Amid the Crowd of Stars (Stephen Leigh)

Amid the Crowd of Stars
Stephen Leigh
Dreamscape
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Many generations ago, humans traveled to the stars in search of new homes... only to be abandoned after a disaster befell Earth. Several colonies died without support from the homeworld, but some, such as the outpost on the tidally-locked planet Lupus orbiting the red dwarf star Canis, endured. Now, as the vessel Odysseus arrives to re-establish contact, some of the Lupusians dream of traveling back to Earth - but, after so long in an alien biosphere, carrying a host of adaptations and exotic bacteria and viruses, will that ever be possible? Are they even still human anymore? Or has their time on the alien world changed them in ways nobody anticipated?
Terran researcher Ichiko came to Lupus to study the cultures that have developed on the world, where the people have reverted to a largely pre-industrial way of life and split into two distinct populations, the mainlanders and the islanders. Those on the mainland look down on the islanders and their strange ways, marked by the colorful native "plosh" fungus and their unusual relationship with the great beasts of the oceans, even going to war to keep mainlanders from hunting the animals. Ichiko's professional fascination with the Lupusians becomes more personal when she meets the islander Saorise, who longs to visit old Earth and defies her clan's reticent ways. But the bond between them is soon tested, as tensions between Terrans and Lupusians increase amid a string of odd happenings and misunderstandings, all pointing toward a great secret of the planet that may endanger everything, and everyone - even the Terrans aboard the Odysseus.

REVIEW: Amid the Crowd of Stars has the feel of older, idea-driven science fiction, which can be both a strength and a weakness.
The concepts explored are interesting enough, at least at the start. A combination of time, local biosphere, and radiation from the planet's sun have worked subtle transformations on the "Lupusians", to the point where there is a very real question as to whether they constitute a new species. This is heightened by the literal barriers that are placed between Terran and Lupusian, a necessity due to potentially deadly local pathogens that could threaten the starfarers (and Earth, if any made it home) and the fact that there's no guarantee that the Terrans don't carry any germs that could wipe out the Lupusians after so long isolated from Earth microbes. The world itself - a tidally-locked planet with a narrow habitable zone between perpetual light and shadow - is not exactly unique in science fiction, but has produced an interesting culture, in this case with strong roots in Irish traditions as the majority of original colonists hailed from that region. The islanders have assimilated much further into the world's life cycle than even the mainlanders, sharing a unique bond with the native biome (no spoiler if you guess whether any species in that biome counts as sentient)... a bond that is already threatened as younger generations seek better opportunities among the mainland clans, and is only further endangered when the Terrans arrive and threaten to upend the entire planet's culture in one fell swoop. The Terrans, meanwhile, treat the locals as technologically superior cultures have traditionally treated those who are less reliant on gadgetry to live their lives. Never mind that the colony's ancestors were as advanced as the crew, and that they managed to survive and even thrive where many abandoned planets perished, to the crew they're just dismissed as ignorant "Canines". This point starts feeling a bit forced, to be honest, as if the author were deliberately pointing to the fact that he was flipping an old genre convention on its ear by having a multi-ethnic advanced ship crew looking down on rustic native pale-skinned folk. The biology on Lupus is much more collective than the crew can understand, linked on a microbial or quantum level - which bears a deliberate and obvious similarity to how the Terrans are linked via brain chips and a network of artificial personal assistants, making their dismissal of Lupusians all the more ironic. This parallel becomes rather heavy-handed as the story winds on.
You might notice that I started with the concepts instead of talking about the characters and story. That is because the characters themselves, while they have potential, end up being thin and less impressive than I'd hoped, falling into too-familiar slots and stumbling in too-familiar ways. Ichiko is the starry-eyed anthropologist who ends up identifying more with the native Lupusians (particularly the isolated islanders) than with her own people, and ends up doing some rather questionable things as a result. Similarly, the islander Saorise initially dreams of visiting Earth and escaping what she sees as a trap of a life following in her mother's footsteps as eventual clan leader, a dream that transfers almost seamlessly from the concept of interstellar exploration to the person of Ichiko and which also leads her to some questionable actions. Up on the starship, Ichiko fights against the prejudices of her peers and superiors (plus a one-time lover who becomes an overprotective lunkhead cliche) and an increasingly intrusive artificial assistant (part of a subplot that could've done a lot more with its page count and never quite pays off as well as I'd hoped). On the planet, Saorise must deal with fallout over her increasingly close ties to a mistrusted outsider, which threatens one of the islanders' closest-held secrets. It all blows up in an explosive finale that feels both forced and rushed, and an ending that left me feeling dissatisfied enough to trim the rating.
While there are some nice ideas, and Leigh does a decent job sketching out the Lupusian culture and some of the local animals, by the end it just never lived up to my hopes for it.

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