Sue Burke

Sue Burke made a splash a few years ago with her first novel, Semiosis, in which human colonists must deal with some sentient plant life. In Dual Memory, she takes us back home to an Earth that seems less hospitable than her earlier exoplanet. We are in the far future on an arctic island called Thule. Antonio Moro is an illiterate war refugee with artistic talent but no training. By happenstance, he acquires a digital assistant, Par Agustus, with a rare emergent independent consciousness, a show more suffer-no-fools personality, and an artistic bent of its own. Par says that “creating art rebels against nothingness” and asserts that he and Moro are fellow artists.
The island is rife with sapient and semi-sapient machines. As Par tells Moro, “No one understands machines. They’re too complex. Humans believe what machines tell them about other machines.” But Par does not tell Moro that he also knows that “machines lie.” They may not be independent of their programming, but they can sabotage users they don’t like, and they usually prioritize their self-protection, which is always running between the programs. When large AIs decided that aircraft made war more likely, planes produced in automated factories became unreliable. Moro has the good sense to be polite to machines, whether fully sentient or not.
Art, AI, and revolution make Moro and Par an odd couple worth visiting. show less

Purely as a story, this works very well, from the landing on the planet Pax through the growth of the colony and its struggles to adapt to the environment. As a lesson in how cultures adapt to strangers and the balance between confrontation and accommodation, it offers lessons that are entirely relevant to the state of the world today.

This book should be compulsory reading for all politicians everywhere.

Utopia-seeking humans exploring a world full of alien biology. The book covers a century or so in half a dozen parts, each from a different point-of-view character in a different generation, beginning before they realise the plants are sentient and journeying through the development of a sometimes-uneasy alliance with one in particular. For self-named Pacifists there's an ironic (but ultimately unsurprising) amount of violence in their internal relations but they do hold relatively true to show more their principles of living in harmony with their environment: both humans and their alien ally have seen the devastation of environmental collapse and are determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The lingering question is the extent to which such change is possible, on either the individual or the species level. Especially when they end up after all at war....

This is a gorgeous delve into an alien world. Every viewpoint character has an immediately distinct voice. The plant the humans ally with is ambiguously sinister: seeing things from its point of view in some ways detracts from that but in others enhances the theme and gives us a deeper insight into the broader ecosystem the humans have barely scratched the surface of. show less

The dominant theme in this book is the alienness of the aliens. Characterization of aliens is often attempted in science fiction but rarely does an author manage to make aliens both non-human and understandable. A delicate balance, neatly hit here, not once but twice, with two different sets of non-humans.

I'm giving this one five stars, not for storytelling, not for literary quality, but for concept. In a time like the present, when so many books focus on how society can go wrong, this one show more takes a crack at examining a human society that attempts to abandon the mistakes of the past and rebuild a community based on lofty ideals. Can it be done? show less