Usurpation (Semiosis, 3)
Usurpation, the third book in the series that began with Semiosis, is more of a companion novel than a continuation of the original story. The first two books, Semiosis and Interference, took place on the planet Pax and shared many of the same characters, particularly the fascinating intelligent bamboo named Stevland. Both were rich and engaging explorations of several different forms of intelligent life and how the biology of each affected how they thought and acted.
Usurpation takes place on Earth, and unfortunately, it is not as strong a story as its predecessors. Stevland does not appear, nor do any of the other characters from the other books. The first half of the book is disjointed and rambling. It flits from country to country and character to character, describing the effects of a terrible war. Twenty years of story time pass without a clear plot or purpose or any of the intriguing explorations of alien intelligence that featured in the previous stories. The characters are unrelated to each other and seem almost randomly selected.
Eventually the story settles around Levanter, a rainbow bamboo on Earth who, unbeknown to the humans, is acting as the director of the Pax Institute, an organization dedicated to studying and conserving wildlife from Pax. Levanter is unusual among bamboo in his interest in humans, and he manages to maintain his cover for almost a century by pretending to be reclusive and using digital communication.
Halfway through, a plot finally begins to emerge: A strange disease is causing humans to fight and kill each other, and it seems to infect and destroy bamboo as well. At this point, several human characters converge on the Institute: Denis, who lives nearby and likes to visit the Institute; Clerihew, a woman over a hundred years old who leads the Cetacean Cult, an oceangoing cult dedicated to serving the interests of whales; Ico, another member of that cult who starts to doubt his belief system; and Brian, the head of another cult dedicated to serving the interests of an alien creature known as corals. The motivation for these various parties to be there is murky. Once there, however, and on little evidence, they conclude that the disease is a potential extinction threat to humanity and quickly despair of finding a solution. Levanter and his fellow bamboo, however, are on the case.
The rainbow bamboo on Earth are connected by a digital network that allows them to communicate with each other around the world. Their conscious ability to manufacture chemicals in their bodies makes them excellent chemists, and they can share data to collaborate on a cure. Based on the results of the terrible war that started the book, however, the bamboo disagree on whether humanity should be saved or killed.
In the later portions of the book, Levanter contemplates the things that make intelligent plants and humans different. “Human nature originates in the essential nature of animals, movement,” he says, “which they use to avoid and escape problems rather than solve them. . . . We, as plants, remain in place . . . Problems cannot be escaped, only solved.” Later, he says, “Humans are a moving permanence,” referring to how humans, though they can move, do not grow and change the shape of their bodies as dramatically as plants can.
The early books were full of contemplations like these about how a radically different body and patterns of life affect culture and ways of looking at the world. In them, the author masterfully created a unique alien life that was both otherworldly and utterly believable. This book, in contrast, reads more like a disconnected series of short stories than a coherent novel. The recurring human characters have only the briefest of backstories and their actions are poorly motivated. The main plot appears almost as an afterthought and is solved with little difficulty. The strengths of Semiosis and Interference are sadly absent.