Science Fiction

An expedition to an alien planet goes horribly wrong, and the survivors try and find their way amongst a most alien culture in Windhome, by Kristin Landon. Forced quickly to survive with reduced numbers and a fear of what has occurred, the expedition’s goal to make contact with the locals and find evidence of aliens who have ravaged worlds, including the very world they have landed on, is the core of the plot. The heart of the book, though, is the social and sociological relations the three human survivors have with the tall furred aliens who live on the cold and heavily glaciated planet. Windhome is very much in the grips of an ice age, with continental glaciers having marched as far as they have in our own world’s most recent glacial maximum. The author does an excellent job with designing an alien species, the Anokothu, living on such a world, especially one that has recently suffered devastation and loss that has only narrowed the margins of safety and surpluses needed for life. The author provides some twists to their biology that inform and help drive the narrative. This is an alien society that is more egalitarian in some ways, but in other ways the values of the aliens are orthogonal to those of human and human society. They may be humanoid and look in the vaguest sense like humans, but the author makes it clear that they are simply not humans with funny rubber masks. This is also true of other species on the world, which have analogues to Earth animals, but definitely are not. Their riding animals, for example, may be used in the way of horses, but they are dangerous carnivores, and have to be handled carefully.