Review: All That Was Asked
Vanessa MacLaren-Wray 138 pages Paper Angel Press (2020)
Read this if you like: Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdez, Isaac Asimov, Vernor Vinge
tl;dr summary: Alien poet/trust fund child adopts an injured human and manages not to kill her in his attempts to help her.
Even in the world of hard sci-fi it’s relatively rare to see a non-humanoid viewpoint character—and even less common to see one used as a first-person POV. That was the first thing I fell in love with in All That Was Asked. I was also both impressed and delighted by how MacLaren-Wray introduced the non-humanness of the first-person narrator, Ansegwe. He’s recalling the expedition where he meets the human girl he calls Haillyen and starts by recounting the various pains his body felt after this excursion across the alien planet. This is such a smart device, giving him a reason to describe everything from his terminal pads to his hind-end crest—and let the reader know, right off the bat, that we’re dealing with something very different from a human.
The way Ansegwe describes the first human he sees solidifies his alienness in a very smart way, too. It’s a brilliant example of an author taking the character’s viewpoint in mind when writing descriptions. The human is first described as a “colorless creature” that was “clearly a non-predatory beast” as it climbs up Ansegwe’s leg. This gives the reader so much helpful info about Ansegwe’s species, like the size of them, for one thing, which would have been difficult to establish otherwise. MacLaren-Wray’s depiction of human speech is equally brilliant, and at least in my top 5 uses of dialect-type writing in fiction. The lines are comprehensible if you say them aloud, but utterly nonsensical on the page, giving the reader both the knowledge of what Haillyen is saying and the sense of what Ansegwe hears as someone who doesn’t speak English.
Communication (and miscommunication) are the dominating themes in this book, explored through the lens of a first contact between two very different species. This is an idea that other sci-fi stories have dealt with, but this is the first one I’ve read that focuses on the non-human side of that interaction, and it’s an effective device that sets up beautiful opportunities for dramatic irony.
I also like that the communication differences don’t stop at speaking different languages. The use of both colors and tentacle movements to express emotions is a nice analog for the human use of both facial expressions and gestures, and the moment where Haillyen starts to mimic the movements is a great payoff of this setup.
Predictably, the worldbuilding is my favorite part of this book, and if I have one critique to give it’s that I wanted to see more of it. It’s impressive to create such an expansive and unique world in so few pages, but to be honest I could have easily stuck with this voice and hung out in this world for twice as long (or longer) and been happy about it. The whole backstory and intrigue related to Ansegwe’s family feels like an unpulled thread, and one I was hoping would be tugged at a bit more than just as an excuse for his nice house and a convenient relative to reach out to now and then. Given how different these aliens are in appearance, technology level, and how they express themselves, I expect there are some other fun oddities in their culture that could have been cool to see on the page.
Having said that, though, maybe things wouldn’t be that different. There were some striking similarities between Ansegwe’s culture and how things work on Earth, and I kept going back and forth on how I felt about that. Part of me wanted them to be more different, but there is also something very fun in the idea of tentacle aliens having a very human-seeming type of scholarly bureaucracy, and making the same myopic assumptions about new lifeforms that humans would definitely make if we encountered alien life.
Honestly, “very fun” is a term that applies to this book at large, and as much as my little worldbuilding-loving heart wants to see the epic expanded version, its compact length has its strengths, too. I like that the story stops when it does, only hinting at how this whole experience will impact Ansegwe in the future through the epigraphs that start each chapter. The fact that it focuses on just a few key characters also keeps the story tight and the reader grounded. From a craft perspective, I’d definitely recommend this book to any writer who (like myself) tends to take the expansive approach to worldbuilding—it’s a well-crafted lesson in how to use well-chosen, telling details to build a robust world without needing hundreds of pages. And, from a reading perspective, I’d recommend it to anyone who likes non-humanoid aliens to get a starring role in their sci-fi.
See similar posts: