Nancy Kress
Tomorrow's Kin

I hadn't read anything so exciting for ages. "Tomorrow's Kin" is a 2017 science fiction novel published this month on Urania. The author is Nancy Kress, aka Anne Konisigor, born in 1948, and she has won four Nebula Awards and one Hugo Award and was the widow of the great Charles Sheffield. Given this introduction, the expectations could certainly be high, but they find ample and satisfying justification in the content of a science fiction work that I define as an impressive novel with characteristics and considerations deserving comparison to certain works by Heinlein and Philip K. Dick himself. Uncomfortable comparisons, but this work manages to sustain them thanks to a robust, intelligent, and scientifically accurate narrative structure. Moreover, the fact that it is a novel written by a woman and in which the main protagonist is a woman gives it a not insignificant uniqueness and a different perspective from the usual from which to tell the events.

The protagonist is a geneticist named Marianne Jenner. A widow, she has three children named Elizabeth, Ryan, and Noah. The three have radically different temperaments: the first works in the National Guard with the aim of protecting the country's borders from the illegal entry of foreigners; the second is a biologist, a democrat, dedicating his life to the study and protection of the environment and is obsessed with the implantation of so-called invasive species on the ecosystem; Noah is a lost boy searching for himself. Recently awarded for research on DNA that traced the entire human race back to what is a single "mitochondrial Eve," Marianne unwillingly becomes the main reference for a genetic research project for an alien species, the Deneb, landed on planet Earth to warn humans about the planet's crossing with a deadly cloud of spores that will destroy all of humanity with the spread of an incurable pandemic.

With the situation confirmed, the entire scientific community, working in the facilities set up by the Deneb, will concentrate on a race against time to find an antidote to the epidemic's spread while surprising truths about the aliens (immediately the target of hostilities from a large part of the humans) are revealed.

But the novel's story does not end with finding a solution to this pandemic's spread and never directly involves the aliens, especially in the second part. It is divided into two distinct parts: before and after the crossing between Earth and the stardust. The protagonist of the story, alternately accompanied by new characters, is always the doctor who, in the second part, will find herself having radically changed her life and as active as no other in a declining scientific community in a society that has entered an apparently irreversible social and economic crisis.

A novel perfectly centered in the contemporary reality of the USA and the entire Western world in this dark page of our history, which constitutes both the context in which the events are set (with different perspectives and peculiar expressions according to the characters of Marianne's three children) and its very own rationale, developed in the comparison between man and the implications of this strange bond with the Deneb. But "Tomorrow's Kin" is also a mystery, a spy story, and a breathtaking thriller with moments in the first part that touch subjects such as transhumanism and spirituality of Heinlein derivation and new age culture, which is not viewed with any outright negative or positive judgment by the author (clearly an alter ego of the protagonist), but evaluates the assertion of free choice in the face of the individual's state of solitude. Intuitive and brilliant, despite the multitude of themes dealt with, the story never strays and develops in the true manner of a classic.