The best science fiction shows us new ways to see our lives and our times by showing us how both might be otherwise. Characters who seem like us seek out alien worlds whose systems clash, or rhyme, with those we recognize. Characters who seem very unlike us—A.I.-infused cyborgs, plant people who photosynthesize, or humans from made-up societies—act on their feelings, and contemplate moral decisions, and we ask how their stories might inform our own. Critics call these effects cognitive estrangement: the term, coined by the scholar Darko Suvin in the nineteen-seventies, describes how science fiction’s worlds seem strange, yet also make sense, according to knowable rules in a fictional universe, and according to readers in our own.

Great science-fiction writers, almost by definition, are masters of cognitive estrangement. Some of those writers enjoy long, successful careers. Others quit, or disappear—or suddenly, after decades of silence, show up again. That’s what has happened, this year, with the novelist Cameron Reed. Her first novel, “The Fortunate Fall” (1996), a queer cyberpunk tale reminiscent of Dostoyevsky, became a kind of underground classic, more often praised than found. The book portrays an authoritarian near-future Russia where most entertainment and all news comes through Cameras, people wired to transmit their experiences directly from their brains to the internet. Such people rely on Screeners, who make sure Cameras don’t overload or share censored information. Our tragic hero, a Camera named Maya, uncovers the real history of her nation, and of her A.I.-dominated world, along with previously unknown parts of her own biography. The plot attends both to twentieth-century horrors, such as Ukraine’s Holodomor, and to what Reed saw coming, in social media’s incessant threat to our inner life. What if we could replace our lived experience—our self-image, our values, our sexuality—with immersive videos, delivered fresh every day? What would we lose, and would we want it back?

After “The Fortunate Fall,” Reed published a short story that won the Tiptree Award (now called the Otherwise Award), for the year’s best science fiction about gender. Then nothing, for twenty-seven years. Critics’ and fans’ attempts (including my own) to contact the author failed: nobody seemed to know if she was even alive. Then she reëmerged, posting on Bluesky and Mastodon as @LateOnsetGirl. In 2024, her work’s lasting impact led Tor Books to reissue “The Fortunate Fall” in a series of modern sci-fi and fantasy classics. And now Tor is set to release a new novel from Reed, “What We Are Seeking,” that’s longer, more joyful, more ambitious, and at least as devoted to cognitive estrangement, making new worlds whose structures and societies let us see ours with fresh eyes.

“The Fortunate Fall,” by some measures, represented one of the last major entries in cyberpunk, that line of gritty, wired-up near-futures. “What We Are Seeking” (the title comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay) occupies another corner of science fiction. It’s partly space opera—far future, with starships and aliens—and mostly set on a colonized planet: the kind of premise made popular by “Star Trek.” It’s a cracking, fast-moving adventure story, with a wilderness-survival plot, love stories, coming-out stories, and a whodunnit. It’s about desert botany and zoology, and reproductive freedom, and new tech, and religious faith. And it asks us to sleuth out—in its world, and our own—connections among all those things.

The book’s point-of-view character, John Maraintha, has embarked on a starship from his native Essius, a planet without monogamy, or indeed marriage. Essian sex is called “visiting”: most people do it, with whatever genders they prefer. Essian kids grow up in extended matrilineal families, with no husbands or wives. John’s home planet thus has a reputation, elsewhere, as a place of sexual license: “he was entirely defined to these people by visiting.”

Near the start of the novel, John gets unfairly expelled from the starship. He and a friend, Sudharma, end up in a settlement on the planet Scythia, which has recently been colonized by two societies with contrasting mores. The Ischnurans have what we might consider a standard American attitude toward sex and dating, but they also recognize a third gender, the jesses, who vow to wear long braids and practice celibacy. The other society, the Zandaheans, live like conservative Catholics: two genders, nuclear families, no divorce, priestly authority, and would-be trad wives. Neither of these models seems ideal for the small new town. “At first we were all working in our specialties,” Laura, a friendly—and discontented—Zandahean mother, tells John. “But then we started having children, and surprise surprise, it turned out that the burden of providing” for children fell to women. The whole settlement will collapse if townspeople can’t get along. Or if the birth rates drop too low. Or if crops fail, or the local fauna attack.

John dreads learning to live among “marrying people,” who ought to know that “monogamy was unnatural.” He becomes close to Iren, the colony’s only jess, who explains their decision to take the braid after a childhood “longing for a body and a way of being I had never had.” Sudharma’s adherence to the Jain religion—he performs a daily ritual of repentance, avoids garlic—and Iren’s devotion to the sacred jess braid contrast with the Zandahean Church, a faith that tells all people what they should do; Iren and Sudharma apply their rules only to themselves. John also becomes close to Laura, her husband, Piro, and their teen-age child Tali, who wants to become a jess herself.

