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A review by danprisk
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
3.0
This is quite an enjoyable and well written book, but I'm not sure why it's as highly lauded as it is. It's certainly well put together, but not so much that it particularly stands out in the genre: there's an awful lot of exceedingly well written scifi out there. Largely though it fails thematically, by portraying a particularly conservative and essentialist perspective.
Science fiction at its best is a format that allows the writer to explore new ways of being, to prefigure potential futures, and to articulate some aspect of how those futures may be in the world. Look to writers like Le Guin, Leckie, and more for this sort of work. By contrast, Dark Eden posits our own world—with all it's patriarchy, competition, division, and individualism—as an innate manner of being. In this sense it writes from a point of view of bio-essentialism, where, for instance, characters who have never known monogamy find themselves thinking in it's framework. This isn't challenging our world, or exploring possibilities, this is naturalizing our currently constituted ways of living.
Perhaps that's why it seems to have gained acclaim? Rather than unsettling, such a manner of writing comforts the reader in their learned sensibilities.
Science fiction at its best is a format that allows the writer to explore new ways of being, to prefigure potential futures, and to articulate some aspect of how those futures may be in the world. Look to writers like Le Guin, Leckie, and more for this sort of work. By contrast, Dark Eden posits our own world—with all it's patriarchy, competition, division, and individualism—as an innate manner of being. In this sense it writes from a point of view of bio-essentialism, where, for instance, characters who have never known monogamy find themselves thinking in it's framework. This isn't challenging our world, or exploring possibilities, this is naturalizing our currently constituted ways of living.
Perhaps that's why it seems to have gained acclaim? Rather than unsettling, such a manner of writing comforts the reader in their learned sensibilities.