This is a really long piece, so we’re providing three ways to consume it! You can read it here, online - hopefully the bold / italics / right or left justified will help differentiate the authors. You can also read it - still for free! - as a PDF, which has the different authors in different colours; or as an epub, where the authors have different versions of ‘handwriting’. Take your pick as to which one is easiest to read!
If you like what we’re doing, you have until 26 October to send us a donation.
In May 2026, D Franklin read Cameron Reed’s What We Are Seeking and made a comment on Bluesky about wanting to bring together interested and interesting folks to discuss this fascinating novel. From this comment, the conversation you’re about to read was born.
How it worked: Speculative Insight put out a call for contributors, and received a number of strong applications from which we chose the successful four.
We provided three questions in a google document to act as the initial springboard for discussion, then let Ann, Bogi, Caitlin and So have at it. The result - a deep-diving, thoughtful, at times challenging engagement with the novel as well many real-world issues - is below.
Ann LeBlanc is a writer, editor, and woodworker. Her novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese, is a cyberpunk cheese-heist, published by Neon Hemlock. Ann is the editor of Embodied Exegesis, an anthology of cyberpunk and posthuman stories by transfem authors. Her short fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Escape Pod, and Baffling Magazine. You can find her in cyberspace at www.annleblanc.com
Bogi Takács (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) is a Hungarian Jewish author, editor, and critic who’s an immigrant to the US. Bogi has won the Lambda and Hugo awards, and has been a finalist for other awards like the Ignyte and the Locus. Eir second collection, Power to Yield and Other Stories, came out in 2025 and has just won the Byron Caldwell Smith award for best work of fiction by a Kansas author. Eir new novel The Word of the Ancients is Law is coming late 2026 from Candlemark & Gleam. You can find Bogi on various social media like Bluesky, Patreon, Reddit and more as bogiperson.
Caitlin McDonough-Goldstein (they/them) is an evolutionary biologist studying the variability of sexual systems and the interactions between different individuals involved in reproduction. Currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Vienna, they have published research on collecting sperm from toads, estrogen receptor activity in the skin cells of rhinoceroses, a novel reproductive organ involved in the “traumatic insemination” of bed bugs, and the break-down the mating plug in fruit flies. Their current work investigates plasticity in sexual phenotype development in copepods (zooplankton) and the signals that regulate progression of estrus cycles and pregnancy in the mouse uterus. Caitlin brings queer and feminist theory into their work to question the assumptions of sex and sexuality within scientific research. They see scientific research as a speculative endeavor that benefits from imagining the experience of non-human (or more than human) organisms.
So Mayer is a writer, editor and bookseller. Their most recent book is Bad Language, a manifesto and memoir on language and power (and Le Guin), and their most recent collaborative project is The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, co-edited with Sarah Shin for Spiral House. So’s collection of speculative (non) fiction Truth & Dare was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story prizes in 2024, and their co-edited volume Ursula K. Le Guin, SPACE CRONE won the 2023 Locus Award for Non-Fiction. So works as a bookseller at the Maktaba at Ibraaz, and is the editor of catflap, the magazine of Outburst Queer Arts, Belfast. somayer.net
The worldbuilding in Cameron Reed’s What We Are Seeking - especially around how societies on ships and planets are imagined - strikes me as a good place to start this discussion. How do you respond to the ways Reed uses contemporary societies and social elements in her worldbuilding?
Ann:
The conflict between the énqissatêk and the humans feels inspired by the colonization/invasion of the Americas by European settlers. In particular the énqissatêk engage in practices similar to North American indigenous food forest cultivation, and oral culture. The dynamic between humans and énqissatêk (where the énqissatêk currently exercise power over the humans due to the humans’ inability to adapt to the alien ecology, but the larger human colonial groups pose an existential threat to énqissatêk society) is very reminiscent of North America in the early 1600s. I personally have mixed feelings about the use of speculative metaphor to talk about this subject (I am a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma). Speculative allegories can easily fall into the well documented problems of (for example) using fantasy races to talk about human racism. Ultimately the book doesn’t spend enough time with the énqissatêk for me to form a strong opinion on their use within the narrative.
I do think there are interesting parallels between the material culture and cultivation techniques of the énqissatêk and Essius.
Relatedly, I found this analysis by P H Lee interesting: https://bsky.app/profile/p-h-lee.bsky.social/post/3mlbnnhlgxj2f - I’m not sure I fully agree with the particular conclusion here (because of the long-term existential threat that free-ship colonization poses should the aiyi lift their ban), but I think it’s a good example of how the book complicates typical narratives around colonization. Another complicating factor is the presence of the aiyi, and the colonists fear of retribution from the aiyi as a result of the énqissatêk situation.
