n the year 1999, a few dozen unique children are born. Secretly engineered by an alien race called the pribir, they are raised by their unwitting parents in all the various familial conditions possible at the time. One of these children is Lillie Anderson, daughter of single mom Barbara and eventually the ward of her uncle Keith. Lillie's viewpoint will inform in some fashion all the five sections of this novel, with excursions into the worldviews of her uncle, her best friend, Tess, and Lillie's own son, Cord.
Upon reaching puberty, all the pribir-engineered children spontaneously go into a coma while their minds rebuild themselves. Upon awaking, the teens all announce the same message: "The pribir are coming." Indeed, the aliens have returned, bearing gifts, demands, warnings and punishments. Humans are to abandon certain evil technologies and embrace "the right way," the superscience of pribir biology. The world goes into turmoil. Old hostilities and alliances are dangerously sharpened.
Here the narrative leaves Earth behind temporarily, as Lillie and half the pribir teens (but not Lillie's best friend Tess) are brought onboard the pribir ship for further training in "the right way." They meet the pribir representatives: two perfect humans disconcertingly named Pam and Pete. Under the tutelage of Pam and Pete, with their emotions and behaviors subtly controlled, the teens literally ingest strange new knowledge and undergo a swift maturation. After seven months, they are returned to Earth, and the pribir depart for points unknown.
The pribir have neglected to inform the kids of one thing: The ship was traveling a circular course at relativistic speeds all the while, and 40 years have passed on Earth. And not a pleasant 40 years. Biowar has reduced the population from 6 billion to 2 billion, and the environment is shattered. The teens are deposited at the one place that will offer refuge: Tess' ancestral New Mexico farm. There, re-meeting some of their peers, now much older, Lillie and crew have to fashion a new life. They soon find that all the females who were aboard the pribir ship are pregnant. This new generation, when born, boasts even more gene-mods. Life is stable for a while, until a new round of biowar erupts. Facing certain death, the enclave receives a familiar message: "The pribir are coming." But will the help offered by these aliens at this extreme moment prove a fate worse than death?
Positing a post-human Earth
In this grimly beautiful, uncompromising novel, Nancy Kress achieves a Stapledonian vision at odds with the typical "cozy catastrophe," in which postapocalyptic survivors get to wander meditatively through the ruins of civilization, swanning about in empty luxury hotels until the hoarded champagne runs low. Compared to Kress' dire yet ultimately hopeful speculations, books like John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) and Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower (1993) look like a day at the beach.
Of course, the initial setup—imposter children planted in humanity's midst—will echo for most readers with Wyndham's other classic, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). This is surely intentional on Kress' part. For that matter, two other classics resonate here as well: Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953) and, most curiously, Robert Heinlein's controversial Farnham's Freehold (1964), the latter novel in its defend-the-fallout-shelter-and-our-pregnant-women ethos, which it shares with sections of Kress' story. But all these kissing cousins—as well as Jack Wlliamson's thematically similar Terraforming Earth (2001)—fall away once the sweep of Kress' century-long tale is in full gear.
Combining intimate, close-up characterization and action with blunt, evocative summaries of global events, this book manages to compress into its scope material that lesser authors would have used for a trilogy. True, sometimes the synoptical, fast-forward passages seem a little rushed or unsatisfying. For instance, some sentences—"The camvids on the Net, the posted recordings of the dying, the roboviews of entire cities, were horrifying."—beg for at least a little specific expansion. But such a narrative price must be paid in order for Kress to devote more time to the human plight of Lillie and her friends and relatives. Getting to see how they cope with all the bizarre new circumstances of their lives—and mundane concerns such as child-raising—is more interesting than watching perhaps over-familiar scenes of armageddon. And this privileging of Lillie's story actually mirrors the argument made by the pribir that those who died were Darwinically inconsequential. Life favors only the survivors. This merciless depiction of life's evolutionary cruelty remains in constant tension with the finer feelings of the characters, especially Lillie's quest for the meaning of the world. That her descendants will find the answers she fails to grasp is the sole affirmation Kress allows us in an otherwise bracingly bleak portrait of how mankind might yet throw away all its rich heritage.
