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A review by brownbetty
Alien Taste by Wen Spencer
3.0
This book says it was published in 2001 but it feels like nineties straight to the vein.
Consider:
- the protagonist is named Ukiah Oregon. (This doesn't even make sense in-story. Supposedly he's named for the town where he was found, but why wouldn't he take the last name of the family that adopted him? I mean, it's not like he had a name before that that he might want to keep, since they straight up named him after a town.)
- Love-interest girl is named Indigo Zheng. She has a blue swatch in her hair. She works for the F.B.I.. (In fairness, the blue swatch is supposedly because she's undercover, but we never see her working undercover, it's clearly an excuse to give her blue hair.)
- People have PDAs, and phones, because they do not yet live in a world where your phone is a computer.
Having made fun of it, this is an enjoyable read! It demonstrates Spencer's typical interest in alternative modes of organizing societies for reproductive work, and explores their implications.
Ukiah is also an interesting protagonist. I don't want to spoil too much, but at the beginning of the book, he is presented as a grown-up feral child.By the end of the book, we learn that this is not the case at all, but the book is more or less about him discovering this, so I'm not going to deal with that. He misses many social cues, and aside from his fascination with Agent Zheng, doesn't seem to experience or even understand sexual attraction.
In the book, Ukiah works as a tracker, with a private detective, Max Bennet, who his moms hired try to find Ukiah's birth family. Bennet was unsuccessful, but they learned that Ukiah is incredibly skilled as a tracker, so Bennet has made him a partner in his detective agency, and they specialize in missing persons. Although Ukiah's tracking skills are explained as some kind of feral, raised-by-wolves Mowgli thing, it quickly becomes evident that they are on a different order entirely; Ukiah can read the DNA in a drop of blood by touching it.
Cool things: casual queerness. Ukiah's moms aren't really made a big deal of, and I actually read Ukiah himself as queer, in a way, although his only demonstrated attraction is toward a woman. There's no evidence he's attracted to women, so much as one woman, in this book. At the age of twenty-one, he suddenly realizes why humans do so much kissing when he kisses Agent Zheng.Given that half his DNA comes from an alien species, and that species reproduces asexually, I feel that his experiencing of sexual attraction is almost intrinsically queer.
Also cool: SFnal biological stuff: Cellular memory, aging, the boundary between organism and species and self.
One point that made me uncomfortable: Ukiah's moms hire Bennet because, when they have a biological child of their own:
I mean, the book frames it as the experience of 'raising an infant' (they found Ukiah at, they estimate, age thirteen) but I felt, reading it, like they were saying their was some special bond between biological parent and child that an adoptive parent could not understand. This made me sad and uncomfortable.
Consider:
- the protagonist is named Ukiah Oregon. (This doesn't even make sense in-story. Supposedly he's named for the town where he was found, but why wouldn't he take the last name of the family that adopted him? I mean, it's not like he had a name before that that he might want to keep, since they straight up named him after a town.)
- Love-interest girl is named Indigo Zheng. She has a blue swatch in her hair. She works for the F.B.I.. (In fairness, the blue swatch is supposedly because she's undercover, but we never see her working undercover, it's clearly an excuse to give her blue hair.)
- People have PDAs, and phones, because they do not yet live in a world where your phone is a computer.
Having made fun of it, this is an enjoyable read! It demonstrates Spencer's typical interest in alternative modes of organizing societies for reproductive work, and explores their implications.
Ukiah is also an interesting protagonist. I don't want to spoil too much, but at the beginning of the book, he is presented as a grown-up feral child.
In the book, Ukiah works as a tracker, with a private detective, Max Bennet, who his moms hired try to find Ukiah's birth family. Bennet was unsuccessful, but they learned that Ukiah is incredibly skilled as a tracker, so Bennet has made him a partner in his detective agency, and they specialize in missing persons. Although Ukiah's tracking skills are explained as some kind of feral, raised-by-wolves Mowgli thing, it quickly becomes evident that they are on a different order entirely; Ukiah can read the DNA in a drop of blood by touching it.
Cool things: casual queerness. Ukiah's moms aren't really made a big deal of, and I actually read Ukiah himself as queer, in a way, although his only demonstrated attraction is toward a woman. There's no evidence he's attracted to women, so much as one woman, in this book. At the age of twenty-one, he suddenly realizes why humans do so much kissing when he kisses Agent Zheng.
Also cool: SFnal biological stuff: Cellular memory, aging, the boundary between organism and species and self.
One point that made me uncomfortable: Ukiah's moms hire Bennet because, when they have a biological child of their own:
“At first I figured that if someone was careless enough to lose you, then I deserved to keep you as your finder. But then we had Cally. Raising an infant changes you. You see things so differently. [...] I realized then your mother and father might still be looking for you, never giving up hope. So I hired a private detective.”
I mean, the book frames it as the experience of 'raising an infant' (they found Ukiah at, they estimate, age thirteen) but I felt, reading it, like they were saying their was some special bond between biological parent and child that an adoptive parent could not understand. This made me sad and uncomfortable.