The aiyi (and Vo) are a fascinating counterpoint to the relatively grounded queer worldbuilding in the rest of the book. Ischnuran queer culture feels like a fairly natural extrapolation of modern queer culture as affected by the peculiarities of Ischnuran history. The aiyi however are an example of the sort of post-human radical body transformation that’s common in certain genres of self-pub and indie trans SF&F. The potential for such powerful technology to lead to a loss of autonomy (and Vo’s ambivalence about this) is also commonly explored in these works. The Zandahean and Ischnuran fear of the aiyi contains elements of transphobia in it – they are equally fearful of being transformed as they are of being utterly destroyed.
The queer cultural debates on Ischnura (how strictly to adhere to the original Jess code) are reminiscent of both religious doctrinal conflict and contemporary queer cultural conflicts. In particular it’s similar to current and historical debates around transmedicalism/assimilationism vs trans liberation, with the narrative favoring liberation.
The narrative did a FANTASTIC job of showing how those internal queer debates become fraught when exposed to hegemonic cishet culture. The way that Iren feels constrained in how they can portray and enact queerness within the framework of Zandahean-Ischnuran culture is very similar to the way that internal queer discourse is used as a weapon against us when cishet people find out about it.
So:
Everything Ann says about how Reed draws on thinking about nuance, difference, colonisation, gender and autonomy here feels incredibly important and relevant! I want to throw in the way in which the main secondary character grouping initially presents as a heteronormative nuclear family, and unfolds as a cishet man who is having a long-term, loving affair in a community where that is frowned on; a queer cis woman who married for socially normative reasons but has not lost her drive/desire for lovers who are not cis men (and possibly femme of centre); and a child who is not the reproductively-obedient and socially-required daughter mandated by colonial politics, but a rebellious person who not only identifies outside the gender binary and away from reproductive conformity, but also a person who identifies across ethnic and faith lines – and one who is not rejected but ultimately supported by their parents at considerable social risk to themselves.
The queering (into oblivion) of the nuclear family as a whole, rather than the outlier of one member’s difference, is a very contemporary story for sure. But I also want to take a minute (not flippantly) to flip the question on its head: why are there certain contemporary (non-social) elements that are assumed to be present on a future space colony?
I was completely thrown out of the narrative when John is first in Laura’s kitchen and sees Laura turn on a tap. Maybe because I’ve started a job in a newly converted listed building, but I thought ‘Hold on, tap implies plumbing, which implies water infrastructure, on a desert planet, and no-one talks about their water concerns at all’. Maybe in one way I’m saying I’m surprised that ecological concerns weren’t further to the fore given the book’s unusual openness to long-term, multi-generational thinking about life after the machines fail and the ships don’t return, and on the other, it made me aware of a set of assumptions about levels of comfort, practicality, domesticity had travelled directly from Eurowestern industrial urbanisation (I’ve said some more below about settler/pioneer fiction). Something about the banal familiarity of turning on a tap became unfamiliar – in ways that are both generative and distracting in terms of the questions they raised about those assumptions and also infrastructure as part of world-building.
Ann:
I had a similar initial reaction to the mention of the tap!
However, after thinking about my own experience growing up in the desert, I don’t think there is an issue. The region of Scythia they are in reminds me quite a lot of New Mexico. The scrubby sparsely-treed landscape feels very familiar to me. NM is extremely dry. You can drop water on a rock and see it evaporate in real time. It’s common to receive less than ten inches of rain in a year. Yet there is plenty of life, and plenty of water if you can drill deep enough.
The Scythian colonists would absolutely be able to drill wells, and the geology described in the book indicates that it’s very possible that the region has extensive underground aquifers. A water tap seems quite plausible to me. Water pressure would be provided by either pumps (which are not particularly technologically advanced), or by water tanks on the roof of individual buildings.
The book reflects my own experiences of living in the desert, which is that there is plenty of water at home (as long as society-at-large is not too wasteful), but water is a huge concern when on an expedition. John and Sudharma’s water problems on their trip felt very real to me. It’s extremely easy to get dangerously dehydrated out there, and finding drinkable water is a nontrivial problem.
One thing that I love about the book is how much the book loves the desert.
I do really like your point about the assumptions of levels of comfort. The colonists have a lot of anxiety about the potentially inevitable reduction in their standard of living when their advanced tech gives out.
What I find more pressing than the question of water is the question of metallurgy. The énqissatêk (as far as we know) have no metallurgy. This is another parallel between the énqissatêk and the native nations of North America, which did very little non-decorative metalworking. The baskets of the énqissatêk are reminiscent of native material culture, particularly cane/bamboo weaving.
