I don’t remember what prompted me to download “We Have Always Been Here” on my Kindle — it must have happened during a moment of rare reading motivation before that was extinguished by *gestures* life — but I thought a space thriller could be a promising page-turner for my second read of the year.
And while it’s definitely happening in space and I definitely wanted the pages to keep turning (to reach the end), this novel by Lena Nguyen was ultimately disappointing. The brief glimmers of nice writing in the beginning were ultimately snuffed out by poor plotting and a main character who made choices that were flat-out bewildering.
The book is set in a future where the ISF (think of it as government for the universe) has already colonized a bunch of different planets where humans are now more likely to be born there than born on Earth, and we are placed in the space ship Deucalion with a skeleton crew of 13 humans aided by 13 androids whose mission is to explore the planet Eos for possible human settlement — and perhaps something more.
Among the crew of 13 humans is Grace Park, the ship’s psychologist. She differs from most of the other crew in several ways — 1) she was in fact born on Earth, and is effectively an orphan 2) she had signed up for this mission willingly instead of being enlisted into service 3) and she seems to trust androids innately, unlike most of the crew members whose views range from indifference to outright hatred.
The tension kicks off immediately, when the ship’s chief robot engineer got sick soon after landing on Eos and was cryo-frozen with no good explanation by Deucalion’s doctor. Park is also already edgy like a live wire as she suspects that someone is sabotaging the mission (or her) though she can’t figure out why. That’s when worrying symptoms start popping up among some crew members — vivid nightmares, self-mutilation while asleep, sleep-walking around a ship while acting completely awake.
It certainly doesn’t help that Park is strongly disliked by most of the crew. Part of it could be because she seems to act like she’s never interacted with people before despite apparently studying human psychology. I mean, here’s a paragraph about how she’s good at her job:
Park could deduce emotional stability in conversational pauses, anxiety or calculation in the twitch of a brow. Every look was a data point.”
So Nguyen sets out early that Park assesses humans like androids, but the takeaway I got is that she is an unreliable observer. Worse, Park is so poorly self-aware about how she is perceived by others that she does things exacerbating her standing with the crew, like sending androids around to nose out her unanswered questions.
The other reason why she is generally disliked is because of her status as an at-will contractor for the ISF. Their world is one where the majority of human beings who are able to live on nicer, off-Earth planets with their families do so by paying their way with their service — bondage labor, so to speak. And in these types of top-secret missions, the crew they choose to use are these bonded humans as they cannot disobey or question orders lest their families lose their spot on their home planet. So Park, being there of her own free will, is regarded as a spy for the ISF (except by one psuedo-love interest, who frankly felt more like a plot point to make our psychologist appear more human).
What deeply frustrated me is that this book felt more like a good first draft rather than a finished product. This is a promising premise here — unpopular ship therapist tries to suss out mysterious psychosis on board while the space ship appears to be alive. But there were massive plot holes, really squiggly “science” explanations for the issues plaguing the ship (which could be seen as the weakest point depending on how into sci-fi you are), and really mysterious choices for pacing that weakened any momentum a reader might have initially felt.
All of this could be forgiven if the main character made sense. But Park kept doing things that made her seem like she was born yesterday, like going to explore a whole other part of a massive ship with no clear idea where she was going after she had been threatened — the interstellar equivalent of going down the basement alone to “just check it out” after hearing something go bump beneath you.
She was also so naive about androids/humans issues, when that is literally a cultural touchstone for movies, film and TV. I refuse to believe that in making androids a part of their daily reality, Park’s world had apparently never considered that androids could *gasp* possibly have humanoid emotions that the human race feel threatened by. At a certain point, I started noting down my incredulousness to her reactions, like when a character in the book told her that “machine consciousness exists too. Artificial intelligence is still intelligence.”
The world lurched. Park felt as if she were on a seaward ship, felt as if the floor was swaying beneath her… What the hell is he talking about? was her first thought.”
Lady, there is no way this is the first time you have ever heard of this concept, particular in this world. It really made Nguyen’s choice to cast her so wide-eyed as pure negligence.
That being said, I had mentioned in the beginning there were some nice prose (despite it being executed a bit unintentionally). Nguyen’s close-up descriptions caught my attention — like Park “tamping down the bubble of fear in her chest”, and then “welded her mouth shut”. Or when ship doctor “Chanur’s gaze flicked over Park with the hard precision of a scapel,” then “a movement of the cheek, a hardening at the corner of her mouth” to indicate the doc’s hatred of Park.
All these examples are from the first chapter, before the author started introducing big themes that were explored poorly, raised questions that were promptly discarded, and all in all, saddled the readers with a main character that made little sense. Humans, even predictable ones — as Park is purportedly an “expert” on — have reactions that are rolled out in unpredictable ways, but there must be a recognizable tendril that pulls readers to an “ah ha” point of understanding. Lacking that, we are all just wandering on a dark, massive void of a heaving spaceship, nagged by unsettling questions.