We Have Always Been Here

The best thing I can say about this is that it is decently written in part; there's the kernel of a good story here and Nguyen does enough to make you want to keep turning the pages, but as mentioned in enne's review below, the science is laughable. Take the book description for example - "an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy". Really? Ok fair enough, I can let that pass - maybe Eos is in an unexplored galaxy, but then very early on there's this, which stopped me completely:

"She’d brought a MAD—a Mood-Altering Device that shot soothing gamma rays into a patient’s eyes". There's nothing soothing about DNA damage, burns or radiation sickness!

Nguyen uses scientific jargon without appearing to know or care what the concepts mean and I found it really jarring. At best it demonstrates a lack of research, at worst it suggests a belief that the audience for the book is, I don't know - unsophisticated? I'm surprised these weren't picked up before publication. But then neither were the numerous continuity errors and plot holes. There's a flashback to training in the Antarctic where Park adjusts well to the "blank, razor line of the arctic horizon". Quite poor from DAW, honestly

Why does Park act like she has no aptitude or interest in her role? Is psychology a good career for someone so obviously neurodivergent? Why would anyone choose to have someone so wooden to be part of the crew? Why does a crew of 13 humans need two psychologists but only have one engineer? Park is supposedly an expert in body language but misses so much of what is going on. For all the that the crew have been assessed and tested before selection, they act like young children. You get the impression the author was constrained by her plot and needed the crew to act as they do much like the way folk in horror films do really stupid and counter-intuitive things. Some of the crew want to do something, but having the maturity and planning skills of your average nine-year-old, they do it all wrong, but the plot dictates they do what they do.

There might be some interesting ideas about the nature of consciousness, but with all the pseudosciency hand waving, I didn't really care.

This is a sci-fi horror(?) book about a psychologist on a corporate ship sent to explore a planet for a settlement, with hostile crew tension, mysterious anomalies, and distrustful corporate secrecy. The main character Park is not conscripted like most of the rest of the crew, and so is out of the information loop, distrusted and gaslit, all while weird shit is going down.

I personally enjoyed Park as a main character. She reads as an aro/ace character and is possibly the only character who cares about the androids on the ship. She doesn't get along with other humans, deeply prefers her solitude, and has gotten along with androids her whole life. In the end, her personality becomes a plot point itself, which adds to a nice sense of closure to the whole story.

The biggest negative here is that this book is very fluffy on the science part of the science fiction. I like my sf pretty fluffy indeed, and this book is much more about the psychological horror and social tensions (with the crew, and also between the crew and androids) than about exploring a particular novel idea. The book plays pretty fast and loose with "what is consciousness even", but I think that's not the story it's trying to tell.

However, there were a fair number of sentences that just stuck out to me as bad science (or bad writing). One character's whistling was marked as unusual because people don't whistle in space because sound carried so differently away from Earth(?). In another moment, Park's lips are dry from the vacuum of space (while she's been in the ship). I don't mean to nitpick on details, but these moments took me out of the story.