Full disclosure: my first DNF and at 25%. 😮‍💨 I REALLY wanted to like this book and I TRIED multiples times to get into it because the premise sounded so good: a sci-fi story about a super talented artist living in a futuristic city where people use tiny living microbes 🦠 in their brains to boost creativity and intelligence. These microbes help build amazing things, like living buildings and smart machines. The MC is chosen to help design a whole new city on another planet but the microbes start acting up. Some turn violent, buildings grow out of control, and machines go rogue. The city begins falling apart, and the MC has to figure out what’s causing the chaos before everything collapses. Interesting right?! 🤨

I found this book challenging because it mixes hard science, complex language, and deep ideas without always slowing down to explain. I kept looking for a glossary or appendix or even a map.. Basically I was not smart enough for this book 🫠

The author is a microbiologist and uses technical terms and invented words for futuristic tech and alien concepts. There is complex science and world-building like synthetic biology, and intelligent microbes (that aren’t explained in simple terms). The world is densely built, with new technologies, species, and systems introduced quickly. There are philosophical themes in the book that dives into big questions about identity, consciousness, AI, and responsibility.

It took too much brain power for me and if you decide to pick this up, I hope you finish it and think of me!

Thank you to @netgalley and Joan Slonczewski for the ARC copy.

Joan Slonczewski has written quite a few novels, some of which are classics in niche categories like “Quakers in space” and “feminist science fiction.” They remain one of only two authors to have won the now-defunct Campbell Award twice, and though they seem to have been well-known in the 1980s, when A Door Into Ocean and The Wall Around Eden made their reputation, they have since sunk into obscurity. This is a crying shame. Slonczewski’s novels combine plausible science with interesting characters and fascinating ideas, and their new novel Minds in Transit reminds readers of why they became famous in the first place.

Minds in Transit follows Chrys (short for Chrysoberyl), an artist who, when we last saw her in Brain Plague, had agreed to become a host to “micros,” sentient microbes who live inside her body, collaborate with her on various artistic and other projects, and speak with her directly through her retinas. Having started out as a prototypical starving artist who agreed to host the micros for the money and better health care access that carriers received, in Minds in Transit Chrys is now rich, famous, and happily living with her “love sharer” Daeren. A protagonist who faces few material constraints due to her personal wealth runs the risk of becoming boring—but for Chrys, “mo’ money” means “mo’ problems.” Over the course of the book she deals with clients complaining about her and her micros’ plans for building cities; debates over whether to hold her next gallery show on advanced Elysium or primitive Solaria; her sentient house’s high-key emotions; micros who can evade the arsenic molecule detection regime established in the previous book; the Palace’s antipathy to the city’s Underworld; finding consensus with the Underworld residents’ desires for improved infrastructure while resisting gentrification; other types of micros on different planets; the growing cancerplasts that are undermining her Coruscant-like city’s foundations in the Underworld; the intangible sentient Transit, which runs the public transportation system for the city of Helicon, and its maniacal passion for Robert’s Rules of Order; debugging the Diaspore, the planetary quantum computer network; and the fascist rantings of the anti-micros, anti-women, anti-nonhuman Hygiene Minister.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things; Minds in Transit is a book where a lot of things happen. Indeed, probably from an objective craft perspective too much happens, with not enough introspection to balance it out. But Slonczewski, whose earlier novels were marked by a distinctly Quaker aversion to advancing plots through violence, always manages to zig when conventional plotting might zag. At one point, an old foe from the previous book turns the tables on Chrys and tries to take over her body with hostile micros. “Is this the plot?” I wondered. No. The crisis is resolved in the chapter break, and the story moves on. Although the novel does reach some closure in the end, in many ways it defies the conventional three-act structure common in so many narratives. I kept turning the pages, only to realize that the book ends in a place where the story could easily continue.

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As someone who loved Brain Plague, and hasn’t read the previous Elysium books (yet), I was thrilled to realize that Minds in Transit is a new book in Slonczewski’s Elysium cycle, although it isn’t necessary to have read the previous books to engage with this one. The micros, and the questions of which kinds of beings count as sentient and how, is a live one in the book, as Chrys continues uncovering more potential claimants of rights. Who gets to be sentient, and the complications of acknowledging other sentients when they are a few cubits of code living in your body, are the book’s primary concern: “The right of personhood is universal,” Daeren asserts at one Olympus meeting. “And where do universal rights begin? Universal rights begin at home, in the smallest places—the place of our own bodies. That is where every micro person seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, and equal dignity without discrimination. And every human and every sentient being seeks the same.”

