Customer Reviews

Natural History

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Voyager Lonestar Isol, as the name implies, fits in nowhere. She's a "forged," genetically modified to perform certain tasks--in her case space exploration. She's a sentient space ship. Peppered by cosmic debris while on a mission she recalls the words to Don McClean's 1971 pop hit, "American Pie," and figures that this will indeed be the day that she dies.

It isn't. Saved by a lump of grey "stuff" that allows instant transportation, apparently (it will become the Maguffin), Isol returns to the earth system and incites various radical elements of the Forged, persuading them they can have a planet of their own. All they have to do is convince the unevolved (i.e., the unmodified Homo sapiens) to let them go.

Enter the archeologist Zephyr Duquesne, who's enlisted by the earth's powers that be (called the Gaiasol), to check the planet out to ascertain there is no intelligent life there.

Off go Isol and Zephyr, back to the planet Zia di Notte, as we follow not only that story but also those of various other characters, Forged and unevolved, all of whom have agendas of their own. Agendas sooner or later revealed.

It's a kick. The author never loses her focus and creates a bravura finale that is both moving and logical.

I liked this book a great deal and found it to be one of those books that carries you along and keeps you reading page after page. Set in a future where humankind has expanded through the solar system but has not yet discovered FTL travel, science seems to have enabled the creation of new life forms, that house human consciounesses. The life forms, the Forged, are custom designed bodies created to fulfill certain functions, anything from planetoid sized bodies designed to terraform planets, to small sprite sized postal carriers. The Forged, built to perform certain functions, are human beings housed within inhuman bodies. Essentially a new species, created through intellectual evolution, the Forged are set to work under conditions that have parallels with slavery or indentured servitude. Consequently they have started developing political entities like unions and an independence movement. Into these tense conditions comes the discovery of an alien FTL drive by one of the Forged. The story does a good job of developing the consequences of this destabilizing discovery and projects them out into a very enjoyable story.

The story did have some unanswered questions for me, particularly in regards to some of the internal logic regarding the Forged, but all in all it was a very enjoyable read and I would recommend to anyone who enjoys hard science fiction and I will certainly be looking for more works by this author.

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Natural History is New Brit Space Opera, a la Banks & MacLeod, and Robson has clearly done her sfnal homework. I particularly liked her elegant use of current M-space theory (the 11 dimensions of branespace) as the physical background for her, um, Stuff....

Her setup, by contrast, is classical: The Forged, vat-born cyborg posthumans who do most of the heavy lifting in the 26th century, are getting tired of kowtowing to the Old Monkeys, the Unevolved guys who created them: us. As the book opens, Voyager Lonestar Isol has just made a disastrous First Contact with a mysterious alien artifact on her way to explore Barnard's Star....

Let us pause a moment, as you will be doing repeatedly as you read Natural History, to digest a bit of what Robson's doing here. "The Forged" -- what a wonderfully two-edged name. Character and artifact names are a Big Deal in her book: The Heavy Angels. Corvax, who was once a Roc. The Abacand® pocket-brains, sentient but not, well, street-smart. The chilly (but polite) Shuriken Death-angel.... Man, I love this kind of stuff. Especially when it doesn't take itself too seriously. She put exploding spaceships in, too.

OK. My point is that Natural History is a book to be savored rather than gulped. Robson's put a lot of hard work, and hard thinking, into her backstory -- but she doesn't spoon-feed the reader (or, worse, drop in great expository lumps) and some readers won't like the extra skullwork they'll have to do to keep up. Well, too bad for them. Robson can write rings around 90% of all the novelists I've ever read, both inside & out of the SF genre. She's benefitting from UK bookdom's wise refusal to stuff SF into an airtight box, cut off from the winds of Greater Fiction....

Alright, I'm getting carried away here, but this lady can *write*. Trust me. This is certainly not a perfect novel, and I can (kinda sorta) see why it's taken her awhile to find a US publisher. She's writing for *adults*, and avoiding the cartoonish simplicity of, well, 90% of SF books currently in print. So she's not (sigh) likely to find a mass market -- but for those few brave souls who seek science fiction written with thought and substance, Natural History is for *you*, me buckos. You know who you are. What are you waiting for?

Happy reading--
Pete Tillman

Let me start off by saying that I very much enjoyed this book.

