SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen: https://t.co/VfJCaPE30k
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) June 25, 2021
Short Review: 8.5 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): Misanthropic Psychologist Grace, on a survey mission to a new planet with a team of top scientists and a set of androids, finds herself with no one she can trust when people start going mad and seeing things. Really strong noir-ish mystery and themes.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) June 25, 2021
2/3
We Have Always Been Here is the debut novel from author Lena Nguyen and it's a type of book that I swear has been getting more and more common these days. In the vein of say, Emma Newman's Planetfall series or a number of other books, it's a noir-esque novel of a neurodivergant protagonist (described by book blurbs as a misanthropic psychologist) out in space/on an alien planet, as strange things begin to happen among a limited number of characters in what seems to be a locked room-esque mystery. This combination is surprisingly common at least among books I've found myself reading (Kali Wallace's book from this past March, Dead Space, shares some similarities) and it's one I haven't always found myself loving that much.
But We Have All Been Here does this in a fairly interesting manner, with a really strong world, an interesting reveal, and a solid main character to guide us through it all - again misanthropic psychologist Grace Park. It's a story filled with humans - in this case either soldiers or genius scientists - and androids, exploring a newly discovered world on behalf of an organization that essentially controls all of human space, whose power is too substantial for anyone not well off to resist after Earth has fallen to pieces. And the protagonist, who doesn't really empathize with humans but does with the androids, has to discover what's going on as people start coming down sick, androids start acting weird, and everything turns out not to be what it seems, leading to an ending that actually works fairly well and is done in an interesting manner. If you like this type of book, you'll like this, and if you are merely ambivalent, you'll probably find this interesting as well.
Dr. Grace Park is an outlier on the Deucalion, a survey ship heading to a newly discovered ice planet Eos with a crew of soldiers and scientists to explore it for colonization purposes. She's the ship's second psychologist, on a ship where nearly everyone else has their own unique specialty, is perhaps the only one who has never gone into space before, and is one of the few not conscripted by the ISF, the organization that took over human civilization and exploration as the Earth finally rejected humanity. Add in the fact that she is uncomfortable around other humans and feels more comfortable around androids, and Park very much feels out of place on this mission...especially because she's not even allowed to explore the planet like the rest of the crew.
But when people around the ship start getting sick with strange mutual nightmares, and the ship's medical doctor insists upon freezing more and more people, including Park's superior psychologist, Park's discomfort only grows. Soon Park begins to realize that some of the basic things about the mission don't make sense - especially as strange things keep piling up on top of each other.....passages on the ship begin to go on and on, the androids start acting weird and vaguely human like, and Park keeps having flashbacks to her own childhood, when she was raised by her own advanced android in a time of anti-android sentiment.
But as things start falling apart on the Deucalion, Park will find that she may be the only one who can figure out what is happening, before the mystery of Eos and the ship consumes them all, humans and androids alike......
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We Have Always Been Here is told near-entirely from the perspective of Park, our protagonist, except for occasional interludes to read the logged stories of the two travelers and their AI exploration device who discovered Eos, which slowly sheds light on the mystery. Park's storyline flashes back occasionally to Park's childhood, where she grew up inside one of the domes making up well-off Earth years after environmental disaster - "The Comeback", where growings from Earth accelerated and destroyed human settlements all over - under the care of a highly advanced android Glenn. It's a past timeline that heavily shapes who Park is, as she finds comfort and caring and appreciation only in Glenn's care, and can never really relate to other humans, at a time when humans are rioting over androids beginning to take over their jobs and positions. And as a result of that fear, that situation, and Park's own inability to relate to anyone else, she finds herself thinking of androids like Glenn and others as people and empathizing with them, even as she can't empathize generally with other flesh and blood people.
And this works really well in making Park a central guiding protagonist as we explore the mysteries on board the Deucalion and Eos. After all, Park doesn't get along well with people and is on the outside due to her wealthy background putting her outside ISF control, so is it really impossible that her thoughts that things are going wrong are just in her own head? That the freezing of personnel isn't something nefarious but is just her mistrusting other humans and not knowing what to think about them? Nguyen never really tries to fully suggest that Park may actually be crazy and nothing strange is happening, but it's always in the back of Park's own mind as she tries to investigate and colors everything, especially as Park's own mind makes the Androids into more sympathetic people than the humans who hate them. And yet, even as Park isn't someone who empathizes with other humans, it is easy to empathize with Park herself, who is so misunderstood by everyone else due to them not understanding that she sees the world and people differently, rather than being a spy or not caring as she might seem.
And Park leads us on a noir-ish mystery that works for the most part in some interesting ways with some interesting themes. Nguyen pictures a world in which the earth fought back against humanity and essentially expelled all but those rich enough to live in isolation or poor enough to fall into the hands of an overwhelming corporate force that controls colonies away from Earth, except for a few people who attempt to live radically with nature. She pictures androids replacing human laborers as machines supposedly will for humans today, only the protesting and rioting people are protesting beings that do have their own minds and wills to a certain extent, even if that will never be fully recognized or acknowledged by the humans. And she pictures how that overwhelming corporate force will conscript others for its own security, and how those others may react negatively to such things, and fight for their own freedom at incredible potential costs.
It doesn't all work, even as its themes of freedom for humans or artificial life in a warping world do resonate. Once there's a partial reveal of what's going on, a few mysterious occurrences that happen to the main protagonist become something that should not be that hard to figure out for Park, and yet Park still is left in the dark on that for way too long afterwards. And to be honest the non-Park humans are for the most part significantly less interesting than Park herself, with the main antagonistic ones to Park never really being developed at all (Security Chief Sagara is perhaps the only exception), which makes it hard to care whether or not they might be behind it all or not.
But overall it does work, making this one of the better version of books with such a setup, and well worth your time. I will be looking forward to more from Nguyen, whether in this universe or in another, for sure.
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