The production of tool steel (necessary for creating the tools that create other tools that create objects the colonists will need) is a non-trivial problem and requires an industrial base and supply chain that the colonists don’t seem to have. As a woodworker who uses traditional hand tools, I’m very interested in the question of tool production. Early (17th c) European colonists were dependent on the tool production capabilities of Europe. Their agricultural practices involved clear-cutting the old growth food forests and planting European crops (again, similar to what the Scythian colonists are doing). This requires saws, axes, plows, etc that were produced in Europe. Given that the colonists are cut off from the free ships, what will happen to them when their tech breaks down? Will they be able to integrate into énqissatêk culture?
That said, I’m glad the narrative did not get into the weeds on these worldbuilding questions. These are all fascinating questions that I don’t particularly need the answer to (see, Process vs Resolution below)
So:
I absolutely agree with Ann that Seeking “complicates typical narratives around colonization”, and that one place it is doing that is also in thinking about enslavement: John is extremely aware of the potential for the humans to enslave the énqissatêk or any other sentient species, and this acts as a motivation for him to withhold information at the apex of the book, and feel shame around revealing it to Iren – information that then moves the book into its second part. John is particularly aware that any such enslavement would be a re-enactment or return of Earth history, and particularly of the forced transport and enslavement of Africans to the Americas – but this is only touched on briefly, and through the lens of heteronormativity and its churched relations, as John observes that the colonists already practice what he refers to as a form of enslavement, which is how he observes hierarchical heteronormative marriage. This is an insight that arises in feminist anthropology of the 1970s (Gayle Rubin’s ‘The Traffic in Women’ is I believe the classic source), that marriage is a form of indentured servitude at the very least, and is a structural principle from which other forms of enslavement subtend. Both this thought and John’s expression of it (that a society with hierarchical heteronormative marriage will, inevitably and without any self-awareness, repeat other forms of enslavement) are worth sitting with, both for their radicalism, and for their somewhat obscuring of the foundational history of enslavement to the US, and its frequent eradication or minimalisation by the white/right.
I feel this is also part of how the narrative refracts, but also slides away from, contemporary questions of bodily autonomy: a final alliance is proposed as between (in a contemporary Eurowestern cultural sense) trans people seeking autonomy for social and medical transition, and people who want to have children without imposed limits. Population control has rightly been called out as neo-colonial, as it is often only proposed as an imposition on non-Western nations, and sterilisation has been used as a colonial and genocidal tool against non-white populations. Neither of these things are mentioned or invoked, but – surprisingly to my mind – nor was the current, powerful alliance (and indeed crossover) between trans people and people for reproductive justice including the right to legal, safe, free abortion and contraception, which go unmentioned. The right to bear (unlimited) children being brought into solidarity with the right to live one’s gender shifted the ground for me uncomfortably (maybe in part because of the wild explosion of forced breeding fantasy in fanfic and beyond!), and I’m still thinking it through, and thinking through how it connects to other forms of autonomy the book layers: around marriage, around enslavement, around aiyi, around faith/belief, and around language and memory. Is the answer to the title’s implied question freedom/autonomy?
Caitlin:
Reed beautifully intertwines a similar theme across multiple different contexts and levels of familiarity. This allows the same question or proposition to be experienced in different ways by the reader, potentially eliciting different responses. Reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy that So describes is one that stood out to me as well. The colonists' repulsion at even the hint of reproductive limitation is extremely hypocritical when voiced by Marne, who interfered in Irem’s reproductive ability for eugenic control. Or when contrasted with the tacit acceptance of the colonists for highly regulated birth rates that occur on ships or the ways that rigidly enforced social systems, such as marriage, can restrict reproductive choices. Another example is how the fear associated with reproductive knowledge being discovered is also mirrored between the colonists and the énqissatêk (basket-men). Blue’s abrupt exit from the village is after seeing a baby born at the farm. The critical moment in the plot where Sudharma and John follow Blue into the desert is motivated, in part, by concern that the knowledge about how the colonists reproduce will spread and incite fear among the énqissatêk. Later, Sudharma is also concerned about keeping the énqissatêk grove and vegetal forms secret, as access to that information could enable the colonists to develop reproductive control over the basket-men. In turning each theme around from many different vantage points, the answer to the title question would depend on the “we” being considered.
Bogi:
I think part of this is that John doesn't have a subtle and nuanced view of marriage and is not intended to have one. I felt that this was a form of defamiliarization where John having these bludgeon-y views about marriage makes us wonder which other concepts we don't have a subtle and nuanced view of, and whether we come across like John talking about marriage related to those other concepts. I'm reminded of the popular trans meme where "talking about gender with trans people" is illustrated by a cutout from Raphael's painting School of Athens, and "talking about gender with cis people" shows, by contrast, an adult caregiver showing a toy to a toddler.
