![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
City of Pearl
Its been a while since I last wrote something book related. In an attempt to fix that, here are a few thoughts on City of Pearl by Karen Traviss.
Shan Frankland is a tough, seen it all, environmental hazards cop. After a career attempting to impose some limits on amoral biotech corporations, Frankland is talked out of retirement and into a 75 year journey to Cavanagh's Star. Unfortunately for Frankland, although she knows that the mission is ostensibly to investigate a distress signal from a lost human colony, she knows that her actual reason for going is completely different but, thanks to some clever government memory technology, she won't be able to remember what that reason is until absolutely necessary.
Upon their arrival, the humans quickly find themselves in trouble after their ship is immobilised, causing the hibernation system to fail. After ordering that the payload — a group of corporate scientists, brought along to bankroll the mission — be defrosted, Frankland heads down to the surface to talk to the colonists. Rather than being overjoyed to see their potential rescuers, the colonists are distinctly concerned that the presence of additional humans will upset a delicate truce that exists between the three groups of aliens who lay claim to planet. After various negotiations, Frankland manages to get landing rights for the mission, on condition that the scientists agree not to take an samples of the local flora and fauna — something that would upset the ethics of the planet's guardian, an alien called Aras.
As the mission becomes established, ties with the colonists strengthen and Frankland finds herself becoming friends with Aras, but inevitably things soon start to go wrong. Aras, concerned that the real goal of the mission is to find a virus that grants a bizarre form of immortality, finds himself torn between his need to contain the virus and the guilt of his past actions while Frankland finds herself forced to deal a group of scientists who are becoming increasingly stroppy and increasingly willing to ignore the rules.
City of Pearl has a lot of things going for it. The colonists, a fundamentalist Christian sect that eschews technology and animal products, are very elegantly realised — in particular, no attempt is made to gloss over the fact that their life is hard and they're forced to work constantly, just to stay alive. They may be happy, but their life is no simple bucolic idyll.
The main characters, Aras and Frankland, are both very well realised. Aras, thanks to his combination of human and Wess'Har features, is both comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time. He has many human sides to him, worrying about the guilt of his past actions, concerned that duty might require him to do something just as a bad in future, but at the same time he's quite implacable. He also possesses an interesting ethical outlook — he completely refuses to discriminate on speciesist grounds, something that probably seems obvious if you've encountered other intelligent forms of alien life, and refers to both humans and mice as people. Frankland shares Aras' general outlook on the simple life, the importance and inexorability of duty, and also, thanks to an early encounter with a gorilla in a research lab, a view that you can't just write off the suffering of other species simply because they're different. I think it's this shared outlook, combined with the strong sense of loneliness that both possess, that explains why they work so well together.
Shan Frankland is a tough, seen it all, environmental hazards cop. After a career attempting to impose some limits on amoral biotech corporations, Frankland is talked out of retirement and into a 75 year journey to Cavanagh's Star. Unfortunately for Frankland, although she knows that the mission is ostensibly to investigate a distress signal from a lost human colony, she knows that her actual reason for going is completely different but, thanks to some clever government memory technology, she won't be able to remember what that reason is until absolutely necessary.
Upon their arrival, the humans quickly find themselves in trouble after their ship is immobilised, causing the hibernation system to fail. After ordering that the payload — a group of corporate scientists, brought along to bankroll the mission — be defrosted, Frankland heads down to the surface to talk to the colonists. Rather than being overjoyed to see their potential rescuers, the colonists are distinctly concerned that the presence of additional humans will upset a delicate truce that exists between the three groups of aliens who lay claim to planet. After various negotiations, Frankland manages to get landing rights for the mission, on condition that the scientists agree not to take an samples of the local flora and fauna — something that would upset the ethics of the planet's guardian, an alien called Aras.
As the mission becomes established, ties with the colonists strengthen and Frankland finds herself becoming friends with Aras, but inevitably things soon start to go wrong. Aras, concerned that the real goal of the mission is to find a virus that grants a bizarre form of immortality, finds himself torn between his need to contain the virus and the guilt of his past actions while Frankland finds herself forced to deal a group of scientists who are becoming increasingly stroppy and increasingly willing to ignore the rules.
City of Pearl has a lot of things going for it. The colonists, a fundamentalist Christian sect that eschews technology and animal products, are very elegantly realised — in particular, no attempt is made to gloss over the fact that their life is hard and they're forced to work constantly, just to stay alive. They may be happy, but their life is no simple bucolic idyll.
The main characters, Aras and Frankland, are both very well realised. Aras, thanks to his combination of human and Wess'Har features, is both comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time. He has many human sides to him, worrying about the guilt of his past actions, concerned that duty might require him to do something just as a bad in future, but at the same time he's quite implacable. He also possesses an interesting ethical outlook — he completely refuses to discriminate on speciesist grounds, something that probably seems obvious if you've encountered other intelligent forms of alien life, and refers to both humans and mice as people. Frankland shares Aras' general outlook on the simple life, the importance and inexorability of duty, and also, thanks to an early encounter with a gorilla in a research lab, a view that you can't just write off the suffering of other species simply because they're different. I think it's this shared outlook, combined with the strong sense of loneliness that both possess, that explains why they work so well together.