I was intrigued by Tor’s description of Cameron Reed’s upcoming novel, What We Are Seeking: “On the planet Scythia, plants give birth to insects and trees can drag you to your death. Artificial monsters stalk the desert, and alien basket-men have wandered into town.
“John Maraintha has been abandoned here, light-years from the peaceful forests that he loves.”
This mutability of the wildlife made me think the book was going to be kind of like Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Hugo-finalist novel Alien Clay, which I thought was great. I kind of glided over the promotional text’s part about “soaring novel of queer hope and transformation” (thinking that might be associated with the alien genetic mutability part, contributing to the metaphors), and I assumed that the protagonist being abandoned among “people in thrall to a barbaric custom called marriage” would be mildly amusing in a quirky way, like the protagonist in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos dreading having to meet female people on a space station, which turned out just fine. I also was ignorant of the author having won what is now the Otherwise Award in 1998, back when the award and she had different names, and when her gender was different, too.
So, I started this story not only mostly unaware of some plot elements and themes, but actually wrong about some; however, I am happy to have had my expectations upheaved. This is a really interesting and engaging book, with some themes of survival in an alien environment, with alien translation and diplomacy and co-existence being important parts of the plot, but it’s also very much about human values and choices and cooperation, including guarding oneself and others against a proscriptive majority, with a side aspect of an ancestral online virtual “aiyi” culture that also occasionally enforces its opinions on others.
Protagonist John Maraintha had signed up for a spaceship’s medical staff, figuring he’d return to his home on the planet Essius after a couple of decades of astral experiences; however, when translator/ambassador Sudharma Jain learns that the planet he’s traveling to has lost much of its population and technology and is down to one doctor, he requests that a doctor from the ship accompany him, and John is assigned. It’s a one-way trip since the spaceship delivers cargo and personnel to this frontier planet via pod rather than shuttle. Sudharma expects to need surgical brain implants in order to fully understand the beings he’ll be communicating with, and the prospect of having to alter Sudharma’s brain hangs over John for most of the book.
Involuntary exile and surgical ethics aren’t the only problems John faces. He’s from Essius, which has a matriarchal free-love culture, and Scythia is populated by patriarchal monogamists (there’s also a group from a planet that acknowledges a nominally celibate third gender, but they mostly defer to the religious extremists). The spaceship captain admits that the Scythians are also homophobic, but never having had to deal with people on the ground, he obliviously says John shouldn’t take their religious biases too seriously, since John is adaptable.
Numerous Scythians are visibly uncomfortable upon meeting John, and even those who are somewhat sympathetic to him warn him not to flaunt his differences too obviously. So he accepts a role as an on-call emergency doctor, rather than setting up a practice, and spends a lot of his time helping Ru, a widowed farmer, and assisting Iren, a third-gender (jess) biologist.
LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD:
The Scythians are interested in learning to communicate with the basket-men, the tool-using plant-people who drop by occasionally. But they are far more interested and anxious about the Terran ship that has recently come to the planet. Terrans are known to have merged their minds with “aiyi” (obviously intended as a lingual descendant of A.I. or artificial intelligence), and they destroyed a human colony on another planet that they apparently thought was behaving unethically toward the original inhabitants.
John and Sudharma visit the Terran ship, but since Sudharma also meets a basket-man and starts trying to communicate with it, John ends up being the main one interacting with the sole Terran, who speaks English but is sometimes very hard to understand.
As communication increases, John, Sudharma and the colonists realize they are facing some existential threats. John and his allies also force those in power to confront some extremely unpleasant facts stemming from their own actions and from their new world, with which their culture is shown to clash in numerous ways. I don’t want to spoil any of that, but it’s really interesting how Reed weaves together all the threads of plots and themes.
Not so incidentally, there are numerous cooking scenes in the book, as John learns about local foods from a friendly colonist’s wife and shares dinner with her family, and as he seeks to accommodate his housemate’s religion. Initially, he’s mocked for learning to cook, but after John takes a long trip into the desert, his surviving a fight with a snake-tree plant monster wins him some respect.
I enjoy the explanations of alien biology in this book, with this world’s fascinating ecosystem, but they’re mostly background and plot motivator for the human storylines. John’s initial misery is somewhat alleviated by the connections that he makes, including some discreetly intimate ones, and by a largely successful eventual confrontation with those in power. The book ends with some uncertainty for what the future will bring, but I found it very satisfying, nonetheless.
What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed, will be published April 7, 2026; you can preorder it here.
Content warnings: SPOILERS: Gendered roles and expectations, religious/cultural disputes, colonialization, deaths, murder, violence, involuntary sterilization, ecological clashes, threats of genocide.
Comps: The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin; Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC for review from the publisher via NetGalley.