(I must say that marriage itself does seem to get pushback from a certain corner of white Anglo-American queer discourse, where marriage equality is portrayed as somehow bad because it is too heteronormative - often with a more or less veiled anti-immigrant edge to it where the fact that marriage can grant immigration possibilities is either ignored or actively discounted, and this anti-marriage-equality stance is not combined with an immigration reform stance. I've had many conversations like that. But I think this is very much not what either Cameron Reed, or John in the story, are doing.)
Caitlin:
I really enjoyed how many ways Reed considered what it means to be “sexed”. Including different relationships to how one reproduces such that Irem considers “self”-fertilization to be sufficiently chaste. As well as the contrast between “sexed” with respect to gender/sex as well as sexuality. In particular, John’s more liberal perspective on sex and gender is somewhat regressive when it comes to Sudharma’s asexuality. John does not seem to be able to comprehend that Sudharma does not want the same types of sex that he wants in the same way that other colonists are aghast that John wants a different type of sex than their heteronormative version.
Bogi:
Looking at the reception of the book on Goodreads, I also notice John's attitudes about marriage are where some readers have difficulties with the text. Going by some of the reviews, one could assume the book was largely about marriage, whereas there are entire huge chunks of it where it doesn't come into play. (Probably those aspects seem more salient to readers because they hit too close to home?) That made me think of something else that was important to me in this book: the survival scenes in the desert where John is running around and the narrative is not so focused on how John feels about marriage or what is going on with gender and culture and society. It's not like those things pop out of existence - they don't - but the protagonist gets somewhat of a break from them. I think that's such a trans feeling, where you don't need to worry about how people are perceiving you and you can just be yourself and do the things you wanted to do. And then cis people ask why trans people sometimes just want to stay at home and not go out. This achieves the same result, paradoxically by going out, but to an "out" that is very far and devoid of people - or is it? It brings to mind "terra nullius" and how settlers claim Indigenous people don't exist. (All this also relates to the other discussion thread with Ann’s comments about John being trans-coded, too.)
I'd argue one needs a lot of dense societal worldbuilding, thick description, etc. to show the feeling of getting away from it - but still being in other webs that the character doesn't understand either, so it's not a place without pressure. There are all sorts of life forms, and not just ecologies but societies, as John later comes to understand better.
Reed’s characters are also worthy of deep discussion. What do you think of them, how did you respond to their choices, etc?
Ann:
John is such a fascinating character to me.
One craft technique I love in What We Are Seeking is the way the narrative uses the normalization of his POV (and others’ reactions to his presence) to make the patriarchal marriage culture (which is omnipresent-invisible within the USA) feel strange and alien.
I’m particularly interested in the way in which John is in conversation with contemporary trans litfic, and trans outsider art. The book heavily hints that John is an egg (a trans person who hasn’t realized they’re trans), while also laying open the possibility he’s just a Grungler (a bi man who hangs out with weird Discord transsexuals, see https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/grungler for details). Yet, the book isn’t interested in actually resolving that question. Instead, the book engages with John as a real person—the sort of deeply repressed person that would be familiar to people who hang out in queer/trans spaces.
The way that others respond to John feels very trans coded to me. He’s a topic of constant baseless speculation, with people who don’t know him making assumptions about his wants and behaviors based on their (generally incorrect) beliefs about his background/identity. The sort of awkward-fear that strangers have in his presence is a familiar trans experience.
So:
I found myself thinking about the way the characters as narrative forms mirror and also change those in Reed’s first novel The Fortunate Fall: John as expert observer who is roped into a project alongside a highly-focused, specialised character to whom he feels an erotic attraction (split across Iren and Sudharma, who mirror each other fascinatingly), and the way in which Iren’s long testimonial about their past, late in the book, echoes the story-within-a-story device in Fortunate, while both books place at their ends an intelligent and intelligible more-than-human species. Characters function as narrative (as storytellers as well as elements in the story), as well as narrative emerging as a function of characters, in a way that feels more Modernist or Brechtian than the average contemporary SF (or even litfic) novel. There is a something being worked out, and part of what’s fascinating about John is that he seems almost aware of it (the aiyi in a sense as the author who has set the process in motion and absented themselves) – this makes the question of “choices” give me pause! While I feel that the book is about autonomy, it’s about autonomy as a drive, a need, a passion, such that their narratives were not about “choice” (that neoliberal term par excellence, and also moral term), but necessity. Without being essentialist, the novel explores what it means for an aspect, drive, desire, way of being to be a part of one. For example, Sudharma’s conviction that his asexuality/celibacy is such an innate yet also embraced part of him that it will survive any neurological transformation.
