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Semiosis, Sue Burke, first half of a duology (although we don't have a date for the other one, and I could imagine it stopping here and that being okay). This was extremely good and I highly recommend it but I need to put a content note right up front for, like, the same content notes you need for real-life human history: graphic rape*, graphic violence, gruesome deaths, child harm, child death, animal harm, and ethically charged situations relating to colonization, enslavement, cannibalism, and genocide. Serious social and biological science fiction that I would compare most closely to Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, maybe also Walton's Just City trilogy or Cherryh's Forty Thousand In Gehenna, or maybe Card's Speaker for the Dead.
The premise is basically "fifty hippies take off to settle a planet they don't know much about; what happens next will shock you!" We get a series of points of view from different generations, showing how the situation, the culture, and the conflicts of the day evolve, with a very sharp approach to the alien biology and a lot of often-uncomfortable resonance with events from real-life history. There is also some fun stuff here, but a lot of it is heavy and intense. And also *gripping*, and extremely well done in how the big arcs play out in the individual stories. Almost certainly showing up in my Hugo noms this year.
*I want to say about the rape scene specifically that I get really angry in general about authors putting in rape scenes as a thoughtless way to hurt their women characters, but I felt that this one was actually germane to the story conflicts. (And that nothing in this book was thoughtless.) Obviously people still might not be able to read it, or you might disagree that it made sense in the story, but for me it did not infuriate me in that way.
The premise is basically "fifty hippies take off to settle a planet they don't know much about; what happens next will shock you!" We get a series of points of view from different generations, showing how the situation, the culture, and the conflicts of the day evolve, with a very sharp approach to the alien biology and a lot of often-uncomfortable resonance with events from real-life history. There is also some fun stuff here, but a lot of it is heavy and intense. And also *gripping*, and extremely well done in how the big arcs play out in the individual stories. Almost certainly showing up in my Hugo noms this year.
*I want to say about the rape scene specifically that I get really angry in general about authors putting in rape scenes as a thoughtless way to hurt their women characters, but I felt that this one was actually germane to the story conflicts. (And that nothing in this book was thoughtless.) Obviously people still might not be able to read it, or you might disagree that it made sense in the story, but for me it did not infuriate me in that way.
