James Nicoll Reviews

2024’s Usurpation is the third volume in Sue Burke’s Semiosis science fiction series.

Starfarers returning from the distant planet Pax brought with them the so-called Rainbow Bamboo. The unsuspecting Terrestrial humans didn’t know that Rainbow Bamboo is intelligent.

Another big win for the humans messing up Earth’s ecology.

The bipedal primates who fancied themselves the lords and ladies of creation combine technological prowess with a prodigious capacity for monumentally awful decisions. In the short run, this worked out quite well for humans, who carved out a huge fraction of the Earth’s biomass for their exclusive use, at tremendous cost to the other species. At humanity’s peak, there were no less than ten billion humans on Earth (plus a much smaller number elsewhere).

Having greatly reduced the number of species on Earth, humans then turned their destructive potential on themselves. Ill-considered war, badly managed pandemics, and anthropogenic climate disasters¹ have whittled human numbers considerably. By the late third millennium, there are only two hundred and fifty million humans left on Earth, the fewest since the 9^th century.

Although the Rainbow Bamboo on Earth have mixed feelings toward their destructive, suicidal neighbors, the Rainbow Bamboo named Levanter wants to save humans from themselves. Rainbow Bamboo have a number of significant disadvantages, not least of which is their fixed location and lack of hands. They can, however, be quite adept at manipulating other creatures, thus Laventer’s successful pose as the human head of Pax Institute in Bayonne, France.

Can Laventer’s faction prevent humans from extinction on their native planet? Can vegetative intelligence win out over human aggression and limited executive functions? Or are humans fated to be an anomalous layer in the geological record, as unknown on Earth as (non-human) primates became in North America²?

The question may become moot, as humans have returned to Earth with another novel invasive species, a parasitic fungus. Thanks to the same panspermia that allowed Rainbow Bamboo to thrive on Earth, Earth offers the fungus a tasty home. Rainbow Bamboo is among the dishes on offer.

Can humans and Rainbow Bamboo defeat the fungus?

~oOo~

I couldn’t help but notice that the ratio of humans worth tolerating to willfully obstructive pain-in-the-ass humans stayed constant. All that population shifts altered was the absolute numbers. The implication here is that if you want to rid yourself of sand-in-the gears types, you pretty much have to eliminate the species. Harsh but fair.

Along those lines, it’s not really clear to me why Levanter is so determined to save Terrestrial humans. The species will survive elsewhere³, and there are present on Earth non-human intelligent tool-users who seem more amenable to a cooperative arrangement. I suppose even plants have their idealists.

Readers may, as I did, become alarmed that the highly episodic plot signals that this is not actually a novel, but a short story collection packaged as a novel. It’s not that I dislike short story collections, but I don’t like to be presented with one if I’ve formatted my brain for a novel. I assume this is universal. If it is not, it should be.

However, the plot does come together in the end, much to my relief. This is a novel after all, even if a very episodic one.

Due to the episodic plot, many of the human characters make brief appearances. They are nevertheless memorable, if too numerous to name. Levanter and its vegetative kin provide the long-term perspective the novel (and Earth) require. I think readers will enjoy spending time with Levanter.

Usurpation is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: And, I would guess, a birth rate lower than the replacement rate, although the text does not explicitly say that.

2: Primates seem to have first appeared in North America (or least that’s where the oldest fossils that survived to the present day were found). Climate change seems to have wiped out North American primates thirty-odd million years ago. There was no primate recolonization until humans found their way to North America from Eurasia.

I think it is a great pity that North America currently lacks non-human indigenous primates. Restoring North America’s primates should be a zoological priority, right after providing the New World with revived populations of Phorusrhacids, Entelodonts, and Arctodus.

3: The humans on Pax will survive. Humans have colonies throughout the Solar System, but it’s not clear (because they are not the focus of the plot) if they can sustain themselves without a continual reinforcement of immigrants from the Earth.