A deep and disquieting vision of aliens

Alpha Centauri by William Barton and Michael Capobianco (1997)

It's been years since I first read this novel, but it's one of those books you never really get out of your head, for a range of reasons.

The premise is a familiar one, even clichéd.  In 2239, with the Earth overpopulated and resource-depleted, the first interstellar spacecraft is launched toward Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system beyond our own.  Its mission is to find habitable worlds for humanity to colonize, though obviously the chances of getting lucky with the first new system we looked at would be vanishingly small.  Indeed, it quickly turns out that Alpha Centauri is an ancient system, its planets long dead and no longer capable of supporting any kind of life, although one planet, named Pholos by the explorers, teemed with life billions of years in the past.

With the original purpose of the expedition now moot, the focus shifts to the team's efforts to study and understand the civilization that existed on Pholos in ancient times.  It's in this element of the story that Alpha Centauri really shines.  To me, the best and truest science fiction is stories that deal with the exploration of a scientific mystery, such as Crichton's The Andromeda Strain or Hogan's Inherit the Stars.  Life on Pholos ended three billion years in the past, and there are very few physical traces left of its civilization in the present.  The explorers have brought a machine called a "spieltier" which, under certain conditions, enables them to see images of events that happened in the distant past -- but even with this formidable advantage, it takes them a long time to really understand the Pholos civilization, because what they are seeing is so alien as to be hard to interpret.

Pholos had two intelligent species, a humanoid amphibian-like race and a species of huge tarantula-like creatures the explorers name the leospiders.  It takes a long time for a real picture of the relationship between the two species to emerge -- a creepy and disturbing mix of cooperation, predation, and religious fatalism.  These creatures were intelligent and had advanced technology, but their lives were ruled by strange cruel passions, by ecstasy and horror.  Still, if you're familiar with the variegated kinds of parasitic and symbiotic relationships which evolution has produced on Earth, you'll find it plausible that intelligent life could develop this way.  And it's a reminder that nature shapes living things and their behavior without regard for human concepts of morality or justice.  These are aliens, as they might actually exist, not just people with pointy ears or lumpy things glued to their foreheads.  It's difficult to imagine finding any common ground with them, if they were contemporaries.

Toward the end the story focuses on one leospider, Aÿ, who ends up being the last of his kind.  Leospider technology had conquered aging and given them unlimited lifespans, though they were still susceptible to death from accident, suicide, and so forth; Aÿ actually lived for about a billion years.  Eventually just the last few leospiders are living on, pointlessly, in an underground bunker on their dead planet, with the air outside now too thin to breathe.  One by one they die from one cause or another, until only Aÿ remains, the last living thing on his world.  He holds out for another million years, alone, and finally ends his life voluntarily, hoping that someday others will come from some other world, and know that he existed.

Unfortunately a great deal of time is taken up with the interpersonal and sexual dynamics among the crew members, several of whom are not exactly paragons of mental health and would not realistically have been chosen for such an expedition.  Most of this element is frankly not all that interesting, and some of it seems written purely for shock value.  For example, the ship's captain is a woman who grew up in an autonomous pedophile colony in Antarctica, and early on we get a graphic recounting of her memory of being raped at the age of 12, by a man and a woman together, in what seems to be a quasi-religious ritual (bizarre and abusive sex is a recurring theme in Barton's novels; if you read them, you need to be aware that you'll run into this kind of thing).  Another crew member is an infiltrator from a cult back on Earth which believes humanity deserves to go extinct, who is trying to sabotage the expedition.

Nevertheless, the better element -- the tale of scientific inquiry and the vision of a truly alien world, along with the story's elegiac quality and the powerful sense of the vastness and emptiness of the dark uncaring universe -- make this one of the more memorable science-fiction novels I've read.  It will never be made into a movie -- it's too weird.  But it's worth reading.