Science fiction is a genre that loves to speculate about first contact with alien minds. Science fiction is also a subculture that traditionally has a difficult time with inclusion of minds that belong to women, non-westerners, minorities, neurodivergents, and other sources of non-mainstream thought – without even getting into contemplating intelligence found in species right next to us, like octopi.
The last thing I wrote before burning out on science fiction had to do with first contact and the last science fiction I loved – the Dungeon Crawler Carl series – is basically an extrapolation on first contact, in both instances with aliens that are greedier colonizers than we ever were. It’s an interesting subject, and I can’t quite figure out why I couldn’t engage with Tchaikovsky’s latest version, even though I’ve enjoyed his writing in the past and have felt for a long time that he deserves acclaim.
Shroud is the story of some humans I couldn’t really tell apart, aside from one is a fat mean bastard who doesn’t survive first contact, and the alien hivemind then goes “whoops, these things might actually be smart” and gets friendly with the humans.
I had to dive into various reviews for the summary. Interspecies misunderstandings occur until the corporates determine the aliens – who are from a lightless place and have a truly alien lightless culture – are not extractable enough and tries to take them out; the aliens outsmart them; humanity is mostly screwed but in the end it looks like communication is starting to happen.
In the Wikipedia entry, reviewer Zorica Lola Jelic summarizes this one as “whether we should create more sophisticated AI machines when we are morally so corrupt that we do not recognize the responsibility that goes with such an endeavor." Which makes it sound a lot like Dances With Wolves in space.
Compare and contrast with Project Hail Mary, a current big hit that is seeding my social media feed with reactions, including people getting tattoos of the alien at the center of the “should I be selfish or should I go out of my way to help a space alien?” plot. I could even compare and contrast with my own novel, Star Language, which has history repeating itself in a completely predictable way while humans babble about inviting the aliens to A-list parties and demand they solve our problems centered around partisan politics.
The novel itself is not a heavy-handed essay about moral corruption along the lines of the Wikipedia entry. It reminded me a little of Jeff VanderMeer’s work, and it’s definitely got the Tchaikovsky touch – his main interest seems to involve depicting hypothetical alien minds, which is something I very much enjoyed in a D&D romp he wrote where one party member was a magically enhanced spider.
It didn’t grab me though. I didn’t get any particular impression of the two female lead characters, and only a fleeting one of their fat obnoxious boss. I didn’t want to keep turning pages, it was more like required reading.
While I still kind of hope it wins just as encouragement to Tchaikovsky, who is a very good writer, and while I think the message about “we should think about inclusion as it relates to space aliens who are unlike us as scientifically plausible” is a decent one, I kept finding my thoughts returning to DC Carl, where altruism related to bizarre aliens is a winning strategy.
I’m going to read Nnedi’s book next, Death of the Author (the only one I actually purchased before the nominations came out), and will get to the other novels time permitting. I had really high hopes for this one but maybe I’ll like Nnedi’s more.
No comments:
Post a Comment