So here we are I think in the territory of Darwinianism, and how to wrangle with it as (for better or worse) its cultural descendants: co-evolution is a central theme of the book in relation to the creatures living on the planet, and adaptation, obviously, too. John as ship’s doctor made me think about the doctors on the voyages of the so-called “era of discovery”, who were often witnesses and diary-keepers. I was also reminded by the modular branch-like structure of the creatures of charnia, a Precambrian seabed organism that had a similar budding, branching additive form (scientifically known as the apical insertion of new buds), a reminder that the flora and fauna of Earth are plural, intricate and resilient. Charnia made me think about the role that evolutionary biology plays in the novel, not only in relation to the more-than-human multispecies world, but in relation to ideas about character: “Character is fate,” said Novalis (said Thomas Hardy), a nineteenth-century idea that has been much wrangled over under the influence of both Darwin and Freud. I felt that the characters in What We Are Seeking were informed by those histories of thought, in a self-aware but not reflexive way, that they were working through what it means to have a social acceptance of evolutionary models of behaviour (hierarchy of needs, reproduction, all that normative jazz), and to (re)learn what Darwin himself documented and then salted away to avoid being censured by the Church: that collaboration is more present and powerful than co-operation, that gender and sexual diversity is widespread among species, and that emotion and ornamentation are more than just reproductive drives. (With thanks to Joan Roughgarden’s book Evolution’s Rainbow for its deep, and very queer, research into Darwin’s papers and what his original observations mean).
A Roughgardenian evolutionary model presents what might be powerful and potentially queer about thinking with the innate and the deeply-held in a way that crosses between the complexities of embodiment and of frameworks of understanding (faith, science, politics, arts, etc.). What does it mean to seek – to be driven to find – rather than to choose, per se? Or to know that one is driven to something, or innately possessed of it, and to embrace it with intention as well? Transness, faith and sexual desire as aspects of character (and vice versa) all fall into, under and over these questions, particularly where they meet with friction.
Ann:
‘Seeking vs choosing’ is a fantastic way to express what I felt was one of the core themes of the book. The way the narrative very intentionally shifts focus away from Resolution and towards Process is one of my favorite parts of the book.
I think it also relates to certain threads of queer theory, specifically Judith Butler and the idea that gender is something one performs rather than an innate static attribute.
Caitlin:
Two very different scientific approaches are contrasted with Irem and Piro representing dominant imperial western research methods and Sudharma as an alternative approach. Irem’s genetic library represents a system of knowledge in which classification and structure can be used to assert power and a sense of control. Sudharma is instead aiming for mutual understanding, for which they do not plan to extract from the subject but transform themself in order to better facilitate collaboration. In attempting to keep aspects of their insights of the life cycle of the énqissatêk secret, there is a concern for the ways that scientific research has and can be used to subjugate and control other people and organisms. Following from So’s framing, these can be seen as models of different ways of seeking (or seeking versus choosing) consistent with the alternative models of understanding and investigating the natural world from queer, trans, and/or indigenous scientific methods or ways of knowing.
In addition to the connections with queer un/re-learning of the natural world from Roughgarden, symbiosis was prevalent in the biology, interpersonal relationships, and individual identities within Seeking. Seeing the world through established and changing interactions is evocative of symbiotic thinking. In particular, the scientific theories of Lynn Margulis (and collaborators) on endosymbiosis (eukaryotic cells forming from the combination of two cells into one) and Gaia hypothesis (in which the earth can be seen as a single entity formed by interconnected organic and inorganic parts and systems). Or more recently, in the concepts of niche construction (organisms being actively involved in the formation of their environment) in the extended evolutionary synthesis. Irem’s creation of new Jess vows and the braiding ceremony especially felt like a beautiful representation of the trans community's creation of new spaces and worlds for future generations. Notably, these scientific theories can also be seen as putting a name and claim to ideas that were already known and embodied outside of dominant western science, and are also being developed in other scholarly areas including the formulations of sympoiesis of Donna Harraway and intra-action of Karen Barad.
From an individualistic, identity driven culture, the vulnerability, variability, and inter-dependence in symbiosis can be uncomfortable. Especially as symbioses are not just positive mutually beneficial arrangements but also can be harmful or extractive with unequal costs and benefits. In addition these relationships are not stable over time and can shift in response to the environmental conditions. The required changes in both participants to become something new within a symbiosis can also be associated with a sense of loss of the original form, especially if the initial interaction was not consensual. In Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy the colonization of Earth by an alien species requires an even more intimate, sexual and reproductive symbiosis. This direct entwinement creates an entirely new type of life, like how a lichen is both and neither the original fungi and algae species. In Seeking we are observing a deliberative multi-species discussion of how to manage the already initiated changes.
The Human-Aiyi relationship in Seeking represents one end of the symbiotic extreme. Vo indicates that process would not only change their physiology but also their thinking, and eventually they would become more part of the aiyi than an autonomous person. Irem responds to this proposition as if the loss of self would be equivalent to death “The idea of being changed like that unsettles me - but then all funerary customs are disturbing if you’re not accustomed to them” (p.242).
