Review: What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed

What We Are Seeking is a bit hard to classify beyond science fiction. I think I would call it anthropological science fiction, but it's also a first contact story and a planetary colony story. It is a standalone novel (well, so far as I know; see later in the review for caveats). This is Cameron Reed's second novel after the excellent and memorable cyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall, first published in 1996 under Reed's former name of Raphael Carter.

John Maraintha is a doctor from the world of Essius. He took what he thought was a temporary job on the Free Ship Edgar's Folly, where he's endured considerable culture shock. As the novel opens, John learns that the colonists on Scythia have requested a translator to talk to one of the native life forms, and a doctor since they're down to only one. John will be that doctor. The captain has decided, and by the rules of the free ships, John does not get a choice in the matter.

The Scythian colony is about four hundred people, now located in a desert climate since the complex native life forms destroyed their previous settlement. The colonists are a split between Ischnurans and Zandaheans, two other human civilizations from the scatter of colony worlds left after Earth embraced AIs (aiyis here) and turned inward. Both of those groups marry, something John considers a moral abomination. Neither of them seem likely to understand Essian sexual ethics. More devastatingly, John had intended to spend some time as a ship doctor and then return home to a new place in Essian society. Once he lands on Scythia, the chances of that are gone; it is highly unlikely any ship would pick him up again and take him home.

I have been trying to find the right books to compare What We Are Seeking with ever since I read it. The best I've come up with are Ursula K. Le Guin (particularly The Dispossessed), Eleanor Arnason's A Woman of the Iron People, and Becky Chambers's To Be Taught, If Fortunate. The start of the book felt like an intentional revisiting of an earlier era of science fiction, with somewhat updated science and politics, but the last half of the book, where the action picks up considerably, is a meditation on gender, social systems, religion, and small-group politics. All of that is mixed with biological exploration and a first-contact story with some quite-alien aliens.

This is the sort of novel where the protagonist's culture is as foreign to the reader as any of the other cultures he counters, so the reader is assembling several jigsaw puzzles at once. John is dropped into an established colony with its own social norms and established hierarchies. The one other outsider, the translator Sudharma Jain, is, as his name implies, a Jain who keeps very strict religious observances. Half of the colony is from something akin to a fundamentalist Christian religious sect that practices patriarchy and strict marriage codes. The other half is more gently sexist (but still sexist) and has its own tradition of a third gender that becomes central to the story. John, meanwhile, is a strong believer in the Essian approach to social organization: Any two partners of any gender freely have sex by mutual consent and without obligation, and family is based solely on blood relations. These beliefs do not fit comfortably together, even when people are trying (as they mostly do) to be welcoming.

The first half of this book is very slow. This gives all of the characters space to breathe and become comfortable, and the characterization is superb, but it is a book to start when you're in the mood for something slow and observational. There is a plot that gradually becomes apparent, or rather there are several plots that are intertwined, but tension and urgency are mostly reserved for the second half of the book. Instead, the book opens with a lot of close observation of alien flora and fauna and the untangling of subtle social dynamics among the Scythians.

There is also a visitor from earth, much to the distress of the Scythians. Earth presence means the ships will not return and the colony may be cut off from any sort of technological resupply. Despite speaking a common language, that visitor is as mutually alien to the other groups as they are to the native flora. Her life is fully integrated with aiyis, giving her essentially godlike powers and the ability to turn off inconvenient emotions and disregard anything she doesn't want to see. What she and the Earth aiyis are doing on the planet is one of the early mysteries.

The dialogue in this book is truly excellent. Each characters has their own voice, there are fascinating digressions on different words that lead to tidbits of world-building, and some of the culture-specific idioms are delightful.

