Natural History (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: Zia Di Notte, Voyager Isol, General Machen (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Robson's U.S. debut, a thought-provoking SF stand-alone, the British author of Sliver Screen and Mappa Mundi revisits the disquieting territory of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. Advances in genetic engineering have created the Forged, human/machine hybrids that carry out tasks too mundane or too dangerous for the Unevolved, as non-Forged humans are called. Soon after a Forged explorer, Voyager Lonestar Isol, returns from a 15-year trip with the Stuff (a sentient chunk of gray quartz capable of instantly transporting her anywhere), Isol announces that she's found an empty Earth-like planet in a distant star system. By claiming it as a home world, the Forged can finally break from the resented Gaiasol, the political entity that rules Earth's solar system, and become what they were meant to be. While many dream of moving out, others suspect that the Stuff's offer is too good to be true. Archeologist Zephyr Duquesnse, commissioned to study the proposed home world and make sure it's truly free of life, finds no easy answers. Fans of the sweeping, politically and psychologically aware space opera of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod will be intrigued by Robson's setting and the new slant she takes on universal questions.
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Review

"Thought-provoking.... Fans of the sweeping, politically and psychologically aware space opera of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod will be intrigued by Robson’s setting and the new slant she takes on universal questions."
--Publishers Weekly


From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Spectra; 1st Printing edition (December 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553587412
• ISBN-13: 978-0553587418
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #502,580 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ship who raved, April 18, 2005

By	lb136 "lb136" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A pretty darn good sci-fi read, May 19, 2006

By	Colin P. Lindsey (Manchester, NH) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An impressive book, and a very strong US debut, December 31, 2005

By	Peter D. Tillman (Taos, NM USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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