169

I'm a fan of Nancy Kress, and this novel is one of her best. It starts a bit like Beggars in Spain. Human children are genetically changed in a small (for science fiction) way: the portion of their brain for smells is significantly enhanced. The novel is told via a handful of third-person perspectives, with just one perspective repeating.

The opening is from the perspective of a surrogate parent for one of those children. As with Beggars in Spain, the big issue at first is how these children are and are not accepted and/or feared by the rest of society. Things take a more SFnal turn when it becomes clear that "alien" intervention is responsible. The children have been designed to receive pheromonal communications. The first big message: the "aliens" are coming. "Alien" is in quotes because they claim to be humans, just very advanced, particularly in genetics, or what they call "the right way." The title is taken from Terence's "Nothing human is alien to me," and the book plays brilliantly on possible interpretations of that claim.

In the second perspective, we follow one of the children, now in their early teens, as they are taken aboard the "alien" spaceship and educated. This section is very much in the vein of Butler's Xenogenesis books, as humans are pawns to an alien agenda, supposedly for the good of humanity. As with Butler, sex is a prime element in the alien toolbox. The remainder of the book returns to Earth, with Earth in serious trouble, due to climate change, and humanity in retrenchment, a la Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, though this book came first.

The other big theme that permeates the novel is parenting -- good, bad, indifferent, challenged, rewarded. Pretty much everyone of note becomes a parent, and every perspective dwells on the topic, analyzing and compare how they parent with how others do.

As I neared the end of the book -- no spoilers! -- I worried whether Kress could stick the landing. The answer is no, but the flaws are acceptable. Basically, she goes on about 4 chapters too long. She had a perfect ending, but then she wanted to show what happens next. The concluding chapters should have opened the sequel this book deserves. There's an epilogue that finally raises a central difficulty that had been bothering me about the whole pheromonal communication idea. But it is a quick throwaway that again begs for exploration in a sequel.

Also hurting the final chapters is a 2-page meditation on what it means to be human. This would have been better in a rreader's guide.

Had the book stopped a few chapters earlier, I would've gone for four and half stars. But even so, this novel is highly recommended to all readers of hard-core science fiction. ( )

I really liked this novel alot. It reminded me quite a bit of Octavia Butlers Xenogenesis series. The novel covers a span of 100 years and four generations. The first generation are children concieved through invitro fertilization. Nothing special about them until they all fall into comas at the exact same time-when they wake up they all have the same message-the Pribir are coming. The Pribir are aliens-they insist that they are advanced humans coming to help earthlings find "the right way" through genetics. Lillie is a first generation child of invitro fertilization, the novel follows her relationship with the Pribir and that of her children and grand children. Fascinating novel about what makes us human and what could happen to our species if we do not clean up our act. ( )