Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 13

Not many books have chapters narrated by bamboo.

Semiosis is a fascinating take on space colonization, intelligence, and language. The multi-generational story starts with the founding of a small human colony on an alien world where, as they soon discover, plants have evolved intelligence and use animals for tools. Needless to say, things don’t work out the way the colonists intended, and their descendants find ways to adapt to a world where they can’t forget that they’re only one part of the ecosystem – and not a necessary part, either. And the plants have their own ideas!

Each chapter picks up a character from a different generation. Burke gives them all distinct voices and attitudes, and while each looks back at the previous narrator from this new perspective, their stories are their own.

I found the middle chapters the most interesting. At this point the colony has established itself, and all the founders have died off, leaving only those who grew up on Pax don’t have memories of the life they left behind on Earth. These chapters get into how the plants communicate with each other, what kind of worldview sapient bamboo might have, and how the bamboo and the humans figure out how to communicate with each other and negotiate how to share a city and the surrounding area.

The bamboo primarily communicates with other plants through chemical transfer via roots – much like plants in the real world do, only a lot more complex – and over long distances by encoding messages in pollen grains*. Neither strategy is going to help it talk to humans.

I was reminded at times of Robert Charles Wilson’s BIOS and Ursula Le Guin’s early novel Planet of Exile. The latter in particular, since both involve human colonists several generations down the line in a one-city colony, incomplete adaptation to local biochemistry, trying to warn people of danger that they dismiss as smaller than it is (oh, they never attack in groups that big!), and an extended siege against the colony in the later chapters. It’s kind of weird that I read this book so soon after that one.

I bought The Outer Worlds a few years back, probably around the same time I bought Outer Wilds, and finally picked it up a few weeks ago.

About 15 minutes into the game, my biggest impression was “Whoa, the designers on this really liked Firefly.”

The ship’s cargo hold looks like the Serenity, the first town you visit has a neo-western-frontier look to it, the town administrator looks like Badger, the first person who can join your party is a perky mechanic…

It’s very much unlike Outer Wilds or No Man’s Sky. This is an RPG, the kind where you choose different attributes and skills and level them up as you go, collect items to use in exploration or combat, build up a crew and so on. It’s not a spaceflight sim. The quests sometimes involve combat, sometimes problem solving, sometimes diplomacy. Often there are several ways to solve them, and you have to choose one.

And sometimes those choices are hard: The mainline quest in the starting town involves choosing one of two communities to cut power from so you can take the last part you need to get your ship flying again. And by the time you get to it, you’ve talked to enough people in each that whatever your take on the town leadership, it’s clear that the ordinary people are going to suffer one way or another. If you want to keep playing the game, you have to pick the least-bad option, and the best you can do from there is reduce the harm.

The solar system it takes place in was colonized by corporations. It’s hyper-capitalist, cutthroat business from the boardrooms down to the cannery floors, and every town is a company town. Exploitation and indentured servitude are the norm. People are required to spout company slogans during otherwise everyday interactions. The crappy healthcare system rations supplies by patients’ work output, blaming them for their own illness. Sometimes the satire is funny, but sometimes it’s just depressing to talk to characters who have never known anything else.

The main story involves a sleeper ship that arrived late. Rather than spend the money to awaken people who had already been written off, the companies decided to just keep it quiet and leave it somewhere no one would notice. You’ve been awakened by a notorious “criminal,” who says he wants your help gathering the supplies he needs to awaken the rest of them. Though there are hints he might have another motive.

I’m still relatively early in the game, exploring the first offworld port you can get to. Doing my usual thing where I try to find and complete every side quest before moving onto the next part of the main story. The characters and quests continue to be interesting, and I can imagine some good replayability from choosing different crewmembers to come with you on various quests, choosing different specialties so your main character has different options open to them, solving the quests differently, and seeing what that causes down the line.

Definitely recommended if you like RPGs, space, and stories dealing with morally ambiguous situations.

A fun romp through theater, mystery, soap opera, mythology, fandom and screwball comedy romance tropes. (*whew!*) Think of every wacky antic you can that might occur when a new actress joins the cast of a long-running soap produced by and for mythological creatures, with human actors. They’re all in here, and more! (Though it is sometimes a bit too cute with the puns). Took me back to my high school and college theater days, and every backstage comedy I’ve seen.

Yes, and…

Be the mango.

Tinyview has two goals: Show comics in a way that works on small screens and pay the artists. I can’t speak to the second, but they do well at the first (with a few stumbles).

They’ve got some good comics, enough that I’m happy to subscribe for a few bucks a month. (In particular I like Fowl Language, Heart & Brain and Itchy Feet.)

The Android app is basically a wrapper around the website, which is fine, but that also means it can be slow to load sometimes, even when it notifies you that one of the comics you’re following has a new episode up.

Le Guin’s first novel is a serviceable quest story that maps fantasy tropes to a science-fiction setting. It’s engaging enough, but I’d only recommend it to someone who’s already read The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. You can see the beginnings of a lot of the themes she explores more thoroughly in later works: Colonial exploitation, proxy wars, breaking racial stereotypes, interactions between cultures.

Fun fact: Le Guin invented the word ansible for this book.