Interference

I really like the way that Interference takes the themes from its predecessor and extends them in different directions, without just being like "and this is the next thing that happened to all the same characters".

I particularly enjoyed the way she wove in the contingent from Earth - it reminded me strongly of the later books in the Planetfall series.

New humans, new life forms, new explorations - it builds a great new story on the foundation laid in Semiosis.

An intriguing followup to Semiosis that weaves several drastically different sentient species (both plant and animal) into a story about factions, community, freedom, communication and war.

In the centuries since the human colonists left for Pax, Earth's civilization collapsed and a fascist patriarchy took control and has rebuilt things to the point that they can check in on some of those outer-space colonies from before the fall.

Like the first book, each chapter is told from a different character's point of view (including Stevland, of course!), though this time around it's all focused on the arrival of the new expedition and the events leading up to it. The psychology of the bamboo's and the Glassmakers' perspectives is notably different from the humans', and of course each species has its factions, and each faction has its priorities, and each person has what they do and don't know and assume. (The chapter in which the Earth expedition arrives at the colony has the narrator repeatedly making and revising assumptions.)

And there are more factions in a war fought on plant timescale.

Despite it being more tightly compressed in time, it feels less focused than the first book. There's a side expedition late in the story that's both necessary thematically and narratively awkward. I'm not sure how I feel about the epilogue as an epilogue, but as I put the finishing touches on this review I've just discovered that Burke wrote some related short stories set during Semiosis...and a third book that picks up on those threads and was published just last year.

Cross-posted from my website.

I think I liked this volume even better than I did the first volume. Having familiarized ourselves with the two intelligent species in Rainbow City besides the human colonists, we are slowly led to consider a couple of others over the course of this book, and by shifting point of view between the different parties come to understand something pretty deep about the idea of consciousness and species identity. There are now two groups of humans, the Pacifist colonists and the "Earthlings" who volunteered to investigate what became of the colony now that a couple hundred years have passed. They have diverged considerably in their social systems (though the dystopian tendencies of Earth cultures were already making themselves known at the time the first generation of Pacifists left), so they are properly two distinct collections. Midway though the book they mount a quick expedition to another inhabited continent on Pax where they encounter creatures which are the same and yet different from what they have come to know, giving rise to a number of questions about the origin of life on the planet. At the climax of the story there is violent strife between the different power centers in Rainbow City, and by this time I was able to sympathize with more than one of the points of view (although the one chief bad guy never really does anything to redeem himself much at all). Then, finally, in the epilogue there's another long jump in time, at least for humans, not so much for plants, and the author closes the circle back to an Earth that was still far from a utopia. There is one alien intelligence that remains mostly a mystery, the dangerous corals which seek to encroach on the forest, except for a brief period where their thoughts are translated via technology. There is a kind of epic scope in one way, and yet also a cozy feel because of the way we never lose sight of the most fundamental motivations for all the actors: sunlight and water, warmth and food, family and happiness.

The various narrators are sketched out in an economical way so you can imagine their personalities through their actions and what other characters say about them. The worldbuilding is certainly rather extensive but never takes over from the focus on the characters, which I liked. Important things are constantly at stake and keep the tension up, even when it's time for a festival or just a communal meal.