Review: Symbiosis
Nicky Drayden
313 pages
Harper Voyager (2021)
Read this if you like: Vernor Vinge, unique worldbuilding, interpersonal and political intrigue
tl;dr summary: Far future humans living inside giant space creatures navigate personal and political upheaval in their aim to live more symbiotically with their host.
I have to start with a disclaimer: I picked this up from the library shelf not realizing it’s a sequel, but I was too excited by the premise to wait until I got Escaping Exodus so I did the bad reader thing and started the series in the middle. I don’t think my reading was lacking for having committed this sin, however. The first few chapters of Symbiosis grounded me well in the world and characters. There were some places it was clear I was missing backstory, but that just made me want to go back and read the past book, and I never felt thrown out of the world by my lack of context.
It helps that the world of Symbiosis is easy to sink into. The logistics and implications of a colony inside a living being are seamlessly integrated into the plot and culture. The physical descriptions of the world strike that ideal balance where they’re familiar enough for the reader to picture them while still feeling utterly alien, both on the large-scale and day-to-day level. One of my favorite small details was the food, which often has a straightforward name like “lime tart” that gives the reader a context for the taste, then subverts these expectations with a description of a clearly very alien dish (in the case of a lime tart, the lime hatches just before eating, and you eat the hatchlings after they’ve drowned in the surrounding jelly and whipped cream).
These world implications are also fully baked-in to the interpersonal relationships in the form of the expanded marriage unit, a complex system constructed as a population control mechanism. It’s easy to see the under-pinning logic of how this system arose, and the added intrigue of the throttle fish packs a powerful double punch as telling world detail and useful plot device. I also appreciate that Drayden isn’t heavy-handed with explaining the marriage system (at least in this book), trusting the reader to put the pieces together and keeping the pace moving forward.
If I have one critique, it’s that I felt the pace was a bit too quick in some spots in the back half. There were moments like the conference with the other clan leaders and the time spent in the Klang camp where I wanted to linger longer and see more. Bear in mind, this is the perspective of someone who adores sprawling epic sci-fi. The details Drayden chooses to linger on or omit are smart from the standpoint of feeling accessible to a broader swath of readers, so I understand why she made the choices she did. Still, I hope she’s planning to write more in this world, because there’s a tantalizing landscape lurking around the periphery of this story.
The overall voice and tone of Symbiosis reads like a modernized take on ‘50s-era sci-fi. There’s a lightness and campiness that makes it a very fun read, and great attention to detail in constructing the world and envisioning it as a functioning, fully-realized reality. While I rolled my eyes at some of the romance, I do the same thing with romance in any sci-fi book, and I did appreciate the new varieties of sexual tension created by the polyamorous family unit. It’s a smart choice to tell the story in alternating first-person perspectives, both from a plot movement and an emotional standpoint, creating beautiful dramatic irony and letting the reader see things happening in multiple places without the need for narrative summary or expository dialogue.
On a thematic level, the play on humans as parasites is intriguing, and I could see an argument for this being environmental sci-fi. This is I think part of why I wanted more from the interactions with the other clans, to see the different ways they’ve found to live in harmony with their worlds. I saw shades of Star Trek in how this theme weaves through the story, the hopeful tone and emphasis on communication and cooperation over conflict. In the end, Symbiosis creates a world I want to revisit, which is to me the clearest sign of well-written sci-fi.
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