Minds in Transit literalizes this political philosophy, as Slonczewski gives part of the novel to the micros themselves. Each chapter begins by relating recent developments among Chrys’s micro population, who experience one human hour as a year in their lives. Their perspective is necessarily quite different from a human’s, but they can be just as foolish or wise as humans, despite the difference in the scales of their lives. Including their decidedly non-human viewpoint in the book suits its politics, and Slonczewski’s expansive vision of science fiction.

The micros are a charming feature of the novel. Chrys has conversations and even long-running disagreements with individual micros, particularly those she selects to be her “high priest” and other officers who generally speak with her on behalf of the rest of the population. They’re somewhere between long-time tenants, friends, and family, as well as full-fledged artistic and design collaborators. The politics of various micros’ groupings and colonies also play a part in the novel’s structure and development: the book operates on two scales at once. As Chrys’ perspective on her own existence has expanded, so has the micros’, and their shared regard for each other helps the reader orient themselves in the story.

A working microbiologist for decades, Slonczewski has the actual scientific chops to create plausible speculations about how micros might exist, and to explore newer concepts like quantum computing. In expanding the novel’s narrative to other worlds, she reintroduces some elements from earlier books that are now so old they seem new, or at least refreshing, again: for example, the Sharers, who live separately from the so-called Elves on the oceans of Elysium, are nudists who live communally and couch everything in their society through the idiom of “sharing.” Who says 1970s sci-fi is dead?

And yet, despite being a direct sequel to a book from 2000, Minds in Transit feels contemporary, from the fascist rantings of the Hygiene Minister, to marginalized urban communities resisting gentrification, to the realities of inequities in healthcare access, to the question of who gets to be a person with the attendant rights. On one level, everything old being new again could be an indictment of society’s lack of progress since Brain Plague, or since the beginning of the Elysium cycle. But novels like Minds in Transit are still being written to give us new ways of thinking about possible futures, and the ability to envision them. In its expansive conception of personhood and sentience, Minds in Transit is a vision worth experiencing.

Joan Slonczewski is both a microbiologist (she is co-author of one of the standard textbooks in the field) and a science fiction writer. Her latest sf novel, MINDS IN TRANSIT, is a sequel to her previous novel BRAIN PLAGUE (2000), and overall the fifth novel in her Elysium Cycle (to which most of her novels belong). It would probably help to have read BRAIN PLAGUE before tackingly MINDS IN TRANSIT. We have a pair of planets with future technologies, the most important of which is that microbes are sentient, along with many artificial entities and systems. So the people in this world are continually negotiating both with one another and with the million microbes who inhabit them. There are evil microbes who take over their human inhabitants by manipulating their pleasure and pain systems, but most people get along with the microbes that inhabit them in a more or less symbiotic fashion. For instance, the main character Chrys is an artist, and her visual works are collaborations with the microbes within her. The novel mostly consists in all sorts of social and political interactions among the characters, including the microbial ones, and there is no clear line separating social interactions from political power moves. This may sound cynical, but the novel really is not so. The science fictional novum of intelligent microbes is really a way to dramatize how all life involves interactions among multiple life forms, all of which shape and are shaped by the physical environment as well as by one another. Interactions can exist anywhere along the spectrum from complete symbiotic mutualism to one-sided parasitic exploitation. And in fact, IRL our lives are profoundly shaped by such interactions, even if many of the partners (like the microbes that actually do live within our bodies) are not in actuality capable of language and conscious reflection. Slonczewski powerfully illustrates how the mutual web of life really works, through the extrapolative tactic of extended sentience. The plot, such as it is, is quite convoluted, but this makes total sense, given the ways that the book is depicting and making visible the sorts of connections and disconnections that all living beings are involved in. We are all — people, animals, plants, fungi, and microbes alike — involved with one another in multiple ways, involving both unit integrity and interconnections that mean that no unit is actually self-enclosed.

I very much wanted to like this book, as the science is intriguing, and I’ve always found that Slonczewski uses fiction well to explore cutting-edge theories. This time, however, I found the variety of perspectives too confusing to track, and the characters entirely alien. The constant shifting from nano to central figures and out again, and the different timescales didn’t quite mesh for me. Much of this is probably due to my limitations, but I found this was too heavily weighted towards science and away from fiction to keep my attention. I may well try this again once it’s published, and I could change my mind. The intersection between art and science, nano-life and “human”, and questions of sentience and rights are worth exploring further.

I found the voice in this one so grating I couldn't get into it and had to DNF. The blurb/premise sounds amazing, but unfortunately the writing style makes it absolutely not for me.