While reading about ConScription (the New Zealand Science Fiction convention, May/June 2009) (see my report here), I was interested to note the International Literary Guest of Honour, one Julie E. Czerneda. What interested me most was that I'd never heard of her. As I was planning to attend the convention I thought I'd buy one of her books and see if she's any good. The only one I could find in Christchurch shops was Survival, book one of her Species Imperative series. So, is it any good? Heck yes. It's a terrific book, fun, exciting, and delightfully well-written. ("Mac saw it with the stunning clarity of a lightening flash in a darkened room, her mind reeling with the afterimage of truth.") Based on a sample of one, Czerneda would appear to be one very good Science Fiction writer. How come I've never heard of her?
Survival is largely set on a very nifty research station - a series of artificial islands off the coast of a wilderness - on Earth, in a future in which conservation of the few remaining wilderness areas is taken very, very seriously indeed. The main character, Mac, is a feisty researcher who has to battle with bureaucrats charged with preserving the wilderness just to do basic science - just to conduct basic observations that we today would consider to have no appreciable impact on the things she studies. Mac is aware - dimly - that the universe teems with populated worlds and many varieties of alien life, but (as she and others regularly state) she is only interested in the salmon she studies. These early scenes set in the research base are very endearing. I strongly suspect that Czerneda has an academic background herself, as she is clearly fond of the foibles of the researchers and the antics of the research students. For example:
"Pod six was hollow, fixed to the ocean floor year-round, and everything above the waterline was now unofficially theirs. Every year since, new projects had grafted themselves to the interior of the dome wall, supported by whatever means the researchers could afford or create. Despite appearances, to date only one had come loose and fallen into the water, fortunately not harming the students who'd been using that platform for a moment's indiscretion, nor unduly disturbing the otters who'd again found their way inside."
Mac's narrow life of salmon-studying is rudely interrupted by the arrival of an alien, Brymn, accompanied by a bureaucrat who is clearly more than he seems. By the end of the book Mac is taking her first ride into space, on the trail of a biological entity that sterilizes whole planets.
Writing believable aliens is very, very hard. In my experience aliens in fiction tend to be humans with a light dusting of differences. Frequently an author will describe the alien's physical appearance, but soon lapse into anthropomorphic descriptions: aliens that shrug or look concerned or whatever. This is perfectly understandable, as communicating 'real' alien emotion (which might have no direct human cognate) and potentially inscrutable motivations is clearly very hard.
In Survival, Czerneda does as good a job of creating 'real' aliens as I've seen. Brymn is huge, blue-skinned, six-armed (with a kind-of seventh), and his species has a most peculiar and imaginatively-conceived life-cycle. In terms of the interaction between Mac and Brymn, Czerneda walks the fine line between understandability and alienness very well. Mac can sometimes tell Brymn's emotional state at a glance, but frequently she's confused or tentative, and Czerneda occasionally drops in a physical description of the alien's emotional cues, such has yellow mucous dripping from the nostrils being an indicator of distress.
Survival is a fine piece of work, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the other two books in the series.
Survival is by Julie E. Czerneda. It is part of the Species Imperative series.
