Take a new kind of humanity, the Forged, created as part machine, part animal, part human, living uneasily with Unevolved humans.

Take the Stuff, a mysterious substance capable of becoming an instantaneous interstellar drive and a strangely-uninhabited alien planet.

Shake.

Natural History is, at its heart, an experiment, working out the ramifications of an alien intervention into humanity’s future developments. It features a wonderfully-wrought cast of characters in a plausibly sketched future, a couple hundred years ago. I didn’t get a strong sense of the fabric of daily life in that future so much as the power struggles over creation – quite literally encoded into the name of guy in de facto charge of shaping Earth, Machen, and the progenitor Pangensis Tupac. Robson shows us the lines of power and the lines of information, in names as well as actions.

Moments of importance are often underlined in overwrought moments of reaction:

Corvax leaped back from the consoles, straight through his virtual arrays, and landed against the wall, smacking his back so hard with the force of his own involuntary retreat that he snapped several feathers and a minor wing bone. (33)

Overreaction such as this, rather than just reaction, was little a little too frequent for my taste, especially given the general lack of emotional reaction to the immense potential of the universe theoretically opening up for humankind. That’s also why I could never quite relate to Isol, whose journey the book is structured around more than most. But those are minor objections.

What really undermined the ultimate shape of the plot arc for me was that there was no way to show the resolution; instead, it required a chapter of info-dumping. Hard-won, it is true, but nevertheless a weary unwinding in words rather than the visualized playing-out of the fate of those with Stuff. The plot-shape is discovery, a burst of experimental effort, and a steady dying away into a much more limited vision of the likely future.

And yet – this is an impressive book, more so on re-reading than reading for me. The world building was too rich for me to process the first time around. The Forged characters and the solar system which created them are the vividly-realized background of this book. Against them, an elegantly-conceptualized philosophy experiment, in effect, can be carried out; but I deeply admired the world more than I enjoyed the story qua story.

Enjoyment isn’t everything though. Since finishing Natural History, I keep finding ways to relate it to other books. To tell you what they are would be to more clearly spell out exactly how the book ends; suffice to say, Natural History does a more compelling job of realizing the possible consequences of that kind of communication system than most which are even vaguely similar.

If I could instantly teleport through space, secure in the knowledge that I could safely arrive at my destination without worrying about co-occupying space with something else, and certain of being able to breath and not fall, I don’t think I would be content to do it only twice, not if the method I was using allowed for more than that. I would want to know the capabilities of the method I had found, and what wonders the universe holds.

In the first chapter of Natural History, Voyager Lonestar Isol, hurtling through space, damaged and dying, encounters what she nicknames the “Stuff”. It’s a multi-dimensional technology so advanced that it might as well be magic so far as these twenty-third century humans and Forged are concerned. In Isol’s unwitting, stubby hands, the Stuff mutates into a drive allowing for transportation at the speed of thought. And yet she only goes two places: an unknown planet, and back home to Earth.

Isol has a suspicion about the Stuff which the other characters don’t share. She knows she, personally, should not overuse it – but no one else realizes that for the majority of the book. Yet those other characters don’t seem bothered by this lack of use. They’re interested in the political ramifications of that single other planet existing. They’re interested in how the Stuff works, the seven-dimensional mathematics which may lie behind its improbable operations. They never spend that moment in wonder over the possibility that the whole universe has opened up to human exploration.

There are astonishing things and awe-inspiring vision in Natural History, but early on, the lack of wonder expressed by the characters themselves – up until one arrives on that alien planet – baffled me.

‘So, you believe this claim that Isol’s found an extra-solar planetary system?’

The Strategos glanced at the shadows of the two Orniths shifting on the blind, looking like a single monster with two heads. ‘What interests me is this machinery it mentions.’ (62)

Those are the two things which interest all the characters: a single extra-solar planetary system, and the machinery, the Stuff, which Isol has brought back from her interstellar journeying.

How can they be so blasé about the possibilities of instantaneous travel, especially when so many of the Forged to which we are introduced over the course of the story are transit ships? Even when a Forged transit ship take the Stuff on board in the form of a drive, he fails to make much use of it, even though he does not appear to share Isol’s reservations. The universe his apparent oyster, and he coasts about the Solar System.

Natural History is a book which made me feel wonder about the extraordinary things it contains; but it struck me as dissonant that its own characters so rarely succumbed to any sense of wonder about their own world.

(To be continued)