Review: Ascending

Ascending by Margaret Pechenick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well-edited, well-written story of second contact, with an appealing, if bland, narrator/protagonist, but somewhat lacking for me in character development and worldbuilding.

I say second contact because it's set 25 years after a superior alien civilization comes to Earth, takes a good look, and decides to go away again. Shortly after the story starts, they decide to come back - a controversial decision, and subject to much debate within their own culture.

The book is narrated by a graduate student in linguistics who is the only person, apart from her elderly professor/mentor (involved in the first contact), who can speak their language, after a learning process that (with incredible convenience) ended about three weeks before the aliens unexpectedly and unpredictably returned. I'm prepared to reluctantly allow one convenient coincidence per plot, and happily there are no others. However, that's not the end of my issues with the book (which I nevertheless enjoyed overall).

One thing I've noticed about a lot of SF books being published at the moment is that the actual science is a bit dubious. I'm not talking about the genre conventions of artificial gravity and FTL travel; I mean mistakes like conducting radio communication "in real time" from "the edge of the Sol system" (wherever that is), and a pocket-sized oxygen dispenser that's good for a month (as a supplement, but still). For that matter, nine-sided dice; that isn't a number of faces that can be on a regular polyhedron.

That's one level of the issues I had. Another is that the aliens are just not that alien in a lot of ways, despite part of the point of the whole thing being that the protagonist is immersed in an alien culture. They have weeks and months, though the weeks appear to be eight days long (it's never really discussed). They'll kick a person under the table to tell them to shut up. The women wear dresses. For that matter, they're biologically very humanoid; blue blood, yes, but despite being descended from predators, they mostly eat vegetables, and their bodies are very much the same shape as humans'. They have one language (with some dialects) and effectively one culture, despite being a multiplanetary species. There's really not much about them that couldn't plausibly be part of a human culture.

They're stronger and faster than humans, with better eyesight and hearing, and are quicker to learn (everyone on the ship speaks fluent English, despite the fact that some are not at all fans of humanity). They're a largely nonviolent society. But they do have flaws. They're excessively obedient to authority, they apparently don't screen their spaceship crews very well at all, and their computer systems are hard to learn to use (which, as someone in the industry, I can tell you points to poor design).

Then, I didn't feel like the characters had a lot of depth, weight, or backstory. Not just the aliens, and the incidental humans we encounter early on, though certainly them; but Avery, the grad student narrator, herself. Even though we get the entire story through her, she never really had that much dimension for me.

She says things that make it clear that she's had boyfriends, but she doesn't talk about any of them specifically - anything she remembers about them, anything she's learned from her mistakes with them. She has parents, but they're lightly sketched in. She mentions a best friend, but unless this is the person she met briefly during training, this best friend isn't ever named and there are no reminiscences about her either. Her roommates are just a couple of names with no qualities attached. It's as if she comes into existence at the beginning of the book, with the most bland and generic background to go with her bland, generic identity as a basic middle-class white girl. She's a good student, but not outstanding; she manages to be, at one and the same time, the obvious candidate to be the first human sent to live among the aliens, and completely average and undistinguished.

Her mentor considers her to have personal qualities of humility, kindness, and patience, which is why he selects her to learn the alien language and be the potential representative of humanity, and while she doesn't show herself to not have those qualities, she didn't, for me, particularly show herself to have them to an unusual degree either.

Despite all of these reservations, I did enjoy the book, and wanted Avery to succeed. I just wish that everything had been a little richer and better developed.

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