The Highest Frontier - Joan Sloncewski
This book has everything you could want. But, it's not great, somehow...
I found Joan Sloncewski's The Highest Frontier by searching for "hard sci-fi" and it did not disappoint in this regard. It takes place on Earth in about a hundred years. Alien beings with exciting biology have landed in the U.S. and started accidentally killing people while spreading like a pest. Climate change and invasive species have completely altered the face of the planet, and humans have compensated by covering swaths of unusable land with solar panels - which have the unfortunate effect of lowering the Earth's albedo. Humans have engineered bacteria to do everything from 3-D printing food to building space elevators. The internet has a direct interface with people's brains; people grow up controlling an internet of things with their minds, doing everything from attending class, to playing mind-powered sports (in space!), to living in virtual worlds as an escape (almost like Ready Player One, but perhaps less bleak).
For me, the best aspect of this book is that it tosses you not-very-gently into the future, when everyone is brown, English and Spanish mix freely in speech, and Red Bull and Ferrari are still duking it out in Formula One (again, in space!). Nothing is ever explained fully, and the history leading up to the events in the book is covered ever-so-slowly. However, the solid grounding in modern science helps the reader slowly agglomerate Sloncewski's clues into a cohesive picture of the world she has crafted.
In terms of diversity and inclusion, The Highest Frontier bluntly poses a world where everyone is respected for being a living human, regardless of skin color, gender, sexuality, religion, or -- most beautifully -- mental, physical, or social ability. This world isn't posed as a goal to strive for or fight for, but rather as an inevitable future. Diversity and inclusion are a baseline, making the book a woke middle finger to social conservatism. However, there's a bit of Gattaca-like genetic engineering that stratifies society. Parents choose traits that can improve survival and quality of life, such as homosexuality, aspects of autism, and being a twin - and those who don't have such genetic alterations get cooked by the heating Earth while subject to a grungy life on the mind-internet.
Where the book falters is really in the storytelling. Perhaps it's because Sloncewski is a professor of microbiology that the book is written in a painfully dry fashion. While the hard sci-fi aspects are revealed artfully, the characters develop in a mechanical fashion. Everything interesting happening in the world happens to or around the main character, Jenny, who is rich and influential enough to simply have things go her way (though, the underlying commentary on wealth is terrifyingly well done). The book plays out less as an intriguing narrative and more as a series of dioramas displaying Sloncewski's creativity. This makes it rather hard to care about any one character, or feel deeply engaged with the story.
So, read this book for the science.
I found Joan Sloncewski's The Highest Frontier by searching for "hard sci-fi" and it did not disappoint in this regard. It takes place on Earth in about a hundred years. Alien beings with exciting biology have landed in the U.S. and started accidentally killing people while spreading like a pest. Climate change and invasive species have completely altered the face of the planet, and humans have compensated by covering swaths of unusable land with solar panels - which have the unfortunate effect of lowering the Earth's albedo. Humans have engineered bacteria to do everything from 3-D printing food to building space elevators. The internet has a direct interface with people's brains; people grow up controlling an internet of things with their minds, doing everything from attending class, to playing mind-powered sports (in space!), to living in virtual worlds as an escape (almost like Ready Player One, but perhaps less bleak).
For me, the best aspect of this book is that it tosses you not-very-gently into the future, when everyone is brown, English and Spanish mix freely in speech, and Red Bull and Ferrari are still duking it out in Formula One (again, in space!). Nothing is ever explained fully, and the history leading up to the events in the book is covered ever-so-slowly. However, the solid grounding in modern science helps the reader slowly agglomerate Sloncewski's clues into a cohesive picture of the world she has crafted.
In terms of diversity and inclusion, The Highest Frontier bluntly poses a world where everyone is respected for being a living human, regardless of skin color, gender, sexuality, religion, or -- most beautifully -- mental, physical, or social ability. This world isn't posed as a goal to strive for or fight for, but rather as an inevitable future. Diversity and inclusion are a baseline, making the book a woke middle finger to social conservatism. However, there's a bit of Gattaca-like genetic engineering that stratifies society. Parents choose traits that can improve survival and quality of life, such as homosexuality, aspects of autism, and being a twin - and those who don't have such genetic alterations get cooked by the heating Earth while subject to a grungy life on the mind-internet.
Where the book falters is really in the storytelling. Perhaps it's because Sloncewski is a professor of microbiology that the book is written in a painfully dry fashion. While the hard sci-fi aspects are revealed artfully, the characters develop in a mechanical fashion. Everything interesting happening in the world happens to or around the main character, Jenny, who is rich and influential enough to simply have things go her way (though, the underlying commentary on wealth is terrifyingly well done). The book plays out less as an intriguing narrative and more as a series of dioramas displaying Sloncewski's creativity. This makes it rather hard to care about any one character, or feel deeply engaged with the story.
So, read this book for the science.
Comments
Post a Comment