Q

I really enjoyed this scifi novel.

As endorsed, it lives up to being the smartest, most detailed revolutionary world building of all the scifi novels I’ve read around an alien civilisation (and I’ve read a lot of it).

More than Rocky in Project Hail Mary, more than the Pequeninos in Speaker for the Dead, more than the Runa/Ja’anata of The Sparrow, and the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness.

All classic scifi novels exploring fascinating other worldly (literally) species, but none quite so intricately outlining the millenials of evolution, learning, growth, and culture.

It also brought up some real tough and big questions about humanity, morality, and what we stand for.

Is life and humanity worth living for, if you live your entire life in claustrophobic squalor; a life in a makeshift vessel where your lifetime’s work will benefit only generations after you, that you’ll never live to see?

Is immortality – or at least a life spanning millenials – one we would seek, if you’re plucked away from the linearity of time and the natural progression of birth, life, death? If you’re awaken each time to the unknown: you could have landed on a habitable New World, or in the midst of war with an alien species.

And most of all, most difficult of all, the question of who truly “inherits” a world. Who has true claim to a planet. Is it humans, although they’ve torched the one they originally budded from, just because they seeded a new planet? Or the native inhabitants of this new planet, although they themselves bud from the seeds of these alien ancestors?

I found myself not knowing who to side with: The aliens I’ve read about through the generations in this land they call their own, or the humans I share biological makeup with.

If one day we were to evacuate our Earth today, would I also have such strong passions to continue the memories, the genes, the lineage of my kind, at the expense of yet another planet?