"I'm making a mess of this. None of that matters. Let me fall out the window and come in the door again. This is how my story ought to start:"

The challenges for the characters in this story are slow but deep ones: belonging and self-definition, the conflict between cultural tradition and personal circumstance, and the sacrifices required to live with small groups in situations where civil war is viscerally attractive. It has one of the most comprehensive and fascinating treatments of transgender issues that I've read in science fiction. Its commentary on current politics is subtle and estranged in the way that science fiction does best, but still pointed and satisfying. And, well, there are passages like this that I absolutely adore:

"I wouldn't go that far. It could be they are right, the universe we see exists because a mind like ours created it — at least, a mind enough like ours that we can say it wants one thing and not another, and when it acts it does so with intent. That's as good an idea as any. But it is certainly not plausible that such a being believes that people everywhere should marry, or that men should never visit men, or no one should become a jess. Look at what they have created. The universe could have been nothing at all, or one atom of hydrogen floating in a void, or a diamond crystal infinite in all directions, if their mind cared for simplicity or tidiness. Instead we have stars and planets and black holes and nebulas. It could have all been cold and dead, but there is life. They could have made one species for each world, or just a few, which could have stayed the same forever, but instead we have millions and millions, all of which are changing every moment, varying among themselves and boiling off in all directions. Such a god is like an artist who fills up a library of sketchbooks with their drawings of strange creatures, and when every scrap of paper in the place is used up, goes back with a different color ink and scribbles over them again. They are obsessed with variation — they gorge themselves with it and never grow full. Do you really think a mind like that could want us all to live in the same way?"

I had one problem with this book, though, and for me it was a big one: There is no ending. Reed effectively builds tension, gets me caring about all of the characters, sets up several problems, starts down a path towards resolution, and then the book just... ends.

Long-time readers of my reviews will know that I'm a denouement fanatic. I want the scouring of the shire, I want the chapter set in the happily ever after, I want the catharsis of an ending. This made me so grumpy!

To be clear, this is not sequel bait (at least so far as I can tell). I can write a philosophical defense of the ending. The types of problems and lives that Reed set up don't have clear endings; this is, to some extent, the point. We muddle through, and then those who come after us muddle through some more, and the cumulative effect is called human civilization. And there is some denouement; Reed doesn't leave the reader at a cliffhanger or anything that egregious.

But still, I wanted the happy ending, even though that was unrealistic for the style of story this is, because I'm a happy ending reader. This is not an ending sort of book; it's the sort of book where I get a sinking feeling at the 95% mark because there aren't enough pages left for the number of remaining unresolved problems. I've gotten less annoyed in the days since I finished the book, and I can appreciate the thematic point made by how the book ends, but I still feel like it's worth an advance warning if you're a reader like I am.

I would be delighted by a sequel, but it didn't feel like that was the intent.

Apart from that, this was both excellent and rather unlike a lot of current science fiction. I think the closest comparison I can make among recent novels I've read is Sue Burke's Semiosis. What We Are Seeking has a similar sort of world-building, but I liked these characters so much more. It felt like a classic literary science fiction novel, but very much written in 2026. Highly recommended, just beware of the lack of closure.

Content notes: Sexism, homophobia, stomach illness, and some religious abuse.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks

Surface Detail is the ninth novel in Banks's Culture science fiction (literary space opera?) series. As with most of the Culture novels, it can be read in any order, although this isn't the best starting point. There is an Easter egg reference to Use of Weapons that would be easier to notice if you have read that book recently, but which is not that important to the story.

Lededje Y'breq is an Indented Intagliate from the Sichultian Enablement. Her body is patterned from her skin down to her bones, covered with elaborate markings similar to tattoos that extend to her internal organs. As an intagliate, she is someone's property. In her case, she is the property of Joller Veppers, the richest man in the Enablement and her father's former business partner. Intagliates are a tradition of great cultural pride in the Enablement. They are a living representation of the seriousness with which debts and honor are taken, up to and including one's not-yet-born children becoming the property of one's debtor. Such children are decorated as living works of art of the highest skill and technical sophistication; after all, the Enablement are not barbarians.

As the story opens, Lededje is attempting, not for the first time, to escape. This attempt is successful in an unexpected way.

Prin and Chay are Pavulean researchers and academics who, as this story opens, are in Hell. They are not dead; they have infiltrated the Hell that Pavuleans are shown to scare them into proper behavior in order to prove that it is not an illusion and their society does indeed torture people in an afterlife, in more awful ways than people dare imagine. They have reached the portal through which temporary visitors exit, hoping to escape with firm evidence of the existence and horrors of the Pavulean afterlife. They will not be entirely successful.

Yime Nsokyi is a Culture agent for Quietus, the part of Contact that concerns itself with the dead. Many advanced societies throughout the galaxy have invented and reinvented the ability to digitize a mind and then run it in a virtual environment. Once a society can capture the minds of every person in that society from that point forward, it faces the question of whether to do so and, if it does, what to do with those minds. More specifically, it faces the moral question of whether to punish the minds of people who were horrible in life. It faces the question of whether to create Hell.

