“The war had begun long before we arrived because war was their way of life.”
I am not exactly sure what to make of this book in part because it pivots multiple times from start to finish. I almost wish it wasn’t the book it is, and is instead the book I thought it would be. That’s not really a fair criticism, except that the opening section of the book is very good and interesting, and then quickly pivots away from what I found to be so interesting.
The novel is about a group of colonists who travel to an earth-like planet, but quickly realize that the additional billion years of existence and evolution on the planet (plus all the other ways in which worlds can be different) have made this planet not only impossibly different from what they thought, but extraordinarily dangerous as well.
In the opening section, the narrator is Octavo, one of the original colonists, giving us the story about a month after first landing. Of the original fifty colonists, about a third died in the travel and landing on the planet from various computer errors, illness, and landing accidents. Now, three additional colonists have just died mysteriously seemingly from being poisoned by fruit that had been previously safe to eat. Additionally, a field of crops that were thriving have just died overnight from root rot in a way that seems inexplicable. What emerges from this section is the understanding that some plants (if not all plants) on this planet are sentient, and are fighting back against the colonists. They also realize that they positioned themselves in between two warring factions of plants and hope to survive by allying with one group.
The novel then pivots several times as it picks up the collective story of the colony from each successive generation of human. So we end up with some very large time jumps, with some looking backward to fill in gaps.
I wanted to stay closely with that first group a lot longer than we got to, and the time jumps wore thin for me. Another thing that wore thin is how shallow some of the writing is at times, very much overexplaining not the science, but the plot. I don’t know how many times (0 actually), I need someone to say aloud “But plants can’t think!”
The novel ends up feeling like a blend of Dan Simmons’s Hyperion and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books — or if I am being more cynical Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis books and Plants v Zombies.
