Yesterday's Kin

I picked up this novella through a humble bundle a while back. It's okay, but kind of frustrating. Aliens have made landed on Earth, and geneticist Marianne Jenner and her adult children are at the center of events, as it's revealed that the aliens are humans taken from Earth 70,000 years ago, and that both cousin species must worth together to find a cure to an alien plague that threatens them. There's skepticism, panic, violence, and deceit, and at the end a brutal betrayal. This novella feels like it's Frankensteined out of the corpses of more interesting scifi concepts, and never really come together, though apparently it forms the basis of a trilogy.

The first book I read by Nancy Kress was Beggars In Spain and I loved it so I was very glad to have the opportunity to read this one. First contact stories are a favorite of mine and this one didn't disappoint though I did have a feeling throughout that there wouldn't be enough time to tell a satisfying story. I must admit that my worry was mostly for naught. By the end, it felt fairly complete and I chalk my want of more answer to some things (Noah and the sugarcane, why people with the extra haplogroup get the invites to the Deneb homeworld) to being a greedy reader. I won't spoil but I will say that I didn't exactly see the twist with the Denebs coming and it was a well done reveal. I also liked how Marianne's family and their show more relationships to one another played out. It felt uncomfortably real.

I'd definitely recommend this to fans of Kress & also to science fiction fans in general. It was a very quick read and is the sort that stays with you, hovering in the back of your mind for some time after you've read it. Absolutely well done. As always, time spent reading Kress is time well spent and I look forward to her next.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for my honest review. show less

Yesterday's Kin by Nancy Kress is a highly recommended short novel that succinctly captures a first contact story from the viewpoint of one family - with a twist.

They said they were here making contact for a peace mission. At first the aliens, nicknamed Denebs, were staying in orbit off the earth, but then they asked permission of the UN to set up an embassy off shore from NYC. Then they requested specific visitors to their embassy and they revealed their true reason for making contact. The aliens claim there is a deadly interstellar spore cloud headed for earth and they want to warn earth scientists about it so they can find a cure/vaccination before it arrives in 10 months.

The Denebs are also interested in the genetics research of show more Marianne Jenner. She recently published a paper on mitochondrial Eve and a new branch of her descendants. The aliens are interested in this research. Jenner is one of the scientists the aliens ask to the embassy. Yesterday's Kin focuses on the contact with the aliens but it also explores Jenner's family and their interactions during this time.

There are pros and cons to Kress' story. This is a good hard science fiction read since Kress does use up-to-date scientific research in her story. She packs a whole lot into 192 pages, which is good for a simple fast read but bad for any sort of extensive character or plot development. Kress does manage to do an excellent job of telling the story and developing her characters in the limited number of pages, but I think it may have been better if there was a bit more development of the narrative. Even while I enjoyed the story a lot, I was left with a few questions. For me at least, the twist at the end was guessed well before anything was revealed.

(I also wondered about the quote "My, people come and go so quickly here," being attributed to Alice in Wonderland, when most people will recognize it from the movie The Wizard of Oz. I'm not sure if it is in both works or not, but perhaps someone knows.)

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Tachyon via Netgalley for review purposes. show less

Several months previously, an alien ship landed in New York Harbor. They suddenly really want to talk to Dr Marianne Jenner, author of a scientific paper all about mitochondria. They tell Jenner, and the UN Secretary General, some really interesting things. The aliens (humanity calls them "Denebs" even though they aren't from the star Deneb) and humanity are almost genetically identical. Also, very bad things are going to happen to Earth in less than one year.

A group of Earth's best scientists, including Jenner, are taken aboard the ship in a desperate search, with Deneb help, for immunity from "it." Meantime, outside the ship, Jenner's family is fractured. She is a widow with three grown children, two of whom, on opposite sides of the show more political spectrum, are constantly arguing. The third, Noah, is a drug addict. The reaction of the rest of humanity to the news about Earth's future ranges from There Are No Aliens to riots and suicide bombers.

Inside the ship, progress is slow, and the clock is running. As the end gets closer and closer, despair sets in among the scientists that they are not even close to a solution. Then the Denebs reveal the honestly real reason for their trip to Earth. Time will tell if Earth's spirit of friendship and cooperation will continue, or if the Denebs have committed a monumental error by getting all of mankind really angry at them.

This book easily gets five stars. It is full of ideas on a variety of topics, it is really easy to read and the hard science is kept to a "reasonable' level. Will there be a sequel? I hope so. show less

Kress seems to do well with novella length stories and I liked this one a lot mixing family dynamics, politics, evolutionary genetics and first contact. Good stuff.

I generally like Nancy Kress but this is not one of her better efforts. Humanoid aliens have landed in New York City and they have bad news. Not something they are going to do but something that's going to happen to the Earth from outside. They want to help us because they know that at some point in the future their home planet is going to suffer the same fate. In fact two of their colony worlds have already been killed. I liked the story well enough and I'll confess that I didn't see the double twist at the end. The twists brought the story to a satisfactory ending for me.

The story centers around geneticist Marianne Jenner who had just made a interesting discovery concerning the development of the human race. Her discovery is of show more interest to the aliens so they ask her to join the team to help prevent the future catastrophe.

My main problem with the book was Jenner's family. In an already short novel, most of the interaction with her adult children seems like filler, there to increase the page count. The two oldest are constantly bickering with each other and their mother. It seems difficult for any of them to have a normal conversion. Even a simple hello turns into a shouting match. The youngest, Noah, doesn't escape the bickering but doesn't like to join in. All he really wants to do is escape. His escape of choice is a cheap drug that changes his personality. I don't know why Kress felt she had to invent a new illegal drug when there are plenty of real illegal drugs that would have served her purpose. The fact that this drug cause temporary personality changes doesn't impact the story. Neither does the constant bickering.

Her last book "After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall" was great. "Yesterday's Kin" is sort of a let down. I didn't hate it, and I read the whole thing and I liked the ending so I'll still give it 3 stars. show less

It's odd when a novel of the future feels a little old-fashioned... there's nothing at all wrong with that, but to me, this feels like it harks back to a lot of books I've read that were published in the 70s and 80s. I just haven't encountered many not-too-long, idea-based hard sci-fi novels lately. Maybe I just haven't been picking them up?

Actually this is more like epidemic-thriller meets hard sci-fi. Aliens arrive, and make first contact. Or - they sort of make first contact. They're quite reclusive, inside their shielded ship. They say, through their mechanical translators, that they are here on a mission of peace: they wish to work with humanity to discover a cure for a coming event that threatens to wipe out humanity: Earth will show more soon be passing through a 'spore cloud' full of a virus which, they say, will kill both humans and aliens, unless a solution is found.

To this end, the aliens demand that a number of UN leaders and scientific experts be brought to them. One of these is the middle-aged geneticist Marianne Jenner. The aliens seem to think her recent paper in 'Nature' documenting a previously-unknown mitochondrial haplogroup is relevant to the current crisis - but she's not sure why.

Conveniently, for purposes of the plot, each member of Marianne's family ends up embodying one of the different attitudes humanity takes toward the aliens: Marianne herself is open-minded and curious. Her daughter, a top Border Security officer, has one set of concerns. Her older son, an environmental expert on invasive plant species, sees the aliens as invaders. And her younger son, who's always been a social misfit, seeking to 'belong' through drugs, sees other possibilities in the aliens altogether.

The plot presents some interesting scientific ideas, and throws in a few unexpected twists. It's a good, solid sci-fi novel.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy. As always, my opinions are my own. show less