She looked so vulnerable, but to my utter dismay I sensed something beneath my love and pity; something old and insistent and dark, that called for death . . . My vision blackened and I looked down into the nightmare of the bloodmind.

Three missionaries and an anthropologist from the stable, terraformed planet of Irie St Syre, travel to the planet of Monde D’Isle, to find out what became of the colonists who travelled there thousands of years ago. Expecting to find a nicely terraformed planet, they are shocked to find that the head of the colonising expedition never even began the terraforming process, deciding instead to alter the colonist to fit the harsh environment of their new home, leaving them no longer entirely human.

Interesting world-building and discussions about whether the new arrivals would be justified in interfering in Monde D'Isle either by switching on the terraforming machines or by trying to change the inhabitants' biology and culture. ( )

very quick here. I enjoyed this book, loved the anthropological perspective, the questions being asked about the responsibility of the colonial source to the colonized centuries later, and vice versa; questions about religion, and environmentalism, and cultural relativity, and fundamentalism, and human potentials.

I wish the questions had perhaps been pondered in more depth, rather than just raised... but that's just me: I like to see my philosophical questions tangled with in my speculative fiction... ( )

I was recommended the books of Liz Williams, as part of a list of authors. I’d read and mainly enjoyed all of the other authors in the list, so figured Williams had to be worth a shot. In my usual over-zealous approach to such things, I bought all of Williams’ books available in paperback in a oner. As I read Williams’ first book, The Ghost Sister, I thought I’d made a bit of a mistake.

In a future where Earth has colonised many planets through the galaxy, and has in itself fallen into memory, The Ghost Sister describes a mission from one colony world, Irie St Syre, to a failed colony on a world called Monde D’Isle. On Monde D’Isle the descendants of an original colony expedition generations before have become a curious blend of humanity – not quite human, not quite animal – who share at times a collective consciousness called the bloodmind, which both allows them an absolute connection to the environment they live in, but also occasionally drives them to collectively act and hunt as a pack, their individualities temporarily submerged into the whole. The ghost sister of the title is Mevennen, a young woman who lacks this link and is therefore ‘landblind’. The narrative drive focuses on Mevennen’s brother, Eleres, and his determination to cure, or at least protect, his sister, who is seen as either a burden to be ashamed of, or as a weak link who should be killed for the sake of the group.
Into this comes the Mission from Irie St Syre, determined to find out what happened on this failed colony. They become involved in the affairs of Eleres and Mevennen, and what they discover threatens to disturb the very meaning of what life is on Monde D’Isle.

So far, so ho-hum. In all honesty, the book’s plot never quite does it for me – it’s full of quasi-science which borders on the mystical that rarely makes cohesive sense, but clearly wants to THINK that it’s making sense (I find these things much easier if authors just say ‘look, we’re ignoring science, just pretend it’s magic, OK’ than if they try and fail to explain things scientifically). Add in that the culture of Irie St Syre comes over as too PC for its own good (the society is a matriarchal vegan bisexual one that we never really get an adequate picture of), and writing that never quite gets above the level of pedestrian, and I was fairly disappointed. Looking at the response to the book at the time, it was hailed as a ‘multi-layered social commentary, blending action, first contact and a love story’ and was nominated for the Phillip K Dick Award. If I hadn’t already bought more books by Williams, I’d have abandoned her after this. ( )

Interesting intersection between two societies when one of them has been changed by science. Whether it's right or wrong is examined and who has the right to make these decisions is also looked at.

Interesting. ( )