Review: Only Human

Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At last, I reach the end of Sylvain Neuvel's kick-ass, increasingly apocalyptic trilogy, and as expected, Neuvel goes more all out for the finale than ever before. And I didn't think he could possibly top the War of the Worlds-level alien nightmarishness of Waking Gods...oh, but you kid. Well, ten years have passed in-universe since that game-breaking cliffhanger, and now we get to see where Rose and team went. And what happened on Earth in the meantime, where the apocalypse may not be aliens attacking us, but us attacking us.

Cold War II is upon the world as both the US and Russia resurge, colonizing their neighbors, and putting anyone with alien DNA in concentration camps - which also happens to include a lot of people of color, and especially a lot of Muslims, because almost by coincidence the Middle East was where the aliens mostly interbred with humans a long time ago. Like racists need more excuses to be the assholes they really are, but they're just a sign that the human race in general is a bunch of bastards and needs more than just a good kick in the pants to course-correct. Not that the aliens are much better, though. They're often very hard to read from a moral standpoint, but they display so much of a head-in-the-sand attitude towards the ramifications of their centuries of interstellar colonization that it mostly makes them hard to like.

Overall, this book reminds me a bit of N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky in its depiction of a world where everything's gone to shit and even the good guys aren't convinced it's worth it to save said world.

But don't worry, it's Neuvel. He won't give us a complete downer ending. Just like he won't go a whole book without loads of Star Wars references.

To the Themis Files, I now say ave atque vale, and of course au revoir.

View all my reviews