Vatueil is a soldier in a contestation, a limited and carefully monitored virtual war. The purpose of that war game is to, once and for all, resolve the question of whether civilizations should be allowed to create Hells. Some civilizations consider them integral to their religion or self-conception. Others consider them morally abhorrent, and that conflict was in danger of spilling over into war in the Real. Hence the War in Heaven: Both sides committed to fight in a virtual space under specific and structured rules, and the winner decides the fate of the galaxy's Hells. Vatueil is fighting for the anti-Hell side. The anti-Hell side is losing.

There are very few authors who were better at big-idea science fiction than Iain M. Banks. I've been reading a few books about AI ships and remembered that I had two unread Culture novels that I was saving. It felt like a good time to lose myself in something sprawling.

Surface Detail does sprawl. Even by Banks's standards, there was an impressive amount of infodumping in this book. Banks always has huge and lovingly described set pieces, and this book is no exception, but there are also paragraphs and pages of background and cultural musings and galactic politics. We are introduced to not one but three new Contact divisions; as well as the already-mentioned Quietus, there is Numina, which concerns itself with the races that have sublimed (transcended), and Restoria, which deals with hegemonizing swarms (grey goo nanotech, paperclip maximizers, and their equivalents).

Infodumping is both a feature and a bane of big-idea science fiction, and it helps to be in the right mood. It also helps if the info being dumped is interesting, and this is where Banks shines. This is a huge, sprawling book, but it deals with some huge, sprawling questions and it has interesting and non-reductive thoughts about them. The problems posed by the plot come with history, failed solutions, multi-sided political disputes, strategies and tactics of varying morality and efficacy, and an effort to wrestle with the irreducible complexity of trying to resolve political and ethical disagreements in a universe full of profound disagreements and moral systems that one cannot simply steamroll.

It also helps that the characters are interesting, even when they're not likable. Surface Detail has one fully hissable villain (Veppers) as a viewpoint character, but even Veppers is interesting in a "let me check the publication date to see if Banks was aware of Peter Thiel" sort of way. The Culture ships, of which there are several in this story, tend towards a gently sarcastic kindness that I find utterly charming. Lededje provides the compelling motive force of someone who has no involvement in the broader philosophical questions and instead intends to resolve one specific problem through lethal violence. Vatueil and Yime were a bit bland in personality, more exposition generators than characters I warmed to, but their roles and therefore the surrounding exposition were fascinating enough that I still enjoyed their sections.

I'm sure this is not an original observation, but I was struck reading this book in the first half of 2026 that the Culture functions as an implementation of what the United States likes to think it is but has never been. It has a strong sense of shared ethics and moral principles, it tries to export them to the rest of the galaxy through example, persuasion, and careful meddling, but it tries to follow some combination of pragmatic and moral rules while doing so, partly to avoid a backlash and partly to avoid becoming its own sort of hegemonizing swarm. That is a powerfully attractive vision of how to be an advanced civilization, and the fact that every hegemon that has claimed that mantle has behaved appallingly just makes it more intriguing as a fictional concept. In this book, like in many Culture books, the Culture is painfully aware of the failure modes of meddling, and the story slowly reveals the effort the Culture put into staying just on a defensible side of their own moral lines. This is, in a sense, a Prime Directive story, but with a level of hard-nosed pragmatism and political sophistication that the endless Star Trek Prime Directive episodes never reach.

Surface Detail does tend to sprawl, and I'm not sure Banks pulled together all the pieces of the plot. For example, if there was a point to the subplot involving the Unfallen Bulbitian, it was lost on me. (There is always a possibility with Banks that I wasn't paying close enough attention.) But the descriptions are so elaborate and the sense of politics and history are so deep that I was never bored, even when following a plot thread that meandered off into apparent irrelevance. The main plot line comes to a satisfying conclusion that may be even more biting social commentary today than it was in 2010.

A large part of the plot does involve Hell, so a warning for those who haven't read much Banks: He adores elaborate descriptions of body horror and physical torture. The sections involving Prin and Chay are rather grim and horrific, probably a bit worse than Dante's Inferno. I have a low tolerance for horror and I was able to read past and around the worst bits, but be warned that Banks indulges his love for the painfully grotesque quite a bit.