I do, however, wish it was longer. Not because I like long books for their own sake, but because Robson could have done so much more with the material she had. As another reviewer said, the effect of "Stuff" on a society is an interesting study in its own right, but unfortunately Robson's book basically ends just as when we find what "Stuff" is.
The society itself, composed of the Forged (beings with a human consciousness, but created for a certain purpose and therefore in a peculiar, sometimes bizzare, form), and the Unevolved (aka "monkeys"), is an equally intriguing vision. Here, we are given a bit more to chew on, but still I found myself wanting more. The Forged, you see, are humans, with a difference that is very important for philosophical reasons: their Form and indeed their very existence is owed to a certain Function which they were designed to perform. So while ordinary human beings are usually struggling to find their purpose/Function, the Forged are trying to liberate themselves from theirs. Some of them are convinced that they are slaves to the Unevolved for as long as they remain bound to their Form and Function. Others aren't so sure.

To me that seems like a great invitation to pose a question: does having a purpose have anything at all to do with being free, and if so, what? Robson barely touches this complex and deep subject, which is understantable as it might have made the already rich novel simply too rich for public consumption. But I wish she had at least tried: she certainly had the tools for the job right there at her disposal.

The "flight-of-fancy" in the title comes mainly from the only other weakness of this novel: its scientific foundations. The Forged often defy engineering principles (not least by being too grotesquely gigantic for the Earth-standard gravity: there are good reasons why birds did not evolve to be the size of a 747, why insects do not grow to human size and never did, and whale-sized creatures do not walk or even crawl the land), propulsion systems operate via unexplained principles, and the proposed implications of M-theory are rather far fetched. That's ok though: this is, after all, science-fiction. In this particular case, however, I would put a lot more emphasis on "fiction" than "science."

Other reviews cover the basic story, so let me just say I picked this up for summer vacation reading after seeing the favorable NY Times review. This is book was engrossing and imaginative story-telling, very well done.

It is a bit much for light summer reading as it is by no means fluffy reading; it is very thought provoking as to what humans and not-quite-human-any-more beings may face. It was so convincing to me that something like this will resemble the centuries-off future that it's become very hard to view popular TV sci-fi (such as Star Trek, which I confess to love) without wondering why there aren't any radically altered sentients. Still, I finished it across two weeks of time off, by no means reading full time.

The discovery of Stuff and the radical impact it has on society is a fascinating study in itself, even for someone (as I am) old enough to remember when no one thought of owning his own personal computer and phones were hard wired devices with dials.

I'm keeping my eye on this author, and buying her new book.

By reading the other 2 reviews you can tell what the book is about, so I wont go over that again, but I have to say that it was a great book. I read alot of sci-fi and seldom review them.
My only wish is that I could have learned more about Isol, the first chapter in the book hooked me and I could not quit reading it and the idea of forged humans is something I can see in the future. If you like hard scifi, interesting characters, grand ideas, and good storytelling, pick up this book. I have told others about it and they have enjoyed it as well. I cant want to see what the author does next and I rate this as one of the top sci-fi reads for the year so far.

Hard science fiction in both senses of the word, it will richly repay the time you put in. Brilliantly imagined and worked out. Challenging, involving and thought-provoking.

whatever I expected, I didn't get it. One thing I wanted desparately was to know more about Isol; the other was to understand Zephyr more fully. Neither happened. I have become so accustomed to character-driven science fiction that hard science fiction leaves me wanting. I learned more about the peripheral characters than I did about the main characters and that left me wanting more.

Let me say that Robson is a very good writer. Even in my disappointment, she kept me reading--not a page turner, mind you, but an interesting read.

At first glance the book seems to be about the liberation of the "Forged". The Forged are bioconstructs of mainly human origin, but created for specific functions. As I got deeper into the book it raised a lot of questions about what it means to be human and what is ethical when doing bio-engineering.
The end was very surprising and raised questions about the ultimate purpose of the life of individuals and civilizations.

The story is enjoyable in itself, smoothly written and with the "tale for grown-ups"-quality that I associate with Justina Robson, but it is the philosophical implications that makes it a great book.

I found this book while browsing in a bookstore, and I'm very glad I stumbled upon it. I'm more of a fantasty fan, and not usually a fan of hard sci-fi, but I really enjoyed this book. Robson is very good at creating sympathetic characters with intriguing, complex backstories. There is also plenty of plot, action, and interaction between characters to keep things moving along at a good pace. I am very much looking forward to reading Ms. Robson's other books.