We Have Always Been Here

hardcover, 368 pages

Published July 6, 2021 by DAW.

ISBN:: 978-0-7564-1729-1

(1 review)

Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.

Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes—and that’s when things begin to fall apart.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen

3 stars

This is a sci-fi horror(?) book about a psychologist on a corporate ship sent to explore a planet for a settlement, with hostile crew tension, mysterious anomalies, and distrustful corporate secrecy. The main character Park is not conscripted like most of the rest of the crew, and so is out of the information loop, distrusted and gaslit, all while weird shit is going down.

I personally enjoyed Park as a main character. She reads as an aro/ace character and is possibly the only character who cares about the androids on the ship. She doesn't get along with other humans, deeply prefers her solitude, and has gotten along with androids her whole life. In the end, her personality becomes a plot point itself, which adds to a nice sense of closure to the whole story.

The biggest negative here is that this book is very fluffy on the science part of …

This is a sci-fi horror(?) book about a psychologist on a corporate ship sent to explore a planet for a settlement, with hostile crew tension, mysterious anomalies, and distrustful corporate secrecy. The main character Park is not conscripted like most of the rest of the crew, and so is out of the information loop, distrusted and gaslit, all while weird shit is going down.

I personally enjoyed Park as a main character. She reads as an aro/ace character and is possibly the only character who cares about the androids on the ship. She doesn't get along with other humans, deeply prefers her solitude, and has gotten along with androids her whole life. In the end, her personality becomes a plot point itself, which adds to a nice sense of closure to the whole story.

The biggest negative here is that this book is very fluffy on the science part of the science fiction. I like my sf pretty fluffy indeed, and this book is much more about the psychological horror and social tensions (with the crew, and also between the crew and androids) than about exploring a particular novel idea. The book plays pretty fast and loose with "what is consciousness even", but I think that's not the story it's trying to tell.

However, there were a fair number of sentences that just stuck out to me as bad science (or bad writing). One character's whistling was marked as unusual because people don't whistle in space because sound carried so differently away from Earth(?). In another moment, Park's lips are dry from the vacuum of space (while she's been in the ship). I don't mean to nitpick on details, but these moments took me out of the story.