And with finally finishing We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen; I have ended this reading challenge. (I am still reading, but I don’t think I’m going to finish anything before the end of the year.) I’m a little proud of myself for accomplishing this, since normally I’m used to handling just a book a month.
We Have Always Been Here
An interplanetary expedition is sent to check the viability of human colonization on a strange, distant, frigid world. We follow one of the ship’s psychologists, Dr. Park, and the atmosphere of distrust & hostility that builds against her & the ensuing disasters that strike this venture. It reeks heavily of classic science fiction, capturing the paranoia, claustrophobia, and interpersonal conflict of the Terror, the Thing, and Alien, but it goes its own way.
Dr. Grace Park is more in-tuned to relating & befriending the androids aboard the ship. We see through flashbacks of how these sympathies for the synthetic kind develop. And honestly, I preferred those scenes. It’s not just that Earth had an apocalyptic-level event. Humanity attempted to correct the environmental damage it caused, but instead made Earth too green, too savage for human habitability (which is a solid setting.) Civilization is forced into the margins of this new, hostile environment, which is the same outcome had we done nothing at all. Seeing Grace Park grow up in this environment is far more satisfying, as Nguyen well conveys the distrust against inorganics like in Alien, but back on the planet Eos, where we need the creepy isolation of the Thing, she can’t deliver the same quality.
There is a lot to like in this story. There’s also a lot to not like. The characters read shallow & poorly defined, the dialogue is flat, and the pacing is wildly out of control. Park’s backstory I found more compelling than the main plot. The issues with the telling instead of showing serves to shortcut the ending, as it relies on characters making rapid fire conclusive jumps, so the ending comes out of nowhere & rushed. But none of that was enough to make me not enjoy this book.
I don’t want to spoil it, but it isn’t a science fiction story that has a violent climax. You’d think with what inspires it, that’s the natural conclusion of what’s being drawn here. But, through a second set of flashbacks, we see a previously failed landing on this planet from another ship. It parallels the expedition Dr. Park is on and provides further context of what is going on Eos without resorting to omniscient exposition (yet this novel still bristles with tell rather than show). Yet, what we get is quite the opposite. Initially, it fell flat. But that might be because I anticipated violence, explosions (but getting just that was unsatisfying in Dead Silence, so maybe I’m hard to please?), since western media cannot envision a good ending without a violent resolution. Or, in old-school Star Trek style, thinly veiled colonizer pontification.