Thus far, the book is a human-centered frontier narrative, with an assist from Ursula K. Le Guin’s once crucial, now dated, “The Left Hand of Darkness.” The novel’s efforts at cognitive estrangement begin with home and family life. When John asks Iren why jesses wear women’s clothing, Iren says, “Me, wear women’s clothes? What an idea. This is a jess’s dress, young man—the proof of which is, that I am a jess, and I am wearing it.” Then the action moves into the wilderness. Scythia’s plants are its animals, and vice versa, blooming and breeding in alternate generations. (Reed’s planet shares its name with the legendary Scythian lamb, a plant that grew sheep as its fruit.) When John and Sudharma explore the desert beyond the town, they get trapped in a canyon, where John has to fight a carnivorous “snake-tree” while wounded, with only his wits and a knife.

If the novel concerned only these elements—the clash of cultures in a small town, the thrill of the landscape beyond it—readers would still turn the last page with a fruitful, even nourishing, sense of disorientation. But Reed wrote a more ambitious novel than that. It turns out that the Scythian colonists sent for Sudharma, specifically, because he knows how to engage, and translate for, aliens. Besides carnivorous snake-trees, majestic candlehawks, and various glittering quasi-insects, the Scythian biome includes a species called the basket-men, who look like a cross between great apes and praying mantises. Their name comes from the baskets they weave, which let them carry food. Are they a threat to the colony? Possible allies? Do they have language? It’s Sudharma’s job to find out. Humans on Scythia risk extinction if they get the answer wrong, since the basket-men could team up with killer plants to wreck all their buildings and farms.

More perilous still, Earth is watching. Back home, humans have bonded with aiyi, a species of near-omnipotent artificial intelligence that operates according to its own moral code. The aiyi have sent an emissary to Scythia, who will determine whether the colonists deserve to survive. As the novel advances, we learn what the basket-men want, and how to consider minds so unlike our own. We watch Sudharma acquire the Scythian language, whose semantics recall those of Australian Aboriginals. And we discover how Scythia’s basket-men—who appear to lack anything like writing—store information in biochemical form.

In other words, Reed hasn’t just written a novel about social change and family life, queerness and faith. She’s embedded those ideas into a larger arc about settler-colonial systems, about the centuries that gave us Hernán Cortés, Bartolomé de las Casas, the American Revolution, Andrew Jackson, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Treaty of Waitangi. She’s writing about Hawaii and Fiji and Nunavut—and about New England, where I live.

How to estrange—to imagine differently—our presence in such places? As in “The Fortunate Fall,” Reed is thinking about cosmic justice, which does not exist, and about small-scale interpersonal justice, which can exist, and about the idea of original sin. From one point of view, the original sin of modernity, and of Scythia, is simply colonization: the impulse to find a supposedly new world and then “spread anywhere we want.” We—Westerners, humans, Ischnurans, and so on—shouldn’t be here. But now we are. Given the errors made by our civilization’s founders, how should we choose to live? It’s the same question—“reason is also choice”—that John Milton wrestled with in “Paradise Lost,” an epic that, like Reed, he wrote “after long choosing and beginning late.” “Paradise Lost,” too, describes life in a new land, whose humans (Adam and Eve) learn how to care for their biome, how to have sex, and whom to trust, before fighting a snake in a tree.

Milton supported the right to divorce, but also supported monogamy: he hoped we would reason our way to his own moral code, and to the worship of his one God. “What We Are Seeking” offers other answers. From Reed’s perspective, the original sin of modern society consists not just in colonialism (which we cannot fully undo) but in attempts to control who gets to love and reproduce, and how John, for example, eventually gains access to aiyi technology: Should he, Iren, and others use it to make their bodies feel different, and whole? All the humans in Scythia—once they learn to understand the basket-men—have to talk about the futures they want, for themselves and for their children, and about what to do when they must live as people on Earth once lived (a bit like Adam and Eve leaving Eden). Parents, the novel says, do not own their kids: no more than any one God owns us, and no more than Scythians own the snake-trees.

That proposition might seem obvious to some of us, but it’s a far cry from settled law and practice. Seeking good models, or crying out in distress, we might want to read about utopias or dystopias. But we can probably learn more—we might even find more hope—on worlds such as Reed’s Scythia, where thoughtful, flawed characters make choices with limited options. Each figure on Scythia has to consider how strange he or she or they look, how alien their mentality seems, to others. We might see our own lives, our own choices, in none of them, or in them all. ♦