Speaking of Arboreal Point of View

[jesse_the_k]

E Lily Yu’s story about a sentient hemlock was particularly relevant to my interests because I just finished a pair of novels by Sue Burke:

Semiosis and Interference

https://semiosispax.com/

Significant chunks of these books are told from the POV of an alien plant, interacting with the idealistic colonists fleeing Earth to create Pax, a utopian alternative to what they left behind.

The first book was great. As I learned from Sue Burke’s site, the fictional plant’s ability to manipulate humans is based on actual Terrestrial botany. It’s delicious watching the humans finally realize that they’re being recruited as service animals to a huge patch of bamboo named Stevland (yes, after Stevie Wonder).

Semiosis features a conflict often found in generation-ship narratives: how do descendants maintain the values which impelled the founding generation? I love this trope even more as I age, watching folks move through from youth to adulthood. Providing a vision and value system that resists time’s corruption is hard.

I was disappointed by Interference, however, mainly because there was a lot of people-running-around-fighting, which wasn’t very interesting. (Well, except when Martha Wells does her outstanding job of positioning conceptual and tangible creatures in 3D without gravity. Go read Network Effect)