In these times many people have begun to feel it is hard to see how we can possibly survive. Humankind as a whole, that is, but also openly queer and trans people specifically. It is to these questions—of survival of both life and possibility, and the possible tension between them—that What We Are Seeking, Cameron Reed’s brilliant new novel, addresses itself.

Its title, as its epigraph reveals, comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

Millay’s pithy couplet is close to evolutionary psychology or biological determinism, but it offers a crucial reservation. Biology is determinant, sure, it says, but that doesn’t mean we will like what it determines us to be. Reed’s book, I suspect, takes this as a challenge. So nature wants us (queers) to be unhappy in order to allow us (humans) to survive? Well, what can we do about that? The novel’s answer is formulated within an intellectual landscape of transhumanism, one that runs from techno-utopianism to intentional primitivism, but the answer it is most engaged by is quite different to either. Perhaps unusually for a speculative fiction novel, it is an answer that is distinguished by its specificity, its level-headedness, and its concrete practicality.

Both techno-utopianism and intentional primitivism are teleological, even eschatological, visions of human life. Both rely on the idea that we can, must, and will transform ourselves utterly. What We Are Seeking describes an isolated, increasingly abandoned human colony (containing, as all human groups do, some number of queer people) on a planet they call Scythia. Within these contexts, these competing yet strangely similar transhumanist visions are incarnated (or rather insilicated and implanted) in, on the one hand, the “aiyi” nanobots that have taken over “lost earth” and, on the other, the sentient aliens the human colonists encounter. More pressingly and directly, each of these is figured through a person in the process of some kind of transformation, and with whom the viewpoint character, John Maraintha—an underemployed doctor from a planet with institutionalised polyamory who has ended up in Scythia more-or-less by accident—has some kind of erotic entanglement.

So. The aliens. The humans call them the Basket Men, but we later find out they refer to themselves as the énquissatêk. Biologically, they differ from humans in that they reproduce by means of alternating plant and animal stages—the rooted plant stage gives birth to the mobile animal stage—and in the fact that they are able to transfer DNA-encoded memories by eating a fruit produced by their plant stage, thus retaining first-hand knowledge of their ancestors, and of the landscape they lived in, through generations. This gives them a markedly long view, and a disposition to planning (unlike the reactive, short-termist humans). As a result, they speak a language resembling that of the Tamarians in the “Darmok” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which does not use general terms but instead only references to specific real instances.

The humans do not want to fight the énquissatêk, and would probably lose if they did, due to the énquissatêk’s mastery of their environment. They therefore have to come to a modus vivendi with them. The modus vivendi the énquissatêk envisage, we gradually find out, is a managed renunciation of technology combined with a strict limiting of the human instinct to reproduce unsustainably, in order to bring about a contained future in which humans will live within the means afforded them by the (alien) nature of Scythia. This is a back-to-the-land fantasy, but an unusually rigorous one. It is therefore also an unusually challenging one—both to accept (most of the humans in fact find the specifics of the énquissatêk’s proposals, once they grasp them, to be radically unacceptable) and even to understand in the first place.

The person charged with this understanding in the first place, and with any subsequent negotiation, is a translator called Sudharma, with whom Maraintha lives and for whom he nurses an unreciprocated love. Sudharma’s first task is to try to understand the structure of the énquissatêk’s language. Once he does, he may be able to use advanced human medical technology to rewire his brain to allow him to speak it better and even change the terms of the deal. However, such a change will bring him closer to the énquissatêk and take him further away from humanity. It will make him into a different, more alien, person. John—who, as his doctor, will be the one to carry out the procedure—does not want him to do this, because he is in love with him, and does not want to lose him.

Then there’s the nanobots. In addition to its aliens and colonisers, Scythia is also host to one “terran” woman, Izavolizet, who has allowed her selfhood to be transformed in a fashion perhaps already as extreme as, though technically less alien than, that which Sudharma contemplates. She has chosen to share her life with “aiyi,” and can now reconfigure her body, and her emotional state, by a simple act of will. However, this may not be enough for her. She is contemplating a further change, which is to “engender aiyi”—to go beyond co-habiting with nanobots and upload her consciousness completely, destroying her body and current self in the process.

Izavolizet reminds me intensely of the High Trannies of Rachel Pollack’s great short story “The Beatrix Gates,” whose past willingness to accept the self-destruction of gender-change makes them ready for the even more fundamental change of becoming one with nanobots and turning into self-reconfiguring goddesses. We do not learn that Izavolizet went though any gender transition before or apart from her joining with the nanobots, but at one point she certainly does grow herself a penis so she can fuck Maraintha with it. Whether or not she is a transsexual, she is definitely a chick with a dick.

Maraintha, who is technically bisexual but in a Kinsey 5 kind of way, does not fall in love with Izavolizet as he does with Sudharma. However, he certainly grows close to her, enough so that he is deeply upset, too, by the further change she is contemplating. If she goes through with it, the only way for Maraintha to keep relating to her would be to himself be changed into something no longer exactly human, to become a person who lives with aiyi, to become, that is, as Izavolizet is now.