This was great, and exactly what I was hoping for when I picked it up. It's not the strongest Culture novel (for me, that's either The Player of Games or Excession), but it's one of the better ones. Highly recommended, although if you're new to the Culture, I would start with one of the earlier books that provide a more gradual introduction to the Culture and Special Circumstances.

Followed, in the somewhat disconnected Culture series sense, by The Hydrogen Sonata.

Content warnings: Rape (largely off-screen), graphic violence, lots of Bosch-style grotesque torture, and a lot of Veppers being a thoroughly awful human being as a viewpoint character.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Collision Course, by Michelle Diener

Collision Course is the sixth novel in the Class 5 science fiction series and the first that doesn't use the Dark X naming convention. There are lots of spoilers in this story for the earlier books, but you don't have to remember all the details of previous events. Like the novella, Dark Ambitions, this novel returns to Rose, Sazo, and Dav instead of introducing another Earth woman and Class 5 ship.

In Dark Class, Ellie discovered an interesting artifact of a previously-unknown space-faring civilization. Rose, Sazo, and Dav are on their way to make first contact when, during a routine shuttle flight between the Class 5 and Dav's Grih military ship, Rose is abducted. The aliens they came to contact have an aggressive, leverage-based negotiating strategy. They're also in the middle of a complicated war with more sides than are readily apparent.

What I liked most about Dark Horse, the first book of this series and our introduction to Rose, was the revealed ethical system and a tense plot that hinged primarily on establishing mutual trust when there were excellent reasons for the characters to not trust each other. As the series has continued, I think the plots have become more complicated but the ethical dilemmas and revealing moments of culture shock have become less common. That is certainly true of Collision Course; this is science fiction as thriller, with a complex factional conflict, a lot of events, more plot reversals than the earlier books, but also less ethics and philosophy.

I'm not sure if this is a complaint. I kind of miss the ethics and philosophy, but Diener also hasn't had much new to say for the past few books. The plot of Collision Course is quite satisfyingly twisty for a popcorn-style science fiction series. I was kept guessing about the merits of some of the factions quite late into the book, although admittedly I was in the mood for light entertainment and was not trying too hard to figure out where the book was going. I did read nearly the entire book in one sitting and stayed up until 2am to finish it, which is a solid indication that something Diener was doing worked.

I do have quibbles, though. One is that the ending is a bit unsatisfying. Like Sazo, I was getting quite annoyed at the people capturing (and recapturing) Rose and would have enjoyed somewhat more decisive consequences. Also, and here I have to be vague to avoid spoilers, I was expecting a bit more of a redemption arc for one of the players in the multi-sided conflict. The ending I did get was believable but rather sad, and I wish Diener had either chosen a different outcome (this is light happily-ever-after science fiction, after all) or wrestled more directly with the implications. There were a bit too many "wait, one more thing" ending reversals and not quite enough emotional payoff for me.

The other quibble is that Collision Course was a bit too damsel in distress for this series. Rose is pregnant, which Diener uses throughout the book as a way to raise the stakes of the plot and also make Rose more annoyed but also less capable than she was in her earlier novel. Both Sazo and Dav are in full heroic rescue mode, and while Diener still ensures Rose is primarily responsible for her own fate, there is some "military men attempt to protect the vulnerable woman" here. One of the things I like about this series is that it does not use that plot, so while the balance between Rose rescuing herself and other people rescuing her is still tilted towards Rose, I would have liked this book more if Rose were in firmer control of events.

I will mostly ignore the fact that a human and a Grih sexually reproducing makes little to no biological sense, since Star Trek did similar things routinely and it's an established genre trope. But I admit that it still annoys me a bit that the alien hunk is essentially human except that he's obsessed with Rose's singing and has pointy ears. Diener cares about Rose's pregnancy a lot more than I did, which added to my mild grumpiness at how often it came up.

Overall, this was fine. I prefer a bit more of a protagonist discovering how powerful she is by making ingenious use of the ethical dilemmas her captors have trapped themselves in, and a bit less of Rose untangling a complicated political situation by getting abducted by every player serially, but it still kept the pages turning. Any book that is sufficiently engrossing for me to read straight through is working at some level. Collision Course was highly readable, undemanding, and distracting, which is what I was looking for when I read it. I would put it about middle of pack in the series. If Rose's pregnancy is more interesting to you than it was to me, that might push it a bit higher.

