The Lesson

The Lesson, debut novel from Cadwell Turnbull, whose short story "Jump" from Lightspeed last year I came very close to Hugo-nominating (would have nominated if I had realized the Zen Cho story was a novelette...). First-contact story in which an alien ship lands on St Thomas of the US Virgin Islands; I really enjoyed the descriptions of this setting, where Turnbull is from, and also appreciated that unless I'm forgetting someone there are no white people in this novel at all (even a character who appears white is mentioned to have a "light-skinned Brazilian father"). I read this at the perfect time, while my Butler reading group is partway through our read of the Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood trilogy, with which this novel is in close dialogue - if Xenogenesis is about aliens as colonizers who want to possess and exploit humanity, Turnbull's Ynaa are the postcolonial powers who visit the Global South (and Black people generally; there's a riff on Henrietta Lacks) for tourism and resource extraction without much concern for the people living there at all. Smart thinky stuff about cycles of violence and the ways big events do or don't shape personal relationships. Notes for individual and mass violence and animal harm.