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.
