What We Are Seeking

When the Free Ship Edgar’s Folly abandons John on the alien world of Scythia, he needs to find a way to not only survive, but thrive.

Chock-full of ideas, this was an interesting read that nevertheless failed to grab me like The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For did. The world-building is good with Scythia feeling very cohesively and comprehensively alien. There is a diverse cast of characters, but I struggled to care about any of them. They felt distant, always seeming at a slight remove, and, whilst very different people, strangely homogenous.

Much time is spent ruminating on various aspects of queerness and cultural norms. While interesting, at times, this veered towards the entirely too philosophical for my tastes. Generally, I’d have preferred more story and less contemplation. I found the ending abrupt, and was left unsatisfied by it. In short, Reed has written good sci-fi, just not my kind of sci-fi.

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.