{"id":4621,"date":"2018-01-24T12:18:15","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T17:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/?p=4621"},"modified":"2018-03-05T16:02:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T21:02:19","slug":"semiosis-by-sue-burke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/semiosis-by-sue-burke\/","title":{"rendered":"Semiosis by Sue Burke"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Semiosis\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/strong>Tor Books (February 6, 2018)<\/p>\n

SFRevu Link:<\/strong>\u00a0 http:\/\/www.sfrevu.com\/php\/Review-id.php?id=17715<\/a><\/p>\n

Semiosis Website:<\/strong>\u00a0https:\/\/semiosispax.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Semiosis<\/strong> is Sue Burkes\u2019 debut novel, and it\u2019s quite good. The term refers to the whole communications process between living things, and though it usually refers to intraspecies communication, the author ups the ante here. In Semiosis<\/strong>, colonists from a climate change and war-ravaged Earth must learn to get along with plants with opinions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When the novel opens, the original 51 colonists have been weeded down to 31, and three have just been killed while on a food gathering expedition. The planet, named Pax by the hopeful humans, turns out to be at least as warlike as the one they left, but here the protagonists are plants, and as the group slowly comes to realize, they\u2019re plants with comparable intelligence to the planet\u2019s animals, many of which exist in close relationships with their vegetable overlords.<\/p>\n

The humans must pick sides and learn how to work with the plants to survive if they don\u2019t want to wind up collateral damage.<\/p>\n

The story unfolds generation by generation as they discover previous colonist\u2019s ruins and the plant that grew in its midst. Over the generations that plant develops the ability to communicate, beginning with nearly random color changes and progressing to written language. To me, it\u2019s more an AI development tale than a colony tale, although there\u2019s a fair amount of both as the plant, which they name \u201cStevland\u201d after the first colonist to die, faces challenges and threats to the colony.<\/p>\n

The tension between Stevland and the colonists come from its ability to manipulate the environment, making food more nutritious, addictive, or deadly as it suits its needs. They\u2019re not totally dependent on it, but there\u2019s a clear power imbalance and there\u2019s no way to know how that will ultimately play out. Will Stevland wind up their future vegi-overlord, or become a responsible member of the colony?<\/p>\n

Semiosis<\/strong> is told in first person, but that person changes each chapter. I often find that an annoying device, but here it works very well. Each chapter tells the story from one member of each successive generation\u2019s viewpoint, and that allows us to examine inter and intra generational conflicts along with the external threats to the \u201cPacifists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Intelligent plant life may seem like a reach, but there are previous examples in science fiction, like the continent spanning creature in James White\u2019s story \u201cMajor Operation\u201d (1971), or, more recently, the mind controlling fungi in The Genius Plague (2017). In the real world there are a lot of examples of plants appearing to learn, and certainly sensing their environment, though it seems that Terran plants haven\u2019t quite mastered consciousness yet. The quality of the author’s world building reminds me of James L. Cambias’ terrific debut novel A Darkling Sea <\/strong>(SFRevu Review)<\/a>, which also deals with the difficulties of communication between humans and others.<\/p>\n

Semiosis<\/strong> is a solid debut by Sue Burke, and marks the start of a career worth watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Publisher:Tor Books (February 6, 2018) SFRevu Link:\u00a0 http:\/\/www.sfrevu.com\/php\/Review-id.php?id=17715 Semiosis Website:\u00a0https:\/\/semiosispax.com\/ Semiosis is Sue Burkes\u2019 debut novel, and it\u2019s quite good. The term refers to the whole communications process between living things, and though it usually refers to intraspecies communication, the author ups the ante here. In Semiosis, colonists from a climate change and war-ravaged Earth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4621"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4626,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4621\/revisions\/4626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}