"To Plant a Garden is to Believe in Tomorrow": Overgrowth, by Mira Grant

Overgrowth by Mira Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is basically a mishmash of War of the Worlds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a bit of Little Shop of Horrors thrown in.

Mira Grant, the SF-horror pseunodym for Seanan McGuire, always makes her cross-genre stories interesting, however. I adore her Newsflesh and Parasitology series (zombies and sentient tapeworms respectively) and this book also has the virtue of being a stand-alone, even if the story could conceivably be expanded upon. What makes this particular book a bit more interesting, I think, is the prominent grappling with issues of found family, parental abandonment, and the existential question (also touched upon in the many extended quotes from War of the Worlds to open the book's five different sections) of whether or not the human race is worth saving.

This book is the story of an alien invasion by sapient plants. That one sentence barely encompasses the weirdness of the alien ecosystem on full (green) display here. It begins with a rather gruesome prologue straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, detailing when three-year-old Anastasia Miller wanders away from home, stumbles across an alien seed that fell to earth in a comet and germinated, and is swallowed up, digested, and spat forth again as a vegetable-human hybrid copy. She knows what has happened to her and tells anyone who will listen that she is an alien and the invasion is coming. Of course, no one listens to her (which is one of the major themes of the story--people not listening to the thousands across the world who are all asserting the same thing) until more than thirty years later, when an alien signal is received and the armada arrives--and then it is too late.

The author spends a fair amount of time on this fascinating, if horrific, ecosystem. Among other things, Stasia and her cohorts, once their final transformation commences, basically need blood--either human or animal, although the former is preferred--to maintain their metabolisms. Later we find out that consuming blood is necessary for the aliens to continue to be self-aware, which is why the armada endlessly visits life-bearing planets (called "gardens"), conquers and drains them of a great portion of their inhabitants, and moves on. It is a well-thought-out lifecycle that gets ickier and more horrifying the more you think about it. Which is what makes this book stand out: at the end, it comes down firmly on the side of the invaders against the humans.

How you feel about this story will depend on your acceptance of that fact, I think. The author does explore the ramifications of this theme, especially through the character of Antonia Fabris, who argues with Stasia on the subject pretty much throughout the book. (The side characters, including Toni, Stasia's best friend Mandy, and her trans boyfriend Graham, are well drawn and fully rounded people.) There is no last-minute rescue for the human race: the invasion proceeds as planned, with the "scouts" (people like Stasia, sent ahead to warn and prepare) managing to keep humans from nuking the planet. The final pages tell us what is going to happen: Earth will grow biomechanical ships of her own to wander the stars, and Stasia and her friends, along with many other converted humans, will be aboard them, exploring the galaxy. Stasia has been telling this entire story to someone, and at the end we find out who it is: her boyfriend Graham, who agreed to be digested and converted, and is about to wake up in his new vegetable form.

It's a pretty unique spin on the alien invasion trope, I think. I also suspect it will prove to be something of a marmite book--if you can’t abide the idea of humanity getting their asses handed to them, you won't like this book at all. But one of the H.G. Wells quotes sums up this book's approach:

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo….The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

Add to that the fact of humanity in the process of destroying the only place they can live through anthropogenic climate change, the accelerated extinction of species and ecosystems, and the mass misery currently being inflicted on the rest of the world by the planet’s sole remaining superpower, and I really can’t object to this book too much. At any rate, I thought it a fascinating read.

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