The conflict between the énqissatêk and colonists can also be interpreted through this lens as the negotiation of a symbiotic relationship between the colonists and énqissatêk. Keeping in mind Ann’s critique of colonization/invasion retelling in speculative fiction. Forms of reproductive modification are not uncommon in symbiosis as interactions can influence energy reserves or even directly affect reproductive outcomes in the number of offspring, offspring phenotype, or mechanism of offspring production (such as in the case of Wolbachia bacterial endosymbionts in insects). The clear discussion of terms and mechanisms of symbiosis is an interesting exposition of the processes that may occur during formation of a symbiosis. An interesting tension is formed between the abstract process of multi-species co-existence and the personal changes and compromises that are required.
Bogi:
I also think Iren is a very interesting character - in Anglophone and especially US-American speculative fiction, we rarely see people of any gender being a well-accomplished adult who is not young and upcoming, but has grown into the maturity and - yes - social power of their life. Maybe because SFF writers in the Anglosphere often don't feel like they have social power, so even when their characters are middle-aged or older, they are portrayed differently.
I can't even think of a lot of similar characters. Giin from Hungarian author Etelka Suhajda's WonderTimes series, published as by Raana Raas (the first book just appeared in English, translated by Judit Székács - I sadly cannot comment on the translation itself, because I haven't read it yet) is a well-respected religious and political leader, and Iren reminded me of him. My other example off the top of my head would be Queen Meve, the protagonist of Thronebreaker, which is a text-heavy RPG video game in the Witcher universe. She is a middle-aged woman who has been forcibly deposed, but she still retains enough power and allies to make a viable attempt at retaking the throne. It's interesting that neither of these characters have a focus on gender in their character arcs, and one is a cis woman while the other is a cis man. The only nonbinary characters like Iren I can think of are in shorter-form fiction: there are multiple socially powerful nonbinary characters in R.B. Lemberg's Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power, a novella serialized in Beneath Ceaseless Skies almost a decade ago. I am sure there are more - I'm probably missing some very obvious ones - but they are hard to find. So it was a delight to read about Iren for these reasons too, among many other ones.
In his review in Locus, Niall Harrison suggested that the novel places "two traditions into dialogue" - earlier feminist SF (exemplified by Eleanor Arnason and Mary Gentle) and "the post-Leckie space opera." How do you feel about this characterisation?
Ann:
I largely disagree that What We Are Seeking is in conversation with Leckie-inspired space opera—which is generally focused on Empire, human-on-human colonialism, and (space)nation-scale political conflicts. What We Are Seeking isn’t space opera, but does fit within the genre of “human colonists trying to survive on a mysterious alien planet.” Two books also in this genre are Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and The Word For World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin—and I think What We Are Seeking is in conversation with both.
I think the larger conversation in What We Are Seeking is between Science Fiction and Contemporary Litfic. The book uses the tools of literary fiction to explore questions and settings common to science fiction. Structurally, the book feels more like litfic, especially in the way it eschews resolving larger societal questions. If the book was typical Science Fiction, the question of the énqissatêk would likely have had come to a thematically resonant conclusion by the end of the book. Instead, the book leaves this open ended—in the same way it would be preposterous for a contemporary trans litfic book to have solved transphobia by the end of the book. Like litfic, the book isn’t about resolving these problems, but about how the characters live within them.
In particular, I think the book is in conversation with the last two decades of trans literature, such as the works of Topside Press or Jeanne Thornton (the publishing timelines probably don’t work out, but the parallels between What We Are Seeking and A/S/L are fascinating).
Bogi:
I went and looked for interviews to see what Cameron Reed herself mentioned about inspirations - I found an interview with Paul Semel where she brought up Le Guin, Russ, Cherryh, Heinlein, Bujold; and very specifically Janet Kagan’s Hellspark. (She also discussed that her previous and her following book were more inspired by Delany.) Out of these, I especially want to dig into the Le Guin influence.
In addition to The Word for World is Forest, as Ann just mentioned, the novel also reminded me of The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home. Not only in surface similarities like both John and Shevek familiarizing themselves with another planet with different social mores around gender, but I felt that these texts also shared something structural, about pacing, about which details about the world are shown and which are considered relevant. Just as one example, there is a lot about cooking, whose gendering as a feminine craft is problematized in the text.
I’d also say the novel falls into the planetary romance subgenre, and the interview circles around this too: “It’s science fiction set on a planet with both human settlers and aliens. That’s a classic type of sci-fi, but there’s no really satisfactory subgenre name for it”.
So:
I’m loving the “yes, and” of this speculation around the library the book carries, because it feels very true to the project of feminist science fiction, and to the book, both of which think through kinship, relation, borrowing, sharing, and citation in generative and generous ways. I did think about Russ’ ‘When It Changed’ in relation to the isolated community on a planet, and the suggestion of a far slower movement towards some kind of non- or anti-patriarchal decision-making that takes place through the jess ritual – but rather than the kind of feminist separatist fictions of the 70s with their evocation of the commune, What We Are Seeking seemed to me (and this speaks to Bogi’s point about the genre of planetary settler SF) closer to settler colonial narratives such as Little House on the Prairie, and in some ways makes visible how foundational those ‘hardscrabble pioneer days’ tropes are to American SF (one can’t even count the number of Trek episodes where they are called to a planetside community that’s fully pioneer days).
Thinking about older/other genres also made me think about how to describe the generic codes of the opening chapters shipboard, and the fascinating evocation of (for me) Faerie! The opening chapters reminded me of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Kingdom of Faerie (one of Le Guin’s favourite authors, by the way – they met very briefly in the UK in the late 1970s), in particular of the human who is ‘taken away’ to Faerie, and for whom time, relation, direction and ingestion all become disoriented, introducing a fascinating connection between fantasy and science fiction in terms of translation to another place/world. John’s late realisation that he was taken as a sex worker for the shipboard elite fits with the implications of many Faerie legends, and the focus on food, drink and poison on the one hand, and sexual relations, pairings and codes on the other (and the magically appearing food, drink and furniture of Vo’s vehicle) all strike me as belonging to Faerie more than science fiction, and adding a powerful rethinking of the relation to place and body.
Caitlin:
I really appreciate this direct list of references from Reed. From the list the resemblance to Bujold’s Ethan of Athos was the one that jumped out at me. There is a similar juxtaposition of different moralities with the POV arising from a perspective (of a world with only men and terrified of the influence of women requiring ovarian cultures for reproduction) that centers a perspective from a version of “normal” in opposition to one that more resembles the more dominant heteronormative societies we inhabit.
So:
I’m going to go a bit further (!) leftfield while following the Le Guin thread from Ann and Bogi’s replies – maybe because I read What We Are Seeking close to Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory, I found myself thinking of the book as a generation-ship-on-a-planet (both books have a real tenderness about ecosystems, and a clarity that Earth is a generation ship and vice versa), and thinking through the beautiful emphasis on tending crops interwoven with faith and its ability (or not) to change in diaspora with Le Guin’s story (novella?) ‘Paradises Lost’ in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. Gardens and other Edens, perhaps. The place of faith in Seeking – both Christianities and Jainism travelling from Earth, alongside other belief systems – I think is part of a shift/opening in recent SFF, alongside Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, for example, as well as The Republic of Memory.
Ann:
I really enjoyed the way that the book discussed religion. In particular, I thought it was interesting how the Jess practice on Ischnura was presented as a religion. Like many religions, Jess practice contains a founding figure, a liturgy, exegesis of that liturgy, doctrinal debates, and complicated interactions between theology and administration (in this case the jess houses & hospitals).
Bogi:
I felt like the topic of religion was where I had the most hesitations, but I struggled with verbalizing this until Alex Pierce linked Gautam Bhatia’s book review. Interestingly, I had a different but related difficulty - Gautam was having issues with Sudharma’s depiction as a Jain person and how the narrative didn’t grapple with how that relates to the problematic aspects of Jainism in this context, in the present day. I’m not from India, but I do belong to a non-Western religious / cultural tradition that shares several features with Jainism as portrayed in the book, primarily the focus on purity that also includes dietary aspects, as Gautam noted. And one of my issues was that this is entirely shown from an external perspective, which cuts immediately down on how much reflection and analysis can be plausibly fit into the narrative.
This has pros and cons. If you’re not showing these complications from an internal perspective, that can give a kind of out to the author to go like, “I’m not sharing this character’s experiences, but neither do my point-of-view characters.” But it can also make way for exoticization even if in a ‘positive’ way, and I think this is part of what Gautam is responding to too (the philo-orientalism he mentions definitely reminded me of philosemitism). I felt that we didn’t learn what motivated Sudharma to maintain these religious / cultural practices, and the way the narrative handled that reminded me of my own experiences where my existence as a Jewish person who keeps kosher is often entirely reduced to people either accommodating me when it comes to eating, or not. But the meaning of my observance doesn’t have narrative room to expand into - I’m not a character in a book, obviously (?), but people narrativize their experiences in everyday life just as well. If the narrative in the novel engaged a bit more with the meaning, then I think that would have had the potential to engage with the issues Gautam mentioned. Or the alternative option is to make the religion entirely fictional, but structurally, it would still offer an outsider portrayal even then. I’m still sitting with this.
