The Last Human, by Zack Jordan (Del Rey)
I know this book has
received a lot of buzz but frankly I found it disappointing and gave up near
the end. The beginning was awesome: Sarya, a human teen raised by a voraciously
violent, gigantic spider-with-razor-legs, lives on a space station with many other
species, all joined by the Network, a galaxy-wide AI that offers communications
and diplomatic services to those species who join, and ruthless segregation to
those who refuse. Humankind is not among them; in fact, humans are considered
to be extinct, so Sarya disguises her species. Various events catapult Sarya
from her disadvantaged and frustrated life, variously aided and threatened by
an array of fascinating aliens, and Sarya’s history – and the fate of humankind
-- begins to be revealed.
That’s the story I was
led to expect. But when Sarya is killed and her consciousness restored by the
AI of all godlike AIs, I felt as if I had inadvertently stumbled into a cross
between a New Age pseudoreligious tract and The
Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I wasn’t nearly as interested in the new
story, and I found the switch from coming-of-age and girl-finds-herself to
tongue-in-cheek super-cosmic saving-the-universe a definite let-down.
I also
confess to a personal animus against the idea of species exceptionalism. I
disagreed with the idea that humans were too dangerous a species to be allowed
to exist (and that this specialness was admirable). If anything, our
understanding of our place in the natural world demonstrates that our
destructiveness is a bad thing, detrimental to our own survival, and that our
saving grace is our capacity for compassion, not ruthlessness.
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