Natural History
A Novel
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3.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A daring and original new novel from one of sci fi’s most provocative voices, Natural History is a stunning work of bold ideas, unforgettable characters, and epic adventure as one woman seeks to explore what may be the greatest mystery of all. . . .
“Idiosyncratic and unpredictable . . . a novelist of real vision.”—Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth
Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpion–and just as dangerous. Her claim that she’d found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity who’d created and once enslaved them.
It was on behalf of the “unevolved” humans that Professor Zephyr Duquesne, cultural archaeologist and historian of Earth’s lost worlds, was chosen by the Gaiasol military authority to uncover the truth about this second “earth.” And her voyage, traveling inside the body of Isol, will take her to the center of a storm exploding across a spectrum of space and time, dimension and consciousness.
On an abandoned planet, in a wrinkle of time, Isol and Zephyr will find a gift and a curse: a power so vast that once unlocked, it will change the universe forever. With civil war looming, Zephyr’s perilous journey will lead her to a past where one civilization mysteriously vanished . . . and another may soon follow.
“[Robson’s] strongest novel yet, reminiscent of Moorcock, Banks, M. John Harrison, and MacLeod . . . and should assure her position as being one of the most exciting genre writers at this present time.”—SFRevu
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Robson's U.S. debut, a thought-provoking SF stand-alone, the British author of Sliver Screen and Mappa Mundi revisits the disquieting territory of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. Advances in genetic engineering have created the Forged, human/machine hybrids that carry out tasks too mundane or too dangerous for the Unevolved, as non-Forged humans are called. Soon after a Forged explorer, Voyager Lonestar Isol, returns from a 15-year trip with the Stuff (a sentient chunk of gray quartz capable of instantly transporting her anywhere), Isol announces that she's found an empty Earth-like planet in a distant star system. By claiming it as a home world, the Forged can finally break from the resented Gaiasol, the political entity that rules Earth's solar system, and become what they were meant to be. While many dream of moving out, others suspect that the Stuff's offer is too good to be true. Archeologist Zephyr Duquesnse, commissioned to study the proposed home world and make sure it's truly free of life, finds no easy answers. Fans of the sweeping, politically and psychologically aware space opera of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod will be intrigued by Robson's setting and the new slant she takes on universal questions.
Customer Reviews
Curious and a little disjointed but with an interesting twist
This book starts slow and seemingly erratic in it's twists and turns but gathers momentum and interest with a final ending that raises interesting perspectives.