Semiosis

Semiosis is a fascinating take on space colonization, intelligence, and language. The multi-generational story starts with the founding of a small human colony on an alien world where, as they soon discover, plants have evolved intelligence and use animals for tools. Needless to say, things don't work out the way the colonists intended, and their descendants find ways to adapt to a world where they can't forget that they're only one part of the ecosystem -- and not a necessary part, either. And the plants have their own ideas!

Each chapter picks up a character from a different generation. Burke gives them all distinct voices and attitudes, and while each looks back at the previous narrator from this new perspective, their stories are their own.

I found the middle chapters the most interesting. At this point the colony has established itself, and all the founders have died off, leaving only those who grew up on Pax don't have memories of the life they left behind on Earth. These chapters get into how the plants communicate with each other, what kind of worldview sapient bamboo might have, and how the bamboo and the humans figure out how to communicate with each other and negotiate how to share a city and the surrounding area.

The bamboo primarily communicates with other plants through chemical transfer via roots -- much like plants in the real world do, only a lot more complex -- and over long distances by encoding messages in pollen grains. Neither strategy is going to help it talk to humans.

I was reminded at times of Robert Charles Wilson's BIOS and Ursula Le Guin's early novel Planet of Exile. The latter in particular, since both involve human colonists several generations down the line in a one-city colony, incomplete adaptation to local biochemistry, trying to warn people of danger that they dismiss as smaller than it is (oh, they never attack in groups that big!), and an extended siege against the colony in the later chapters. It's kind of weird that I read this book so soon after that one.

(Cross-posted from my website)

The story takes place over the course of centuries on a distant planet, like many other ambitious science fiction stories, but its basic premise is not like any other tale to my knowledge. "Semiosis" is the term invented by Charles Peirce meaning the process whereby signs get attached to meaning, and the concerns of language are central to the tale. To up the stakes, the human settlers of Pax must learn to communicate with a foreign intelligence which is not only alien but not animal in nature, for it is the plant-life which which has the highest degree of intelligence. It requires quite a bit of ingenuity to tease out those aspects of plant life which make for a compelling character: the way a single consciousness can extend over a large area, the sensitivity to chemistry, to heat, and and to light, an extended lifespan for perennials, a form of communication between plant species either from root to root or mediated by biochemical molecules across a range of intelligence levels. Rather than making up names for the plants and animals native to Pax, the characters use ordinary names of Earth species in their place, so it takes a while for us to get used to a "bamboo" that has a few bamboo-like properties but also bears fruit and communicates by patterns on its canes, and "eagles" which hunt in groups and use language, and fire. Furthermore, the humans start out in trouble when much of the technology they brought with them from Earth was destroyed, and much of the rest of it was lost over time.
The things that make the human characters like us are things like family units, written and oral histories carried over seven generations, a sense of curiosity held in check by fear and selfishness. Early on, the author lets us know that life on Pax is not one of safety and ease, with hostile plants and animals along with the danger of starvation. They only gradually come to understand the intelligence of the life around them and develop systems to defend against the hostile type and to benefit from the more cooperative kinds. But the same time they are taming their surroundings, it happens that they are being tamed by an intelligence which dominates the middle and the end of the novel.
There are a few things which test the reader's belief, but in the end I was able to accept them for the way they served the central narrative of the foundation of a new world. The Pacifists were exceptionally lucky to find native things they could eat (including those which were used to medicate and to control them), and they were able to move into a city which they found conveniently abandoned. Also it seemed like kind of a coincidence that two spacefaring species happened to pick the same planet within a couple centuries of one another. The story is not one of the reinvention of civilization from nothing, however, but sticks pretty close to the themes of cooperation within a sophisticated society despite built-in conflict.
I really started getting into the book about the one-third point once the colonists had moved to the Glassmaker city. There's a murder mystery, a pitched battle, political intrigue, some sexual tension, and plenty of conflict between generations to keep a reader engaged. I am looking forward to the concluding installment to the story to round out whether the colony thrives or withers on the vine.