So:
The second thread I want to follow is translation as a science on which new SF is being built, something I love, and I think is the influence of Le Guin, Delany and Ted Chiang, as a way of rethinking/thinking into and out of the anthropological and ethnographic roots of SF (big statement, can unpack). What We Are Seeking joins The Republic of Memory in having a significant character who is a translator, and maybe that is the connection to the Radch books rather than the aspect of space opera – the work of diplomacy and linguistics, and what Leckie calls the ‘translation state’, in which the word becomes a profound (and trans) pun: it is not that you translate languages, but that they translate (change, carry; even devour, in Leckie’s novels) you. Sudharma’s arc (implied in his name, which echoes swadharma, personal commitment) of preparation and undertaking for such a translation is reminiscent of the finale of Arkady Martine’s duology in A Desolation Called Peace, where the adjutant Twenty Cicada (who follows a minority faith) accepts the fungus that will transform his brain to be able to understand the plural selves of the alien hivemind. Both Martine and Reed end with the moment of translation-as-transformation, leaving us as readers to imagine what societal impact this might have.
As fascinating as the linguistics are as a substrate of the book (the pronunciation shifts, the diagrammatic work of translation, the perils of its failures), and the precision and richness that carries through in the book’s use of language, it is the ethical commitment – the risk of becoming-other – that is what translation (and the narrative) is doing and carries. The question of what it means to communicate across boundaries is of course one that preoccupied Le Guin, whether in terms of space-time in The Dispossessed, or in her thoughts on therolinguistics in ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’; What We Are Seeking has elements of both; or brings together both in a kind of somatic simultaneity that picks up on something else I’m thinking about (again left field), which is the Bundist commitment to doykheit or hereness (imagining Bogi might jump in here? Or not!), and what it means to do the work where you are – and how that’s complicated by being a settler colonist with an Earth history: what to do ethically with having been translated to a new place, and finding the same power relations there.
Ann:
Building on Bogi and So’s thoughts on the narrative’s relation to LeGuin: John feels like he would fit very neatly in a Hainish Cycle story (Iren, in comparison, feels very modern. If you spend time in queer circles you will meet many people just like Iren). John possesses a certain set of characteristics that remind me of the protagonist from The Dispossessed, or LeGuin’s Hainish anthropologist/diplomat characters (Left Hand of Darkness, etc). I’m not quite sure how to describe it, but these characters embody the juxtaposition of a strong personal ethos while also expressing a certain receptivity/passivity/openness interpersonally. They are listeners and observers, rather than talkers.
Other characters frequently identify these traits in John as feminine, which is related to the question of whether John is an egg. But it’s possible to also consider these traits as anthropologist-coded (which of course further connects to the book’s discussion of certain jobs/tasks containing gender).
It’s interesting to compare John’s anthropologist-coded attributes with Sudharma, who is the actual academic expert. Within the narrative Sudharma feels more static than the other characters. His Jain faith is primarily presented in terms of its rigidity. He exists largely separate from the colonists’ debates about queerness, family, reproductive autonomy, etc, and thus undergoes very little interpersonal change. And yet, he is the character who will be undertaking the most radical change.
Sudharma’s impending transformation has very strong parallels to trans transition care. John’s anxieties around how Sudharma will change echo the fears that family members often have about people who are deciding to go on HRT. Sudharma’s insistence that he will still be the same person (just different) are reassurances that have been spoken by many trans people. John’s fear of Sudharma’s death—both real and a metaphorical death of self—is also quite familiar (think of the ways that parents often mourn their ‘dead’ son or daughter, even as their alive trans child sits before them).
Caitlin:
There are so many different types of transition/metamorphosis shown in Seeking. In particular, the complex emotions and preparations around Sudhrama’s impending transition was ramping up in close proximity to the discussions about Scythia’s desire to be a Jess and their braiding ceremony. Vo also initiates a transition to become more fully aiyi leaving behind their more corporeal forms and attachments to humanity. We also are given the transformation or transition of Green (Blue) after they make contact with the food sources of other adults. This form of memory and information sharing is like forms of communication through social fluids, in which communication is to also acquiesce to the irrevocable changes initiated by those biomolecules. And all of these personal forms of transition occur within the broader context of, and entwined with, the ecological transition that has been initiated by colonization.
Ann:
The fact that the story ends at the beginning of Sudharma’s transformation feels extremely significant to me. Thematically, I believe the ending makes the point that the book is about the Process/Struggle and not Resolution; and that life is in constant transition (societal, ecological, interpersonal, bodily, etc). I really like the way that So expressed this earlier when discussing what it means to seek rather than to choose.
Caitlin:
“But I think he meant ‘Cut the tree in your mind.’ Stop mourning things that are gone, which to them their old way of life already is. I don’t think they have customs or rituals or traditions, at least not as a human understands them. Instead they have plans and plans can change.”
(Sudharma translating the énqissatêk p. 323)
Thanks to everyone who spread the word about the call for contributors; to the other applicants (we hope you’ll enjoy reading this, and responding); and to D, for the initial inspiration and for their generous donation to pay contributors.