Every chapter is like a short story within a shared universe-and it’s a phenomenal universe. Beginning with Octavio, the story is told from seven different points of view, spread out over more than a century, and each perspective change sends the story years ahead. The plants of Pax are able to think and plan ahead-and the colonists must learn to communicate with them in order to survive. He knows the chemical alteration is too fast to be mere ecological adjustment, and when the deadly vine changes its chemistry again to destroy a field of grain the colonists planted, Octavio begins to understand that the poisonous vine sees them as a threat. The deadly crop, he discovers, comes from an identical snow vine that’s competing for space with the vines closer to the colonists. He tests a persimmonlike fruit growing on snow-white vines and finds it safe to eat-but later, three Pacifists die after eating the same fruit from a different vine that’s now, somehow, poisonous. The botanist, Octavio, knows that planting seeds from Earth, without symbiotic microorganisms in the soil, would be futile, but Pax is already teeming with plants. They arrive 158 years later on a planet they name Pax. In the 2060s, a group leaves Earth to create a new, peaceful society. Colonists land on a planet with unexpected sentient species in this sci-fi debut.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |