![](https://image.librarything.com/pics/fugue21/magnifier-left.png)
![We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/0756417295.01._SX180_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... We Have Always Been Here (edition 2021)by Lena Nguyen (Author)
Work InformationWe Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen
![]() Books Read in 2024 (475) No current Talk conversations about this book. ![]() ![]() Park is the backup psychologist on a mission to explore a new planet, with a strangely smaller-than-usual complement of humans and a lot of androids. When things start going wrong, she falls back on her greater affinity for androids, but they are acting strangely too. Park is presented as neuroatypical, but nobody ever says anything except how weird and offputting she is, which felt wrong to me—even the corporatized, post-ecopocalyptic hellscape would surely remember the lingo if it can also make androids and use FTL travel. Ultimately I didn’t connect with Park any more than she would have with me. A solid 7/10 rounded down to three stars. It felt a little bit like some old-school sci-fi, a little Alien meets McCaffrey's [b:Crystal Singer|653711|Crystal Singer (Crystal Singer, #1)|Anne McCaffrey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403186691l/653711._SY75_.jpg|1173956] meets Geordi and Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm mixed on this one. It checks a lot of boxes for me -- space horror/philosophical sci-fi with a central mystery surrounding androids, nightmares, and mysterious recordings that indicate greater mysteries. That intrigue fuels the first third of the book. After that point, though, a lot of the suspense fizzles out as we spend more time exploring the main character -- Park -- and her backstory. While there's plenty of interesting character work in these sections, it undercuts the main story's tension and deviates greatly from Eos's mystery. In the end, it doesn't come together quite cleanly for me. I've always been one who's willing to suspend disbelief when reading sci-fi and don't need the science elements to make a ton of sense (just a quick glance at some other reviews here indicates I am in the minority in that respect), but the constant shifts between claustrophobic suspense, existential questions of consciousness, and long chunks of backstory made the story feel more disjointed than I think it was intended to be. no reviews | add a review
Awards
Fiction.
Mystery.
Science Fiction.
HTML:This psychological sci-fi thriller from a debut author follows one doctor who must discover the source of her crew's madness... or risk succumbing to it herself. Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility. Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes—and that’s when things begin to fall apart. Park’s patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing—neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself—is as it seems. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |