What We Are Seeking

Hardcover, 352 pages

Published by Tor Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-250-36473-9

From Cameron Reed, the acclaimed author of The Fortunate Fall, comes a soaring novel of queer hope and transformation, perfect for readers of Ann Leckie and Amal El-Mohtar.

On the planet Scythia, plants give birth to insects and trees can drag you to your death. Artificial monsters stalk the desert, and alien basket-men have wandered into town.

John Maraintha has been abandoned here, light-years from the peaceful forests that he loves.

The desert is harsh and the people in thrall to a barbaric custom called marriage.

He must find some way to make a life here.

But on Scythia, survival means transformation—and not everyone is willing to change.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed

5 stars

I will change, as everyone changes throughout life. We change when we learn new things, when we meet new people, when we move to a new place.

What We Are Seeking is an incredible book.

Let me pitch this to you by comparing it to other touchpoints. It's got a similar anthropological and gender focus to Left Hand of Darkness. There's alien biology, transforming yourself to meet it, and (some) humility about colonialism that feels reminiscent of To Be Taught if Fortunate. The protagonist comes from a planet without marriage nor social homophobia and gets into an Ethan of Athos-y situation when he is forced onto a planet where most people are married and have strict het gender roles.

It's also a story about being the only person carrying your own culture with you in a community. It's got first contact and linguistics. It's about …

I will change, as everyone changes throughout life. We change when we learn new things, when we meet new people, when we move to a new place.

What We Are Seeking is an incredible book.

Let me pitch this to you by comparing it to other touchpoints. It's got a similar anthropological and gender focus to Left Hand of Darkness. There's alien biology, transforming yourself to meet it, and (some) humility about colonialism that feels reminiscent of To Be Taught if Fortunate. The protagonist comes from a planet without marriage nor social homophobia and gets into an Ethan of Athos-y situation when he is forced onto a planet where most people are married and have strict het gender roles.

It's also a story about being the only person carrying your own culture with you in a community. It's got first contact and linguistics. It's about queer solidarity in the face of oppression. It's about the meaning of vows. It's about religious trauma. It's a story about third genders and the cost of "driving a wedge into other people's heads to pry open a space to live". There's just so much going on. This is not even getting into the worldbuilding that spills over outside the immediate plot about other planets and earth and the ship culture and the aiyi and and and

It's a slow, meandering, interpersonal sort of book. It's prone to cultural monologues. Structurally, it's a story that weaves a number of self-reinforcing parallel threads that all come to a similar point. Thematically, this book centers on the idea of change, and each of these story threads ends with taking a step into a new and destabilizing future together. We see the friction and the feelings and the decision point, but the reader isn't handed any certainty about the future. It's a form that lands with deep emotional resonance (especially that exquisitely worded final sentence), but it's also one that doesn't end with the typical level of plot closure you might be expecting.

It's not perfect, it's sometimes clunky, and it's not for everybody, but this is a book that is just going to rattle around in my brain for a long while.