Is there a name for the kind of science fiction that's all about coming up with novel ecosystems and trying to figure out how they work and how humans can adapt to them? Because I think it's my favourite kind.
In The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky we have a human civilization taking root in an alien world, literally. The humans base their villages around massive trees that host a kind of combined wasp nest/cyborg computer system that binds the villagers together. Protagonist Handry is accidentally severed from the system and forced to wander the land, having lost his empathic connection to the other villagers as well as his ability to digest alien foods. His sister, Melory, is chosen by the hive’s wasps to receive a ghost, the eponymous expert system, which is a sort of cyborg implant which offers expert advice (in this case medical), but which the villagers have come to uncritically obey, a sort of cautionary tale for technocracy run amok. The villagers are obedient to the ghosts, the priest wants to eradicate them, Handry's sister wants to find a compromise, and the ghosts themselves have their own views. In this, the alien setting works well to make this theme a parable rather a direct analogue to Brexit.
Drawing on inspiration from the insect world seems like a good strategy for coming up with aliens that are strange but still comprehensible. Tchaikovsky, an amateur entomologist, does exactly that, tending to give a mammalian species insect characteristics. The harboons piqued my interest: picture aggressive, six-limbed baboons with scythe claws capable of debarking trees. But there’s something about all those mentions of stalk eyes that just didn’t work for me. It’s just too goofy when you encounter it on a human scale––it was the same for me with the Andalites from the Animorphs series when I was a kid. I’m hoping it’s just the constraints of the novella’s brevity that kept him from further sketching out the insect aliens, as I understand it’s something he does in his other novels, and I’d like to read them eventually.
That said, it’s to the novella’s credit that most of the worldbuilding is never outright explained, mostly it's just lightly sketched and the audience ends up filling in the rest themselves. It’s a fantastic example of what Scott McCloud calls closure in his Understanding Comics. The story moves at a brisk pace, Handry shows up somewhere, describes the situation and establishes a conflict, then moves on.
It’s not the story we’re here for but a chance to explore the world itself. In fact, I kind of dreaded the inevitable confrontation with a villain who wants to severe all humans from their his and revelation of the long abandoned worldship, thinking there was no way Tchaikovsky could avoid the genre clichés. And he doesn’t. He embraces them. There’s some decent humour mined by having characters duel by reciting command line operations and forcing operating system updates on each other as if they were wizards throwing around arcane spells.
There’s a sequel due out next year (though with the pandemic, who can say for sure?) and I’m looking forward to seeing how Tchaikovsky can further flesh out this imaginative world he’s built. I really hope the theme of colonialism is further explored––how much can they compromise with a genuinely hostile ecosystem they can't leave? At what point does human survival become the outright elimination of competing forces?
Details
Title: The Expert System’s Brother
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Series: Expert System
Format: ebook
Length:160 pages
Publisher: Tor.com
Date: published July 17th 2018
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