To Each This World

By: Julie E. Czerneda

Narrated by: Megan Tusing, Justin Price, Sharnell Palmer

Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

From an Aurora Award-winning author, a new sci-fi novel follows three intrepid humans caught up in a conflict that stretches across time and space.

Biologist Julie E. Czerneda's new standalone science fiction novel, To Each This World follows a desperate mission to reconnect with long lost sleeper ships, sent centuries earlier from Earth to settle distant worlds.

A trio of Humans must work with their mysterious alien allies to rescue any descendants they can find on those worlds. Something is out there, determined to claim the cosmos for itself, and only on Earth will Humans be safe.

Or will they?

The challenge isn’t just to communicate with your own kind after generations have passed. It’s to understand what isn’t your kind at all.

And how far will trust take you, when the truth depends on what you are?

©2022 Julie E. Czerneda (P)2022 Spotify Audiobooks

Aliens and puzzles and diplomacy, oh my

If you like weird alien biology, weird/cool future tech, world building like woah, and weird people saving the world through the power of friendship and snooping, this book is for you.

Interesting look at negotiations between worlds

I really enjoyed how this book focused on the tenseness of negotiation and diplomacy between different interstellar creatures. The intrigue and mystery was fine, though I have mixed feelings about the ending.

The performances were great on their own but it was a little jarring when the VA tried to voice each others characters, it just sounded like they didn’t know what the other character talked like.

Overall though, enjoyed!

Creative and engaging

The world is amazing, and the aliens bizarre and intriguing. I like how they use invented pronouns for the aliens and alt intels, instead of assigning them genders. Performance is a little stilted sometimes, and inconsistent between narrators, but very listenable

Narration was lacking

Performance notes: A couple of words and names were mispronounced, occasionally the emphasis was placed on the wrong words, and Killian’s voice in Henry’s chapters was wrong. I recommend getting the printed book from your local library; follow along as you listen. That helped me a lot. In the printed book it is easier to distinguish one speaker from another and to understand which words are spoken and which are only thought.

Mind-expanding

I had no idea of what to expect, and it was challenging at first.
Then it was wonderful! Literally.

Best New SF in years

An original concept well told. Reminiscenr of Ian Banks. There are first contact situations and the difficulty of understanding words while missing context. The slow understandings of the characters are realistic. And there is no gratuitous violence.

A thought provoking image of where humanities future could go.

I loved the core concept of isolation between human settlements should we ever start spreading through the galaxy. So many sci-fi stories ignore or gloss over that reality of vastness between solar systems. In that setting, Czerneda gives us interesting characters and complex cultural relationships, all with a ticking clock of planetary destruction.

Stunningly complex tale!!

Somewhat slow start quickly becomes a rich rollercoaster of a ride through alien worlds and bizarre biology. Deep, utterly believable character development. Unexpected twists and turns to a slightly sad, but ultimately satisfying end. Cannot be absorbed in one reading - will read again asap. Julie’s world building and aliens are always amazing: this is hands down her best book yet. Hated for it to end.

Oh, the narrow line!

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. I think I most enjoyed how the main character really didn’t know exactly what he was doing, even though he, and his predecessors, had been doing the job for centuries. The author did a very good job of presenting diplomatic dialogue between two races of beings who fundamentally do not understand each other. The various species that are introduced, aside from humans, range from wildly and vastly intelligent to others being little more than eating machines. I tend to think that this is more along the lines of what we will find, if we ever get to the time and place where we can travel between the stars and actually encounter beings who have developed and evolved on alien planets. Some of them will be very basic, some terribly intricate, some very intelligent, even vastly, more intelligent than humans, and some of them will seem very unintelligent, but we won’t really be able to measure their intelligence until we understand them. If we insist upon judging other alien races before coming to a thorough understanding of them, a maddeningly human trait, we are in for some very painful encounters. Hopefully, by the time such travel is technically possible, we ourselves will have evolved far enough to survive the encounters, and I have those that we encounter survive as well.

real aliens

it took a chapter to grasp some ideas , now that I am done, I miss the characters, and appreciate the complexity of alien mind, an how really foreign it might be