Review: Migration, by Julie E. Czerneda

[Russ Allbery]

Migration
by Julie E. Czerneda

Series:    Species Imperative #2
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2005
ISBN:      0-7564-0260-3
Format:    Hardcover
Pages:     453

Migration is the second book of the Species Imperative, and this is the
old-fashioned type of trilogy that you very much want to read in order.
Start with Survival. There is a (slightly awkward) recap of the
previous book at the start, though, if it's been a bit since you read
it.

In my review of Survival, I praised Czerneda's ability to capture the
feel of academic research and the sense of real scientists doing
science. I thought I went out on a bit of a limb, not being a scientist
myself (just someone who worked at a university for decades), but
Czerneda was still holding back. I'm now completely convinced: whatever
else this series is, and it contains a lot of politics and
world-building and fascinating (if very human-like) aliens, it's some
of the best science fiction about practicing scientists I've ever read.

I cannot express how much I adore the fact that the center of this book
is not space combat, not daring adventure across alien landscapes, but
getting a bunch of really smart experts in their field together in a
room with good equipment and good computers to chase an intellectual
problem from their own individual perspectives. And if Mac is perhaps a
bit *too* good at quickly overcoming interpersonal conflict and
suspicion, I'll forgive that for the deft sense of politics. Mac's
success may be a bit unrealistic, but the direction and thrust of her
tactics are spot-on. This is how interactions between smart and curious
people often work, at least if they're sufficiently motivated to put
aside pettier political infighting. This is also how the dynamics of
emergency war rooms work: if you can give people a focus and divide up
the work, the results can be amazing.

The second best part of the book is Oversight. The first book opened
with the latest round of Mac's ongoing war with Charles Mudge III, the
oversight board of the neighboring wilderness trust. He shows up again
at the start of this book, acting completely consistent to his stubborn
idealism shown in Survival, and then develops into one of the best
characters in the book. Unexpected allies is one of the tropes I love
most in fiction in general, but this one resonates so deeply with the
way grudging respect and familiar patterns, even patterns of argument,
work on people. Czerneda had me grinning. It's just perfectly in line
with Mac's character, her single-minded focus on work that tended to
miss a few points of human connection, and the sort of deepening
respect that builds up even between adversaries when they know deep
inside that they are following different interpretations of the same
principles.

I'm going to be rather sketchy on the plot, since Migration follows
closely on from Survival and is concerned almost entirely with the
aftermath of the climactic events at the end of that book. But as you
can tell, this is more of Mac, and she's not managed to separate
herself from Dhryn problems or from the Ministry of Extra-Solar
Affairs. She does, however, get rather far away from Norcoast for a
while, an interlude in the wild northern Canadian wilderness that once
again proves Czerneda to be the type of writer who can make the
quotidian as engrossing as alien dramatics. She's also suffering from
nightmares, anxiety, and a lot of circular thinking, making this one of
the series that shows the realistic toll of dramatic events on human
psychology.

There was a bit of a nascent love story in Survival; there's a lot more
of that here. It's the one bit of the book that I have mixed feelings
about, since it feels a touch unnecessary to me, and therefore a bit
intrusive. It also involves a fair bit of love at, well, not first
sight but surprisingly fast, which is something I know intellectually
that other people think happens, but which always undermines my
suspension of disbelief. That said, Czerneda gives Mac a clear tendency
in how she forms emotional attachments and sticks with it throughout
this series to date, which I do like, and she keeps the romance
consistent with that. It thankfully does not get too much in the way of
the plot, although I could have done with just a few fewer determined
proclamations that the characters won't let love get in the way of
doing what they need to do.

That quibble aside, this is fantastic stuff that avoids most of the
cliches of this sort of story of alien politics and possible war. The
focus is firmly on analysis and understanding rather than guns and
action, the portrayal of scientists, analysis, and problem-solving is
spot on, the aliens are delightfully different (and different from each
other within the same alien species, which is important depth), and Mac
is a fantastic protagonist. She's vulnerable, wounded, and out of her
depth, but she knows how to map new situations to her areas of
competence and how to admit when she doesn't know something, and her
effectiveness is well-grounded and believable. Oh, and there are some
amazing descriptions of the Canadian wilderness that almost make me
want to find a secluded cabin without Internet access. (At least if it
had all of the convenient technology that Mac's future Earth has.)

It's a rare middle book of a trilogy that's better than the first, but
this one is. Much better. And I already liked the first book. Highly
recommended; I think this is one of Czerneda's best.

Followed by Regeneration.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2017-05-31

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>