Semiosis

This book was nothing like I expected and kept me on my toes the entire way. I generally try to avoid spoilers, but it's difficult to discuss this in light of how little information we get from the teaser. I'll try not to give away too much, but if you want to discover this on your own, know that

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you're in for a ride and read no further.

I was unaware that this book followed many generations on Pax. As such, I almost bailed during the first chapter because it dragged a bit. But as soon as I hit the second and realized what Burke was doing, I was spellbound. This storytelling. For real. So much to piece together between the POV, the implicit commentary on cultural heritage and ownership (on many levels), and the passage of a collective knowledge. This story has a lot going on, and I think as readers, we are also a thread in it...how we choose to side, whom we choose to trust...because I sure didn't know it til the end. Or maybe I still don't. I wondered how invested I'd become, and the answer is SO MUCH. I could hear the Glassmakers singing Uncle Higgins' song, and I broke.

It was not a perfect book. As I mentioned, it took me a little bit of a push to get into it, and there were plot points that I felt needed to be explored more or brought back into the mix later in the book. I also missed the intrigue of puzzling out the generational divides from one chapter to the next once the book gets about halfway through and stays on a more immediate timeline for the duration. And lastly, the word "fippokat" and "fippolion" (I guess mainly the prefix "fippo") royally got on my nerves. Personal irk, really, but it took me out of the story and seemed uncharacteristically silly for the characters to choose that as the breeds' names (yes, I get that the kats are silly creatures, but still).

All the same, this was a provocative story and a heart-pounding page-turner. I could never guess what might happen next because of its twists. I will certainly direct more care to my houseplants. I see a small stand of bamboo in my future...you can be sure I will be playing Stevie Wonder for it.

Many thanks to Tor and NetGalley for the advanced copy.

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three cheers for the humor root concept - there are some humanoids who should grow one too ;)

Well-written novel of ideas. Plays with “what is sentience” across botanical, mammalian, and entomological domains. Acknowledges the significance of housework.

Purely as a story, this works very well, from the landing on the planet Pax through the growth of the colony and its struggles to adapt to the environment. As a lesson in how cultures adapt to strangers and the balance between confrontation and accommodation, it offers lessons that are entirely

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relevant to the state of the world today.

This book should be compulsory reading for all politicians everywhere.

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My footing in the genre of Science Fiction is still a little rocky. I've been trying to stretch outside my comfort zone, and pick up more books that I wouldn't normally read. So when Semiosis came along as a review opportunity, I jumped on it. What caught my eye about Sue Burke's story was the fact

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that this book isn't just about space colony survivalists, but also about their deep connection with the nature around them. Give me a book about sentient plants, and you have my attention! I'm happy to report that this book really impressed me.

I'll admit, it did take me a whole generation (essentially a chapter) to really settle in to this book. The humble beginnings of the colonists were intriguing, but confusing. I had to learn their day to day workings, their history, and even their speech. However as I read, and as the generations of colonists slowly started to float by, I became fully immersed in this story. Burke does an amazing job of picking the perfect spokesperson from each generation, someone who is right on the inside, to tell the current story. I watched as the people when from barely surviving, to thriving within the ecosystem that had once terrified them. As they learned, I learned, and it made me feel like a part of it all.

Semiosis has so many ethical quandaries to consider. Whether to live with nature, or to force it to conform to humanity is one of the biggest. The colonists slowly learn that giving the intelligence of the world around them the credit that it is due, helps everyone. There is also a fascinating discussion of merging two cultures. When faced with a the prospect of whether to completely destroy one another, or to work together, things are predictably split. I actually loved this portion of the book. It was a bit violent, but also fascinating. To watch two sets of beings who can't understand one another ever so slowly learn to mesh. I was so caught up in the debates of the colonists. It was intriguing to watch them essentially forge a brand new society from the ground up, and try not to make the same mistakes as on Earth. After all, if we don't learn from our mistakes we are doomed to repeat them. Right?

To wrap things up, because I don't know how to really discuss this book without ruining anything, Semiosis was so much more than I expected. Yes, it was a little slow at the beginning. Yes, I had to push through the first chapter to learn how this new world worked. However the multi-generational storytelling really caught me up, and I ultimately finished this book with a smile on my face. It was surreal how obsessed I became with these people as I watched them grow. That's a huge nod to Sue Burke's writing.

