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Publication Date: Apr. 2003 (1st) Publisher: Tor Books (1st) 480 pages Summary The discovery of a strange, seemingly omnipotent technology pushes humanity on the brink of a civil war between Unevolved and Forged humans. In a Nutshell Fails to live to the very high potential of its setting. Review I tried to like this book. I really did. It has a great setting, and some nifty ideas, but the overall plotting and character development is so weak that I had to labor to get through the last half of the book. The novel starts on a high note, putting us in the perspective of Isol, one of the Forged, a caste of humans who are created, not born. Isol, a Voyager-class, was built for long-range exploration, both physically and psychologically: she is a starship whose propensity for loneliness borders on the sociopathic. Throughout the first chapter, we get to enjoy her unique point of view as she comes in contact with an alien technology so advanced that it seems able to grant one's every wish. Isol seems like an interesting choice for a main character; she is unique, possessed of a tragic history and destiny, and seems able to shake the foundations of the society from which she comes. It is rather puzzling, then, when Robson quickly abandons Isol in favor for her real protagonist. Enter Zephyr Duquesne(sic), professor in archeology, slightly overweight, introvert, and in an online relationship with a man she never met. If you're wondering what such a character is doing in a space opera about Forged human beings, well, so am I. I recognize the value of the "everyday man" (or woman) in SF, a position that Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick pulled off with brio time and again. Here, however, Zephyr is such a banal character that she actually feels less believeable than the other characters in the story. She places the novel firmly in the "wish fulfillment" category, where Zephyr, embodying the author or her readership, lives extraordinary adventures despite her uninteresting life. This is all the more grating that Zephyr is insignificant in the story and her involvement is protracted, a fact which she recognizes herself when her pocket AI proves more important than her. Zephyr is the main problem of the novel, but there are others. The writing is uneven, and some running sentences throughout the book are so convoluted and amateurish they're actually painful to read. The story never truly moves forward, and instead stalls for time, building up to a few characters waxing poetic about the nature of the mystery alien artifact. Promises of social changes, caste conflicts and civil war never come to bear, despite heavy foreshadowing to that effect. There is no epiphany for any character, and in the end, everything stays the same. For all these reasons, it feels like Ms. Robson came up with a fantastic setting, but could never make it go anywhere. And herein lies the real tragedy of Natural History: for all its faults, the setting of the novel is genuinely intriguing. Justina Robson parades Forged humans in the shapes of starships and small planets, Heavy Angels climbing from the Earth's surface to space, hive-minded insectoid beings, and Forged rejects reduced to the roles of carrier pigeons. It's too bad all this wonder never got to go anywhere at all. If you still want a dark, space opera novel about altered humans coming in contact with a mysterious alien artifact, pick up Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, instead. It is a superior novel on almost every point. |
Copyright © 2005-2008 Daniel Roy