Matriarch
Matriarch was a Christmas gift from Kevin. Something he picked up dirt cheap at a discount bookstore to put in my stocking. This worked out great with A Star Shall Fall a couple of years ago, so it makes sense he'd turn it into an annual tradition. But it took me a while to work up to this book. It's the fourth in a series, and I wasn't about to see out the first three books just to read this one. Especially because at least one of those books is no longer available in print. Which doesn't bode well for the series.
So I went in with reservations, fully prepared to abandon the book after the first few chapters. It was definitely confusing at first. I ended up googling the plots of the first three books to catch myself up. I'm still not sure I'm straight on the various alien species, but I sorted it out enough for the story to make sense. And surprisingly enough, it drew me in and held my attention right up to the end.
Like any good sci-fi, this story holds a funhouse mirror up to our world to illuminate some of the issues we're dealing with. An alien species has the ability and desire to restore ecological balances and they've got their hands on a genetic library that has blue prints for a wealth of life on Earth. So they're coming to fix our planet, which will necessitate killing a whole lot of humans. But first they're tackling another planet that's sort of on the way (I think?). And there's a faction who are extreme isolationists and think everyone should just be left to their own business.
That conflict is the center of the story, and it's one I found very interesting. If you have the ability to fix something, do you also have the responsibility to do so? Who's to say your solution is necessarily the right one? But if you do nothing and everyone dies, or worse, outgrows their space and starts colonizing and destroying other planets, then are you responsible for that? How do you go about finding the balance?
Then there are some background plots about xenocide (which happens more than I was expecting) and immortality. And whether one can help make up for the other.
I'm not rushing out to read the rest of this series. Parts of it are clumsy and repetitive. But overall I was intrigued enough to read and enjoy the whole book. It's something I never would have picked up on my own, and it presented some interesting moral quandaries. So I guess I get to look forward to this sort of present for the rest of my life.
So I went in with reservations, fully prepared to abandon the book after the first few chapters. It was definitely confusing at first. I ended up googling the plots of the first three books to catch myself up. I'm still not sure I'm straight on the various alien species, but I sorted it out enough for the story to make sense. And surprisingly enough, it drew me in and held my attention right up to the end.
Like any good sci-fi, this story holds a funhouse mirror up to our world to illuminate some of the issues we're dealing with. An alien species has the ability and desire to restore ecological balances and they've got their hands on a genetic library that has blue prints for a wealth of life on Earth. So they're coming to fix our planet, which will necessitate killing a whole lot of humans. But first they're tackling another planet that's sort of on the way (I think?). And there's a faction who are extreme isolationists and think everyone should just be left to their own business.
That conflict is the center of the story, and it's one I found very interesting. If you have the ability to fix something, do you also have the responsibility to do so? Who's to say your solution is necessarily the right one? But if you do nothing and everyone dies, or worse, outgrows their space and starts colonizing and destroying other planets, then are you responsible for that? How do you go about finding the balance?
Then there are some background plots about xenocide (which happens more than I was expecting) and immortality. And whether one can help make up for the other.
I'm not rushing out to read the rest of this series. Parts of it are clumsy and repetitive. But overall I was intrigued enough to read and enjoy the whole book. It's something I never would have picked up on my own, and it presented some interesting moral quandaries. So I guess I get to look forward to this sort of present for the rest of my life.
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