10/22/2019 (Tor Books)
Hardcover  ISBN/ITEM#: 1250317843
Originally posted: SFRevu 10/2019

Sue Burke completes her Pax duology in this continuation of the story of a planet with sentient plants and the human colonists that have made a home there. The Pax colonists have developed a working relationship with the sentient plant Stevland at the heart of the city built by the original colonists, the alien glassmakers, as well as forging an alliance with the glassmakers themselves, who had left the city for a nomadic and mostly feral, existence, but at least some have returned. They face challenges from climate change, the lands on their borders drying and fire, a plant’s greatest fear, spreading, as well as a threat from space in the form of the second human expedition, bringing the problems that the colonists had fled earth to leave with them. 

Interference is as good as Semiosis, which is no small feat for the sequel of a book whose strength lay in its thought-provoking concepts. Like Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Sue Burke elevated a good story with a great idea, that the plants of the planet Pax had varying degrees of sentience, and that the most intelligent of them all, the Rainbow Bamboo grove/entity at the hear of the city built by a previous alien race and abandoned, was able to interact with and ultimately partner with the human colonists.

The colonists consider it a partnership. Stevland, the plant thinks of the humans as its service animals or at least refers to them as such when discussing matters with the other plants its root network shares information with.

Things on Earth were never especially good, and the governments haven’t gotten any better since the colonists left. For one thing, there was an event of mass genocide when someone decided to use their position at the top of the artificial food chain to poison five…billion…people. All of the US, and herself among them. Leaving plausibility out of it, its a crime so horrific that the survivors dug up her body, cloned it, and tormented the clone as a sort of perverse version of the Truman Show. No clone lasts forever, so there’s always a spare in waiting, though she never knows that’s what she is until the day she’s needed for the show.

Except that one girl realizes that she’s a dead ringer for NVA and comes to the conclusion she’s next. She plots to escape before they come for her, but the only place that offers her hope is a spot on the second expedition to Pax as a linguist trained in the archaic English the colonists spoke. To get on the mission she winds up displaying some sociopathic tendencies that might suggest she’s not wrong about her identity.

The expedition crew is largely made up of academics, but of course, there’s a politburo officer sent along at the last minute who is out to take control of the expedition. Not only that, but he’s one of the people charged with tormenting NVA, so there’s a question about whether he’s along for more than the ride. The expedition leader may be an academic, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t fought wars on his own turf.

As I said in the intro, something is up with the climate on Pax, or at least in the area that Stevland borders. Fires are cropping up more and more frequently and the ground there is dryer than in years gone by. Stevland and the colonists discover that the menace from Earth isn’t their only problem, nor is Stevland the only intelligence on the planet.

Nature, on Earth or Pax, is still red in tooth and claw, or whatever color sap is, and nobody in this book is above violence to protect themselves or those they care for, not man, nor alien, nor plant.

Semiosis followed the original colonists, hopping down the timeline with characters form subsequent generations. Interference follows a more linear timeline but moves along a cast of characters, Steveland itself among them, as each facet gets its turn to tell the story. Though the wheel only goes around once for each character, they’re all on the same stage, so we get to see things work our for them in a more satisfying way. This is billed as a duology, and it does wrap up the story fairly well, but by it also begs for a third book to tell the story that’s started in the last chapter, more or less an epilogue set back on Earth.

Besides that, the author alludes to other expeditions to other planets, as well as a Martian colony that broke away from Earth and managed to fight off attempts to bring them back into the fold. There’s plenty of room in this universe for Burke to tell separate or connected stories, and her first two books offer strong evidence that they’ll be stories worth telling.