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A bit episodic to start with - and some conclusions were reached rather too glibly at first - but the big ideas drew me in and I was fascinated by the exploration of ethics, sentience, and communication that developed. Highly recommended

Semiosis combines a political story about the struggle to create a utopian society--this time a space colony on another planet--and a first contact story with a truly alien alien--a sentient rainbow-colored bamboo. The story covers several human generations with different points of view so the

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reader can experience how both the society and its relationship to the alien evolve, and it ends with a suspenseful encounter with a third alien species that introduces ethical questions about genocide and assimilation. I always enjoy when an author does something different within the science fiction genre, and Semiosis certainly qualifies.

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This was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, and while I often disagree with the jury’s choices, there’s at least some expectation of quality in the books they pick. I mean, this is a national award. For science fiction. They might define the genre a little oddly every now and again, but

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they at least recognise good fiction when they see it. Except, well, maybe not last year. That was a really shit short list. Happily, the best book did indeed win. This year was quite an odd shortlist – the final book of a trilogy, a book of sf art, a horror novel, a debut novel, a mainstream novel that’s really sf, and… this, Semiosis. Which is certainly science fiction. It is, in fact, a first contact novel, and it says so on the cover. But it’s also surprisingly old-fashioned. I was reading sf like this back in the 1990s. The fact it’s done well doesn’t make it any more twenty-first century. The novel is structured as the diaries of members of a colony that has settled an alien world – a private venture, with very fixed ideas on minimising the colony’s impact on the alien world. The personal accounts follow on one generation from the next, first outlining the accommodations the colonists have made to survive, then the perversion of those accommodations in order to preserve ideals that no longer are relevant. Then the colonists learn there are others on the planet, descendants of colonists from an alien world. Where Semiosis differs from other first contact novels is that the major intelligence the colonists discover is a plant. And it more or less programmes the humans according to its own needs, which happily also result in some degree of success for the humans. That is until the humans meet the descendants of the prior alien colonists. There’s no denying Semiosis is done well, but there’s nothing I can see in it that makes it stand out from other well-crafted science fiction novels that privilege science. And while that may be a rarity in this day and age, it should not on its own be enough to merit appearance on a major genre award shortlist. Semiosis was good but I don’t think it deserved to be a Clarke finalist.

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more like a collection of stories than a novel, approximately one per generation of these colonists.

This was beautiful and lyrical and tragic all at once. And so SO interesting.

John Scalzi turns his blog over to other authors a few times a month so they can publicize their newest book by writing about the "Big Idea" that gave rise to it. In February of 2018 Sue Burke wrote her Big Idea post about this book and I knew I had to read it. Why? Well because it's about sentient

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plants controlling human behaviour on a far-flung planet. But she started the post by talking about how plants here on our planet have persuaded humans and other beings to do their bidding. As Scalzi said in his introduction to the piece, you may never look at your houseplants the same way.

A small group of fifty humans set out into space to colonize a new world, a world that would not repeat the mistakes we made on earth. In particular, they wanted peace; they even named the new world Pax. Some people died in transit and some died in landing crashes. The native vegetation on Pax had to be tested carefully because plants which looked the same could be nutritious or could be deadly. The colonists managed to survive and have children but they were afraid to venture from their initial landing spot. Then two of the second generation went exploring and found a beautiful ruined city which could shelter the colonists much better. There was a rainbow bamboo that grew there that provided delicious fruit. The Parent generation did not want to move but a revolt in the second generation put them into power and the community moved to the city. That was just what the rainbow bamboo wanted. Is that a good or a bad thing?

It was interesting to see how the community evolved throughout the generations and how their system of government evolved too. I'm not sure if the author is in favour of war or violence but this book certainly seems to argue that conflict is hard-wired into our genetic makeup. And not just ours but any kind of sentient being.

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Stevland! Who knew that a sentient rainbow bamboo plant could be such a fascinating character.

