First impressions review: The Color of Distance, by Amy Thomson
I’m surprised I hadn’t run across this 1995 sci-fi novel before, because it is very much the kind of book I would have latched onto when I was in high school – and which I still very much enjoy! Premise: Biological surveyor Juna is stranded on an alien planet. It is inhabited by an amphibian-like species who live in the rainforests and seas. They are hunter-gatherers but have highly sophisticated bioengineering skills via spurs on their wrists that can secrete all sorts of chemicals. They use these to save Juna when she is having a severe allergic reaction, in the process giving her many of their own characteristics, like color-changing skin! The POV moves back and forth between the aliens and Juna, and seeing their reactions to each other’s cultures is fascinating and often funny!
The Tendu are great. I kind of pictured them as child-sized bipedal axolotls, only with fan-shaped ears instead of frilly gills. We get plunged into their culture right away, as a trio of them find Juna dying of anaphylactic shock. This is initially a little confusing, but working out the details of how they are similar to or different from humans and seeing how they make brilliant use of their forest home is fun. As befits an amphibian, they go through multiple metamorphoses and don’t have parent-offspring relationships1. However, they do have an important adoptive/apprenticeship relationship between an elder (sitik) and adolescent (their bami). The bami becomes a sexually mature adult when their sitik either chooses to die, or leaves the village to become an enkar, a kind of wise hermit who helps settle disputes within and between villages. By linking with their spurs (allu-a), the Tendu can share their emotions and heal one another. This is particularly important for the relationship between sitik and bami and, if the sitik is lost too early, the bami usually pines away and dies! Each elder has a special responsibility called an atwa, which may be to care for a particular part of the forest or a particular type of plant, and they train their bami to take on this atwa. For Ani/Anito/Anitonen2, the “new creatures” (humans) become her atwa. She is not super thrilled about this!
One thing I wish the book hadn’t done, though, is state that Juna learns how to SAY Tendu words. These words don’t have a sound, because the Tendu only talk through skin pictures, not spoken words! They are, in fact, really confused by the concept of verbal language. So it doesn’t make sense for Juna to realize “spiral” means “Ani”. Of course, only having pictograms for Tendu words would have made this book hard to format and read, so I understand why we get terms like sitik and bami in alphabetical form that we can say. But I either wouldn’t have called attention to this, or would have had Juna realize that the spiral pictogram means “fern-girl” or something like that; that the name sign connects to something else in the world. It also isn’t clear why the Tendu mention having “stinging stripes,” which sound like some kind of defense, but never sting anything. I’m also a little skeptical of the range of things the spurs can do – it seems unlikely in an evolutionary sense – but I’m willing to roll with it.
1. Well, actually, some earth amphibians DO – for example, in the midwife toad the male carries the eggs wrapped around his legs, and the extinct gastric-breeding frogs of Australia used to suppress their digestive acids, swallow their eggs, and cough up little froglets – but in general parental investment is lower than in mammals.
2. Her bami, elder, and enkar names, respectively.
I also liked Juna. She is freaked out about waking up in a cocoon with color-changing skin and claws, but she is also a biologist, and the way her fear and interest war with each other feels realistic. Like Anito, she’s in an awkward position of being an involuntary ambassador for her people…who really pissed off one village of Tendu by burning down a chunk of their forest! It wasn’t meant badly (the survey team were trying to sterilize the area, in case they had introduced any earth germs) but certainly made for a rocky start to diplomacy. I do wish we’d gotten a bit more of her backstory, though. We know that she has a Finnish father and an Ethiopian mother, and that she, her brother, and her mom somehow got stuck in a refugee camp for a while, where her mom died before her dad managed to find them. But…how did her parents meet in the first place? And were they visiting relatives when war broke out or something? Her experiences in the refugee camp inform a lot of her reactions – positive and negative – to what she experiences on this new world, so it would have been nice to get a bit more detail. Also, she was in a “group marriage”. This is apparently a common thing among humans in this future time period, but it isn’t clear how that works. Is Juna bisexual? She had “wives”, but we only actually see her be attracted to men3. Again, this is something that could have been explored a bit more, since the Tendu are interested to discover that, for humans, sex can be something like allu-a: functioning as a social bonding experience.
3. The time-period when this was published may have something to do with that; publishers could be a little weird about authors putting more than one form of diversity in their book at once! We do know that not-straight people do exist in this world though, as illustrated by one crew member who flirts with everyone. Stereotypical, but…I actually wished we got more of him. He seemed fun!
I like too that the Tendu, for all that they put a big emphasis on “harmony”, are not entirely noble savages. They can be foolish and short-tempered, many of them are interested in human technology, and their culture is capable of change. For instance, they have legends of how one group of Tendu adapted to the sea; the sea-Tendu now are physically distinct, but still genetically and culturally connected to the forest-Tendu. They feel like people, just not quite the same as human people. The descriptions of all the species in the jungle - trees, birds, frog-bats, fish, insects, and more – are gorgeous, and the ecological interactions believable. I wanted to taste all the delicious-sounding fruits! That’s why I liked that, at the end, the author included a list of rainforest conservation groups that readers can support if they wanted to protect similarly biodiverse ecosystems on earth.
Overall recommendation: If you’re tired of grim futures in sci-fi, try this book! While not unrealistically optimistic about humanity, it is brimming over with beauty, biodiversity, and sometimes-difficult but still heartwarming relationships.
