Unusually for me, I bailed on Natural History at around the 30% mark - pedestrian world-building, pages and pages of expository text and we never stayed with a character long enough to get any idea of their motivations. Plus it's supposed to be the distant future with transhumanism, nanotech and virtual realities, and yet Earth and the unmodified humans seemed to be at about a present day plus fifty or one hundred years state of organisation, except for speech idioms, which were late 20th century. ( )

A cranky cyborg, engineered for interstellar travel, comes across a new technology and a new planet - finally - a chance to get away from the monkeys! The politics of the "unevolved" and the "forged" play out across the solar system while an historian is shipped out to determine if the planet has ever been occupied - in the belly of the cyborg ship. I sometimes had trouble keeping track of the characters - they could have been better defined - but was thrilled by a new and interesting story. ( )

I would love to read a lot more things in this world ( )

Natural History by Justina Robson was the May 2010 reading selection on the Calico Reaction blog. While I didn't get a chance to participate, I was intrigued by the description of the book.

Voyager Isol, a Forged ship / human discovers a piece of alien technology that allows for near instantaneous space travel. Her discovery opens up a can of worms as the Forged see this technology as a chance to finally have their own home-world away from the humans who created them.

Robson's book reexamines what it means to be human and humanity's history of slavery. The social commentary aspects of Natural History were fascinating. But the story's construction — writing from numerous points of views with little explanation or context — got in the way of the overarching plot. ( )

Justina Robson writes a blend of Space opera, hard sci-fi of the quantum physics variety, New Weird I suppose, with a pinch of moral philosophy thrown in. This was a fairly complicated read for me, constantly interesting but somewhat slowgoing. I guess I hit it at a bad time too – this is not the kind of book to try to attempt a few pages at the time before falling asleep in the evening.

In a far future, mankind is divided into the Unevolved and the fabricated Forged. The Forged are human minds inplanted into bio-constructed bodies, born as adults but with speeded up virtual childhoods. Many of the Forged have no physical resemblance of humans at all, created to operate in deep space. And even their minds are tuned to accentuate certain traits. The exploring Voyagers for instance, resemble a kind of mix between Bumblebee and Scorpio, with personalities bordering on the autistic to allow them to be alone for years at the time. The basic human need for company and social interaction is in them instead tweeked to be stimulated by discovering certain radiation patterns. The Forged are considered human, and have equal rights in theory. But with no means of reproduction of their own, and with a programming designing them for specific jobs, many Forged feel like second rate citizens. In fact, there is a rather large Independent movement brewing.

When the Voyager Isol returns to earth, fitted with a strange new technology, and reports stumbling onto a strange new world, fit for human existence but apparently totally deserted, it’s seen as a possiblity to break free, creating a homeworld for the Forged. The governments of Earth demand an investigation to see if the planet is really void. The archeologist Zephyr is chosen to be the first Unevolved to visit an alien planet. She and Isol don’t exactly hit it off, and she soon realises she’s mainly a delaying tactic to buy Earth some time. And on the strange new world with no means of getting home on her own, it quickly becomes apparent Isol hasn’t been telling the whole truth. There is something alive on this planet after all.

One of the most fascinating things about this dense book is Robson’s ability to create characters that are both very human and incredibly strange. Among the main players here are (besides the rude, solipsistic space travelling scorpio) a senile Terraformer, a worker in a collective Hive mind, an Eagle creature that didn’t turn out quite right and a one hundred meter long oval blimp that vainly prefers to manifest as a slender blue humanoid is his capacity as union leader.

Unfortunately, Robson doesn’t quite bring the plot home. The last forty of fifty pages seem too neatly settled in some cases, and too randomly rambling in others. I end up feeling a little unconvinced, but the ability to create relateable post-human strangeness and the boldness of ideas are enough to make me want to give this writer another chance. ( )