★★★☆☆ Destination Uncanny Valley

Someone You Can Build a Nest In

John Wiswell

I have mixed feelings about John Wiswell's debut novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In. Intellectually, it's one of the most interesting attempts I've read at a problem Science Fiction authors have always struggled with -- creating aliens that are actually alien. But emotionally, alas, I didn't really connect with it. Sadly, I finished the book with a feeling of relief.

I don't guess Wiswell was aiming at Science Fiction, but rather Horror Fantasy. Fine, I don't care where the bookstore shelves it. It stars an alien monster that a science fiction author would be proud of. What's more, the alien monster, Sheshehen, is the main point of view character. And she is truly biologically alien. She's a blob of flesh and can voluntarily take any shape and incorporate anything she eats. Does she have bones? If she wants to, and if she eats something with bones. Her life-cycle, though inhuman, is more familiar. Wiswell obviously based it on the truly horrifying Parasitoid Wasp -- they lay eggs in the body of a host, the eggs hatch and consume the host, killing it -- thus the title Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

This leads to some fascinatingly awkward etiquette problems, like this one

There was no easy way to ask if Homily wanted her to eat her mother.

Indeed, it's a difficult subject to broach.

Where Shesheshen's alienness slips is in her inner life. She thinks and wants and communicates in a very human way. In fact, she falls in love with a human. How does she have the capacity for a very human-seeming love? Her species reproduces asexually. In real Earth animals eggs are invariably the result of sexual reproduction, but Shesheshen's species seems to be all-female, and Shesheshen produces eggs without any conspecific males or mating with conspecifics. Perhaps she a hermaphrodite or parthenogenic, but it seems more likely that she is simply unlike any Earth animal. Furthermore, like Parasitoid wasps they do not nurture their young. It is difficult to understand how, with this biology, it makes sense for her to experience a very human love.

Well, of course it is not really that difficult to understand. Wiswell is bowing to the exigencies of fiction. He wants a point-of-view character that his readers (most of whom he assuredly expects to be human) can relate to. For me this doesn't quite work. The alien biology combined with the almost human psyche combine to place Shesheshen in the Uncanny Valley. One suspects that Wiswell may be doing this deliberately.

I personally am not a big fan of Romance novels, and while I appreciate the creativity of this one, it landed outside my sweet spot. It would not surprise me to learn that it works better for folks who have broader romance tolerances.

I thank NetGalley and DAW for an advance reader copy of Someone You Can Build a Nest In. This review expresses my honest opinions.

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