Review of Synthetic Eden by Alexander Titus and Sean Platt

Humans have screwed Earth and the only option is to rush outwards into the stars, ad astra per aspera style. Oh wait, you’ve heard this one? Synthetic Eden really hopes you haven’t. Alexander Titus and Sean Platt have crafted a space colonization narrative that isn’t so much planetary romance as it is planetary horror, with a side order of social breakdown thriller. It has its moments, and I kept reading until the end because I wanted to see how it shakes out. Unfortunately, it also has some serious issues and could really have used queer and autistic sensitivity readers. I received an eARC from NetGalley and publisher Sterling and Stone in exchange for a review.

Dr. Samara Makinde is a geneticist, which kind of has a bad rep these days ever since some of them got too trigger happy with their CRISPR machines and engineered a fungus that’s now spreading over Earth in a grey-goo-style apocalypse. The end is nigh, but Samara has reluctantly accepted a berth aboard one of the few interstellar colony ships. She knows her skills will be necessary to help the colonists survive on their new home, for she can engineer adaptations to food sources or even create new medicines. Except when they make planetfall and start setting up their colony, the threats are even stranger and more existential than anyone anticipated. When Samara runs afoul of a fundamentalist psychologist who turns her into public enemy number one, she has to make decisions that could jeopardize not only her own life but perhaps the last humans in existence….

Let’s get my major criticism out of the way. There are two serious issues with representation in this book (and there are likely others I’m just less sensitive to): autism and queerness.

There’s a character who is initially portrayed as autistic-coded but then gets revealed to be—you’ll never predict this—an android and … sigh. I’m not going to speak on behalf of autistic readers, but just as us ace people are tired of being compared to robots, I am pretty sure autistic people are exhausted. Were there any sensitivity readers on this project?

I can speak on queer rep though, and I would love to do that, except apparently in Synthetic Eden, queer people do not exist! Very early on, it’s established that every single person on the colony ship had to agree to be partnered up with someone of the opposite sex so they could make babies and, you know, propagate humanity. On the surface this makes sense in a cold and logical way—if you can somehow ignore that some queer people are a thing. Which is exactly what Titus and Platt do; there is zero attempt to reconcile the At Least One Child Policy with the possible presence of lesbians, gays, aces, and other folx. Everyone who gets to survive the apocalypse is very straight, I guess. What else is new?

This also speaks to an even larger spectre looming just behind these pages: eugenics. For as much as Titus and Platt want Samara and Ayesha to debate the pros and cons of gene-editing their descendants, no one wanders close to this uncomfortable issue. Once you start talking about gene-editing people, inevitably someone starts thinking there are certain traits we should edit out. I don’t know if they just thought this would distract from the rest of the narrative or they were reluctant to open that can of worms, but either way, it’s a glaring omission from a book that otherwise bravely tackles contemporary ethical issues around genetic engineering.

If you can somehow see past these issues, then Synthetic Eden has a decent narrative, I guess. Titus and Platt’s characterization is nothing to write home about, but the plotting is tight and the pacing creates a good level of suspense as the story moves forward. None of this is enough to allow this book to achieve escape velocity from mediocrity, however.

Colonists land on planet fleeing doomed Earth. Planet tries to eat them. Colonists’ social fabric frays even as mysteries abound. Secrets! Deception! Conflict! Repeating the same mistakes of Earth’s past: humans, aren’t we so treacherous and reactionary and short-sighted?

Yawn. Been there, Coyote’ed that.

I had finished Synthetic Eden by the time I wrote my review of Semiosis, and therein I took a casual sideswipe of this book. Both deal with a last-gasp colonization effort of a planet notably indifferent to human life. Yet they strike a sharp contrast in terms of philosophical and narrative quality. Semiosis plunged into a creative and fascinating exploration of animal versus plant psychology. Synthetic Eden, on the other hand, retreads worn out paths without much to make it stand out. It may well use cutting-edge science, but the story it tells is nothing we haven’t seen before.