Putting the life back in science fiction

I read the whole thing. I didn’t want to comment until I was finished. As an aside, Smashwords is a good concept but the site randomly became very slow or even stopped responding for me several times over the last few days as I read your book. I should have downloaded the full .epub file and converted it as soon as I’d bought the book.

You’ve built a very interesting world, and given a guided tour of it. In fact I would say that this reads like a very loving, thorough, and novel experiment in world-building with (unfortunately) the minimum of characterization and story necessary needed to show it off.

As I neared the end I realized that the larger story this tale was embedded in wasn’t going to be fully resolved in the pages remaining. It turns out it wasn’t going to be even a little resolved. On the last page I know barely more about how the narrator or the world got into this state than I did on the first page. What caused war among the colonists? What happened in his forgotten later life to make the narrator so well-known and apparently important? Why are the Old Ones still promoting human colonization via sponsorship of different warring tribes? Normally in this sort of setup, I’d expect two stories converging: one about the present circumstances (which you told) and one reflecting on the past and filling in background, gradually catching up to the present and remembering or discovering clues until the narrator connects the past with how he woke up on the first page of the book. It feels like one strand was dropped here, that the narrator was mostly unconcerned about how he got into his present circumstances and strangely terse in explaining the parts of prior life that he could remember to the reader. Even when he’s out of immediate danger, the narrator talks more about (e.g.) how local composting systems work than about the mystery of his own life.

I had a hard time remembering who did what (apart from the most central characters) because the characters blended into the scenery and each other. Certainly you’re not the first author, particularly in SF, to have a hard time writing three dimensional characters. I think that the narrative device is a two-edged sword regarding your characters. It means that the narrator can be embedded in the action without the author trying to think like someone raised in a very different environment, and the reader likewise is spared considerable interpretive labor. The downside is that it can excuse or even demand a superficial description of characters that doesn’t rise much above “written transcription of images from a surveillance tape.”

So far it would seem I’ve just complained, but I wouldn’t have bought your book and read it all if I didn’t find it interesting and enjoyable. In my opinion, despite what I said above, you’ve written enjoyable hard SF, subgenre “wiring diagrams.” It takes quite a bit for me to enjoy wiring diagram fiction nowadays, but you’ve cleared that bar. Your biological/ecological interests are clearly the focus of your fiction, and they’re interesting to me because I’ve read far fewer SF stories with loving detail devoted to gardens and gut bacteria than to rocket engines and robots. The only other writer I can think of off-hand whose ideas are so interesting that I’ll happily forgive his other literary deficits is Greg Egan. If you write more, short stories or novels, I’ll look forward to reading it.