Learning the World

A wonderful book that balances the advancing human civilization with an alien species that is just starting its industrial revolution. We see the questions asked by the humans on how to approach the aliens, while the aliens see the human ship approaching, calculating trajectories.

There are a few rough spots in this book - namely in the last third of the book, dealing with the beasts of burden used by the aliens. I went back and forth on how I felt, and decided it wasn't just a gimmick, but clumsily written plot device. It makes sense with the story.

I especially liked how human and alien the aliens were. Ken Macleod makes a huge effort to make the aliens seem humans, but when the story ends, the aliens are truly alien...

This is a great story. I highly recommend it. ( )

This was my first MacLeod novel. The book offers a reasonable number of original and intriguing ideas which initially seem to promise quite a bit of potential. In the end, though, I found Learning the World to be light on resolution and heavy on serving up mild platitudes. Indeed, it’s hard not to read this as a watered down Young Adultish version of Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. Not that there’s anything wrong with YA scifi, but it’s not particularly my cup of tea.

I found the world / society / race building consistently the best thing about the book (both for the surprisingly human aliens and for the surprisingly different-from-human homo sapiens colonists who come visiting). Not the deepest perhaps and at times leaving me feeling that I had missed some logical leap, but interesting enough to keep me reading and keep me thinking.

On the other hand, the characters never did much for me. Our human protagonists Atomic Discourse Gale and Horrocks Mathmatical had clever names, but not much else to recommend them. I found the alien protagonist Darvin somewhat more sympathetic, but generally too good to be true, and smack dab in the middle of far too many amazing events to be particularly plausible.

As we approach the climax of the book, the human people all act like thirteen year olds (whether sixteen, of sixty, or three thousand), the alien people all act with a wisdom beyond any explanation, and the readers are thrown a big curveball which somehow makes everything work out ok.

I could see this being quite satisfying for a young reader seeking validation of their opinions that (1) they are wise beyond their years, and (2) old people are dumb. ( )

Not quite as clever as it thinks it is. Lightweight.

Book reading is odd sometimes - some themes you hardly ever encounter, and then by chance you come across two at once. I'd just finished LeGuin's short story collection which ends with a Generational Ship tale, and then I picked up this Learning the World, as a change of pace, only to find it too is a generational ship tale. For many years FTL and warp drive were used as a handwavy technique of shrinking the vast interstellar gulf. But for some authors with a more compelling grasp of physics there is another way. Fill your large spaceship up with a decent genepool and send it on it's way sublight. It might take a few hundred years, but it will get there. However societies change in such time, and that's what Learning the World is about. We follow three distinct viewpoints - Atomic, a young coloniser only 14 at the start of the book, born at the end of a voyage just in time to begin the colonisation process; Horrocks a crewman born midjourney and life extended, dedicated to the ship and preserving it's voyage; and Darvin, one of the aliens who manages preIndustrial revolution to discover the incoming spaceship.

Weirdly we never get the actual third person voice of Atomic, she's only ever represented as her biolog entries (quite why people are still writing blogs x000 years in the future is never explained). I'm also not too convinced by the atomic (ie fission) power or weapons, these too seem far too old for such a futuristic vessel.

As the ship gets closer to the planet they realise that instead of an empty world like all previous encouters there civilisation has colonised, this one contains higher life forms. Darvin's people are evolved from batlike creatures, and still in an almost feudal competitive society. This is contrasted well with the interally complex capitlaistically driven politics of the ship - where the oldest 'original hundredthousand' citizens are still active, and genemodified to speeds and plots beyond the comprehension of their younger shipmates.

Surprisingly the jumps in POV and gaps in the timescale work farely well. This style of wrting often leads to disconcerting changes, but careful chapter breaks make it farely clear what is going on. Despite this I wasn't that impressed though. I'm not quite sure why, the aliens were fun, as was that modifications to Horrocks and the elders. Possibly Ken was just trying too hard to make a sociological point, the idealist imperial communist aliens weren't explored as deeply as they could have been, and likewise the details of the ship could have had more explanations. Although the cover blurb sells this as a 'first contact' novel, this theme is barely touched upon amidst the politicing on both sides, and this is a detriment to both. The subtitle also mentions a "scientific romance" there is no romance and precious little science in it.

Readable, at time intruiging, but much more could have been made of it.
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Intriguing first contact story told from the contactees' point of view, as the aliens, who call themselves 'humans', arrive in their generation starship. Concepts are thrown in all over the place; I particularly noted Macleod playing with political and economic systems and straying outside his usual socialist comfort zone, without being at all po-faced about his free-market system. ( )

A first contact novel where humans are the aliens. Explores some interesting concepts and the twists in the plot make it interesting. ( )