If you have gotten this far in the series, you will probably enjoy this, although it does feel like Diener is running out of new things to say about this universe. That's unfortunate given the number of threads about AI sentience and rights that could still be followed, but I think tracing them properly would require more philosophical meat than Diener intends for these books. Which is why the next book I grabbed was a Culture novel.

Currently this is the final book in the Class 5 series, but there is no inherent reason why Diener couldn't write more of them.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong

The Teller of Small Fortunes is a cozy found-family fantasy with a roughly medieval setting. It was Julie Leong's first novel.

Tao is a traveling teller of small fortunes. In her wagon, pulled by her friendly mule Laohu, she wanders the small villages of Eshtera and reads the trivial fortunes of villagers in the tea leaves. An upcoming injury, a lost ring, a future kiss, a small business deal... she looks around the large lines of fate and finds the small threads. After a few days, she moves on, making her solitary way to another village.

Tao is not originally from Eshtera. She is Shinn, which means she encounters a bit of suspicion and hostility mixed with the fascination of the exotic. (Language and culture clues lead me to think Shinara is intended to be this world's not-China, but it's not a direct mapping.) Tao uses the fascination to help her business; fortune telling is more believable from someone who seems exotic. The hostility she's learned to deflect and ignore. In the worst case, there's always another village.

If you've read any cozy found-family novels, you know roughly what happens next. Tao encounters people on the road and, for various reasons, they decide to travel together. The first two are a massive mercenary (Mash) and a semi-reformed thief (Silt), who join Tao somewhat awkwardly after Tao gives Mash a fortune that is far more significant than she intended. One town later, they pick up an apprentice baker best known for her misshapen pastries. They also collect a stray cat, because of course they do. It's that sort of book.

For me, this sort of novel lives or dies by the characters, so it's good news that I liked Tao and enjoyed spending time with her. She's quiet, resilient, competent, and self-contained, with a difficult past and some mysteries and emotions the others can draw over time. She's also thoughtful and introspective, which means the tight third-person narration that almost always stays on Tao offers emotional growth to mull over. I also liked Kina (the baker) and Mash; they're a bit more obvious and straightforward, but Kina adds irrepressible energy and Mash is a good example of the sometimes-gruff soldier with a soft heart. Silt was a bit more annoying and I never entirely warmed to him, but he's tolerable and does get a bit of much-needed (if superficial) character development.

It takes some time for the reader to learn about the primary conflict of the story (Tao does not give up her secrets quickly), so I won't spoil it, but I thought it worked well. I was momentarily afraid the story would develop a clear villain, but Leong has some satisfying alternate surprises in store. The ending was well-done, although it is very happily-ever-after in a way that may strike some readers as too neat. The Teller of Small Fortunes aims for a quiet and relaxed mood rather than forcing character development through difficult choices; it's a fine aim for a novel, but it won't match everyone's mood.

I liked the world-building, although expect small and somewhat disconnected details rather than an overarching theory of magic. Tao's ability gets the most elaboration, for obvious reasons, and I liked how Leong describes it and explores its consequences. Most of the attention in the setting is on the friction, wistfulness, and small reminders of coming from a different culture than everyone around you, but so long ago that you are not fully a part of either world. This, I thought, was very well-done and is one of the places where the story is comfortable with complex feelings and doesn't try to reach a simplifying conclusion.

There is one bit of the story that felt like it was taken directly out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign to a degree that felt jarring, but that was the only odd world-building note.

This book felt like a warm cup of tea intended to comfort and relax, without large or complex thoughts about the world. It's not intended to be challenging; there are a few plot twists I didn't anticipate, but nothing that dramatic, and I doubt anyone will be surprised by the conclusions it reaches. It's a pleasant time with some nice people and just enough tension and mystery to add some motivation to find out what happens next. If that's what you're in the mood for, recommended. If you want a book that has Things To Say or will put you on the edge of your seat, maybe save this one for another mood.

All the on-line sources I found for this book call it a standalone, but The Keeper of Magical Things is set in the same world, so I would call it a loose series with different protagonists. The Teller of Small Fortunes is a complete story in one book, though.

Rating: 7 out of 10