To Each This World

Julie Czerneda

★★★★★

More like the Species Imperative trilogy or In The Company of Others than Czerneda’s more recent Night’s Edge series, To Each This World is a hard science-fiction story featuring multiple alien biologies, space colonies, polymorphic artificial lifeforms with a sense of humor, quantum-entangled tech-mediated telepathy and disposable avatar bodies for the astronauts who try to negotiate the future of humanity with aliens who think very differently from us.

It takes a little while to get going, but it does. And what could easily have turned into a series of plot tokens – travel to the next colony, convince them to return before the cosmic threat gets them, lather, rinse, repeat – never settles into a pattern. Each world they visit has fared very differently, and has to be handled in a different way.

Spoilers:

Some of the colony worlds are well-established. Another was so inhospitable that only a handful of descendants are eking out a miserable living. One turned out not to have any land so the colonists are still in cryosleep....

More importantly, the viewpoint characters are also deeply involved in trying to figure out what’s really going on. One’s a space pilot, and the other is the Arbiter, whose job negotiating with New Earth’s alien partners has become the job of re-consolidating humanity on one world. Are the Kmeth telling the truth about the threat of a “Divider?” What is it they really want out of their partnership with humanity, and why are they so insistent on bringing all the humans here?

Meanwhile, we catch glimpses of a human explorer on another world, one divided between human-compatible ecosystems and very incompatible systems, with a clearly artificial split that keeps the two apart.

The ending is abrupt, but only because all the pieces have been slowly drifting together such that it’s not clear how they fit until just before the end. 10 pages from the end I was wondering how she was going to resolve it in that much space. Amazingly, it works!