★★★☆☆ | Science Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A comfort read with some interesting themes:
- Human sustainability in a fragile ecosystem
- Finding purpose and meaning in a godless, accidental universe
- Finding joy in the face of mortality and eternal oblivion
I respect the neutral gender treatment in the novel, but it kept throwing me off during my reading.
Highlights
You and I–we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?
You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.