found worlds that had nuked themselves into oblivion and others that were simply abandoned (though the human dying of cancer comes up with a compelling theory as to what happened to them), but only three that were still alive.

As an avid science-fiction reader and viewer, I'd definitely encountered the Fermi Paradox by then (given how huge and old the universe is, there's got to be more intelligent life out there somewhere, so why haven't we seen it?), as well as the idea of advanced species sending out berzerkers to destroy potential rivals before they have a chance to develop. (Liu Cixin's "Dark Forest" is a variation on this where the advanced species aren't actively looking, so you might be able to escape notice if you're very, very quiet.)

It's been a while, but Calculating God sticks in my head as an interesting exploration: What if there is scientific evidence out there for a supreme being, but to find it you have to correlate knowledge from multiple inhabited worlds across the galaxy?

The specific situation is a pattern of mass extinctions that's common on all known inhabited worlds, and a multispecies expedition has come to Earth to cross-check our fossil record and see if it matches too. (It does, of course, which is what sets the rest of the book in motion.)

Like a lot of Sawyer's more philosophical science-fiction, it's mostly talking and thinking and figuring things out. There's not a whole lot of action, and I remember thinking the young-earth-creationist vandals were too much of a caricature to take seriously. (I suspect if I read it again now, they'd seem subtle compared to the pundits and politicians making noise today.)

There's a deus ex machina close to the end, but it's sort of the point of the book, and an epilogue that pulls together several of the "why is this aspect of life universal???" questions the characters had been trying to figure out.

Cross-posted from my website.

A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. Not so much about the moon turning into cheese as how lots of different people react to the moon turning into cheese.

Some of the vignettes are funny, some are touching, and some stand out more than others. Some people only show up once and others come back repeatedly. The feuding cheese shops that have gotten a lot more attention since the change. The pop-science author whose book on fantastic takes on the moon came out at exactly the right time. The astronauts whose mission is scrapped take it better than the billionaire rocket mogul whose company is building their rockets and spacecraft.

The most impactful stories, though, are a set of vignettes around the 3/4 mark involving a long-divorced couple staring down mortality, and an extended chapter on a writer who has spent her entire adult life trying to get her first novel just right before shopping it around.

OK, there's one with a more literal impact, but you know what I mean.

(Cross-posted from my website.)