I enjoyed reading A Wall Is Also a Road by Annalee Newitz, although the protagonist’s victories came a bit easier than I was expecting. The publisher’s description calls it “heartwarming” but, like Newitz’ Automatic Noodle, I would say its tone is closer to “cozy” despite a few passages where the protagonist feels fear, pain, and shame. It’s a science fiction/academia novel, but it’s also historical, since about half the book is spent in field-research visits to the Roman Empire. Science fiction, academia, research, and history are all interests of mine, and I did like the young protagonist’s curiosity, warmth, and, eventually, courage, despite a few stumbles, so I was quite satisfied with how it all turned out.
The visits are made by Gardenpath, a sort of slime mold wearing a protective field suit on their visits to the planet they call Tentacle; they’re a graduate student pursuing the radical thesis that life can develop on planets instead of just between the stars. They are astonished to realize that some of the life there actually seems to be intelligent, so they modify their suit to masquerade as one of these weird animals, for closer investigation.
Meanwhile, Gardenpath (whose story is told in third person, past tense) is also navigating the hazards of graduate school, trying to become not just a professor but an Investigator (top-tier research scientist). They’re intelligent enough to mask their research and results in less inflammatory terms than “our accepted theory of Life is all wrong,” yet they’re very naive in some ways about how things work at this elite university. For instance, they know their advisor is horrible, yet they fail to see how the highly original research they’re doing might be repurposed toward martial uses.
Gardenpath is also shocked to realize that they may have been conducting their own research in an unethical manner, when a student and professor specializing in Culture warn them that they are getting too close to one of their research subjects, and possibly crossing some other lines as well. Gardenpath solves this by dropping the culture studies as part of their research, and focusing on the eco-web, rather than dropping their close friendship with the brothel worker Murtis.
I really enjoy this character, as I get to know her through Gardenpath’s perspective. When what Murtis thinks is an illiterate, hardly verbal woman (Gardenpath in disguise) shows up, Murtis takes care of her. She has seen a lot, so she is remarkably tolerant when Gardenpath’s truth is revealed to her, taking it in stride since so many people from all over the world (or the Roman Empire, at least) travel to the resort town of Pompeii, so why not from outside it, too? She even believes Gardenpath’s warning about the coming eruption of Vesuvius, although she keeps putting off acting on it…
I also enjoy the depiction of the cooperative galactic society, where people sleep in clusters and help each other maintain their health, both physical and mental. Sure, there are bad pockets, like the unethical professor, and the rigid, discriminatory belief structure that prevails at the academy, and the war off in the background of people’s lives, but as events unfold, it seems that most people mostly do believe in harmony rather than just using cooperation as a hypocritical byword.
Why the title? Well, the phrase is actually used in the book, but I think the point is that a barrier can also be a signpost of sorts that can lead the way to discovering more information.
MILD SPOILER: The thing I initially found least realistic in this book was when some students appeared to be trying to rein in that prestigious, unethical professor merely through exposing his mistreatment of them, since I thought it was far more likely that the students would be expelled. However, Newitz had the students find a far more workable, believable solution. I was cheering for Gardenpath and their fellow students toward the end!
A Wall Is Also a Road, by Annalee Newitz, will be published Oct. 6. (304 pages)
Content warnings: Nonhuman protagonist, squishy boundaries, nonconsensual penetrations (physical and mental), nonconsensual and painful experiments, power imbalances, academic trauma, war and weapons.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
