Alan Zendell's Blog: It's About Time - Posts Tagged "generation-ship"

Learning the World: a Scientific Romance by Ken MacLeod

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book left me with sharply mixed feelings. It's an easy read, a great story that's often fun, but there were just too many things in it that felt wrong to me. Too much strange physics which might be acceptable if it was necessary to drive an otherwise tight plot, but it wasn't. The green mist in interstellar space signalling the coming of intelligent visitors and the spawning of countless new universes really add nothing to the story and and cause readers to scratch their heads.

The characters are well-developed and interesting but the web of constantly changing relationships and alliances gets confusing, especially during the critical events at the story's climax. I had to read the last couple of pages several times before I understood what had actually happened.

The most likable aspect of "Learning the World" was the alien bat-people, though the author's final evaluation of them made me want to shout "No!" It's great that they're able to overcome their differences and unite in the face of an external threat from the sky, but the case for their nobility doesn't make the grade. The bat people have enslaved, tortured, and maimed a species similar to themselves if somewhat lower on the evolutionary scale throughout their history. As much as we like the bat-people, we tend to cringe whenever their treatment of the trudges enters the story. When they learn that the trudges are in fact their equals, or nearly so, the bat-people change their ways virtually overnight. No more castration, no more crippling, no more whipping and killing. The author puts that forth as proof of the bat-people's honor and basic goodness, and would have us believe that that makes them better than humans. But I kept likening the trudges to chimpanzees, from our point of view, and that just didn't wash with me.



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