Utopia-seeking humans exploring a world full of alien biology. The book covers a century or so in half a dozen parts, each from a different point-of-view character in a different generation, beginning before they realise the plants are sentient and journeying through the development of a

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sometimes-uneasy alliance with one in particular. For self-named Pacifists there's an ironic (but ultimately unsurprising) amount of violence in their internal relations but they do hold relatively true to their principles of living in harmony with their environment: both humans and their alien ally have seen the devastation of environmental collapse and are determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The lingering question is the extent to which such change is possible, on either the individual or the species level. Especially when they end up after all at war....

This is a gorgeous delve into an alien world. Every viewpoint character has an immediately distinct voice. The plant the humans ally with is ambiguously sinister: seeing things from its point of view in some ways detracts from that but in others enhances the theme and gives us a deeper insight into the broader ecosystem the humans have barely scratched the surface of.

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3,9 stars

This wasn't quite as good as I was hoping for, but still very original and enjoyable. Based on the ending I figured this would be a standalone, but I'm not mad about the upcoming sequel.

I think this book would have been better (for me) had it been around 600 pages longer. I enjoy

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multi-generational stories, but I prefer them with enough heft to leave me some room to form attachments to the characters. As it is, this was a fascinating story about a half-dozen generations in a curious world, but it read more like a summary than a full fledged history.

Also, the graphic rape scene was an unpleasant surprise I could have done without. I don't really feel like it brought anything to the story that couldn't have been conveyed less graphically with just as much impact.

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The dominant theme in this book is the alienness of the aliens. Characterization of aliens is often attempted in science fiction but rarely does an author manage to make aliens both non-human and understandable. A delicate balance, neatly hit here, not once but twice, with two different sets of

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non-humans.

I'm giving this one five stars, not for storytelling, not for literary quality, but for concept. In a time like the present, when so many books focus on how society can go wrong, this one takes a crack at examining a human society that attempts to abandon the mistakes of the past and rebuild a community based on lofty ideals. Can it be done?

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A good story that mostly deserves 4 stars but fell flat toward the end and left me feeling unsatisfied. 3 stars overall.

What an incredible book! A truly engaging, unpredictable plot, great character development, but most importantly a deep exploration of the notion of civilization, the nature of communication (both its limits and how it is less limited than we might think), individual ethical choices when balancing

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short vs. long-term goods in a crisis, sentience (what does it mean to be sentient, to be aware, to be intelligent), family structures, the conditions in which humans/human-like beings can and can't live peacefully with each other.

In a fun coincidence, I just came across this book exploring vegetal life and pushing on our framing and understanding of it.Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World. You can buy it and/or download a free PDF, which is what I'm going to do.

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Human colonists arrive on a planet with sentient plants. Attempts at understanding and misunderstanding ensue, with both death and hope. I thought the idea was cool but I didn’t end up too invested in the thought processes of plants. Contains brief and unsexualized rape scene.

Pros: brilliant world-building, fascinating characters and situation

Cons: some stories were very impersonal

The Commonwealth of Pax started as a group of volunteer colonists leave the horrors of war on Earth to begin a hard life on star HIP 30815f. Almost immediately they discover that the plant

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life on their new home world has varying degrees of intelligence, and that another alien species left ruins of a magnificent but failed city.

The novel is told from the points of view of one of the first settlers and six descendants, one from each of the following generations. Each generation faces new problems and challenges, from predators, from the plant they’ve allied with, internal strife, and the rediscovered aliens.

Most of the stories are told with an element of reserve, that allows some of the more unpleasant things that happen to leave little impact on the reader. By the time I got to know each character their segment ended. Though I’m glad that the rape scene was written in a clinical rather than sensationalist manner, on the whole I much preferred the longer stories that allowed me to really immerse myself in the character’s lives. Higgens’ section especially touched me deeply.

The sentient plants were handled well. I didn’t understand a lot of the chemistry involved, but there’s explanations for how the plants communicate - with humans and with each other. I loved the bamboo’s learning curve, from wanting to domesticate these strange but helpful animals to being a contributing member of their community.

The world-building was excellent, with whole alien ecologies and while plants and animals were given names reminiscent of Earth, it’s clear they’re VERY different.

During the second story I was shocked at how far the parents had fallen from their own constitution and their use of Earth tactics they claimed to hate. I’d have expected that kind of break to happen much later in the colony’s lifespan.

This was a fascinating book.

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Space colony gone wrong, meets alien, but done with well defined characters across a few generations. Read through it faster than I expected, so looking forward to book 2.