These two characters, and the alien forces they are moving towards, pursue two opposite but equally radical approaches to the conundrum posed in the book’s epigraph. We might say, were we to parse them in terms of novums, that Izavolizet is the cyborg to the énquissatêk’s companion species: If the énquissatêk offer humans a future of embracing limitation in order to manage and survive in the natural environment of Scythia, then the aiyi offer instead a future of total release from all natural bounds, including death, and eventually from individuality itself.  If the constraints of our biological nature doom us to be unhappy and unnatural, we can contemplate either fundamentally changing ourselves to be in better conformity with our limitations or doing away with those limitations altogether.

Some readers of this magazine will doubtless feel Maraintha’s distaste for both of these transhumanist choices, even as he has great affection for the people drawn towards them, as culpably conservative. (Though I would be lying if I said I wasn’t myself seduced by the nanobot option.) And perhaps it is right to see What We Are Seeking as a fundamentally small-c conservative book. But amidst our current ecological collapse and political dysfunction, this conservatism is not complacent, but urgent. What We Are Seeking does not rest content with either side of the transhumanist opposition, or even with the opposing of the two sides. Instead it asks, and tries to seriously answer, in practical detail, the question: Is there a third way, between the garden and the interface?

It answers this question, I think, through the story of a third person Maraintha meets and grows close to on Scythia, who has made some fundamental changes to themself: Iren, who is a Jess.

“Jess” is a third-gender category on Ischurna, the homeworld of some—but decidedly not all— of the colonisers on Scythia. A Jess is understood to be neither a man nor a woman, though they can arise from among people assigned to either gender at birth, as well as from among people we might call intersex. Jesses (in theory at least) swear to lifelong celibacy: the warranty of their genderlessness is sexlessness (an idea very familiar to me, a trans woman who grew up planning to become a priest).

Sexlessness, however, is not childlessness. The Jess have developed multiple advanced forms of gender surgery, including not only hormones, plastic surgery, and genital reconstruction, but also the ability to have both parts of a reproductive system in one body, allowing for parthenogenesis, virgin birth.

The Jess, then, are certainly transforming themselves, reshaping their bodies, becoming something different. Unlike Sudharma and Izavolizet, however, Iren’s transformations do not attempt radical change to human nature, which is to say they do not consider removing either the human or the nature parts of it. Instead they modify, they accommodate, they combine and disaggregate. They attempt to be happier with what they already are.

I won’t give away the whole plot with Iren: Their attempts to make sure a Jess identity becomes a foundational and ongoing part of the colony’s culture; their discovery that others are working to make sure this does not happen; and their response to this. Instead I will just quote one short passage, late in the book.

Iren has initiated a second person on the planet into the status of Jess: a younger person who has taken the name Scythia. They have done so, however, with a subtly modified vow, one that allows a little more latitude on the question of celibacy. Now Iren are arranging for them to take testosterone. As they do so, they say to Scythia:

“Soon then, you will begin a transformation of the body that can trace its origins all the way back to old Earth. Those people had no concept of ritual at all, but they had a crude idea of memory, and learned some ways to honor it. It is time Ischurnans rediscovered their knowledge. Now the custom starts again in a third world, and you will be the first.”

This is a vision of the survival of queerness not as imagined revolutionary triumph over heteronormativity, nor as some final blessed relief of assimilation into normalcy, but instead as making sure what we already are keeps on going. My first response, confronted with such a vision, was a sort of disappointment. When we first encounter Iren, the concept of Jessness initially seems very different to contemporary forms of queerness. It seems very speculative, very exciting. But as the characters all start to plan seriously how to ensure the possibility of some kind of open queer life continues in a colony that is likely to experience both technological regression and the kind of intense mutual surveillance common to all small communities, the range of possibilities Iren contemplates start to map more and more closely onto the ideas about what queerness that we have access to here and now, in twenty-first-century America. This seemed, for a moment, a pity to me.

Then I thought about it harder. I remembered that this book has plenty of greater strangeness, greater transformation. What these characters are doing is, in context, specifically not that. Their struggle recasts queer flourishing from a teleological, even eschatological problem to a more existential one. Not how to solve everything forever, but how to make room, and keep making room, for gradually figuring out the different things we individually and incoherently might want, in addition to the survival that is a precondition for wanting anything at all.

What I realised is: maybe this is exactly what I had been hoping for. Back in 2017, Casey Plett and I wrote an essay in the back of a sci-fi anthology we had edited called Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, part of the first fluctuations of what has now become a tsunami of trans SFF. In it we noted that:

The stories we got … seemed to be telling us something eerily consistent: It was something about not saving the world—Or, perhaps more accurately, about redefining what saving the world looks like … not heroically and single-handedly rescuing the masses (how possible is that, even in galaxies unknown?) but carving out small pockets of knowledge, strength, and survival … [representing] the heroic everydayness of real trans people’s lives, even among outer space or apocalypse […]

I think What We Are Seeking attempts exactly this, but with a scale, a breadth, a combination of detail and sweep that I could not have imagined. It is a wildly speculative and imaginative book about an extremely specific and minutely envisioned struggle for survival. It is a breathtaking space opera about just getting on with everyday life. It refuses to rest content, as so much supposedly political SFF does, with platitudes, visions of implausible heroism, or schemes to annihilate ourselves as we are and become something totally different. Instead, it insists on imagining the unimaginable, and planning for it as a practical undertaking, something done day by day, year by year, life by life.