Shora is a planet with no land at all, colonized generations back by humans who chose to reshape their own biology to fit the ocean rather than terraform the planet to fit themselves, and the descendants, the Sharers, live in a deliberately non-hierarchical, entirely nonviolent society that the book then puts under direct military threat from Valedon, the patriarchal, hierarchical moon next door. I want to be upfront that the first section is slow, it took me a real chapter or two to adjust to how differently Valan society is structured on the page, but I was fully sucked in by the midpoint and found myself thinking about the book constantly during the day, which for me is the actual test of whether something worked.

What impressed me most is that Slonczewski never lets the pacifism read as passivity or weakness, the Sharers’ nonviolent resistance is depicted as an active, disciplined, occasionally brutal-feeling strategy, not a moral pose, and one reader online called it “Occupy Shora” which is a funnier and more accurate one-line pitch than anything I could come up with myself. The worldbuilding around Shora’s marine ecology is genuinely dense and well thought through, purple algae-derived skin pigment, biological technology instead of machine technology, and it never feels like set dressing.

Where it comes up a little short is characterization, several readers land on this same complaint and I agree, the ideas and the ecology are doing more work than the individual people are, the anarchist-feminist-pacifist utopia is more vivid to me now than any single Sharer’s face. It’s a real trade the book makes and I don’t think it fully gets away with it.

Four stars. This sits comfortably a half-step behind The Dispossessed for me, which, given the company, is still a genuine compliment.