Toni Anzetti almost bites off more than she can chew with Typhon's Children, which is full of classic SF themes like lost colonies, alien consciousness, and the changing nature of humanity. She's given a lot of thought to them though, and the result is an ambitious and exciting first novel.
Typhon is a water world, a warm ocean with scattered volcanic islands. It looks like a tropical paradise, but for the remnants of its stranded human population, it has turned into hell.
Every life form seems to be dangerous. A volcanic eruption has destroyed the colonists' first settlement and most of their equipment. Many of the original colonists are dead, and children born on Typhon suffer massive mutations. Most die, but those that survive are deaf, or legless or otherwise physically challenged. Even worse, nobody can figure out why.
Needless to say, the colonists are nearly at the end of their rope. Some are in despair, convinced they're already doomed. Others are desperate, planning forced breeding programs in a last bid to rebuild a healthy population.
Only one colonist -- a marine biologist and social misfit named Per Langstaff -- is still determined to learn how to survive on Typhon. Langstaff is the traditional scientist hero, a competent man convinced that knowledge is the key to survival. A true naturalist, he doesn't let the colony's lack of technology interfere with his quest for understanding.
Langstaff is also a careful observer, and author Anzetti gets creative with his experiments. I particularly liked his method of measuring the strength of tidal swells with mollusks, testing the amount of force it takes to pry different species from the rocks. After cultivating a mollusk population on rocks likely to experience storm surges, he can measure the waves simply by seeing which ones get uprooted.
Of course, all this competence would get very annoying without some imperfections. Anzetti avoids this trap by cursing her protagonist with an antisocial nature, a dangerous flaw in the colonists' tiny society.
By alienating Langstaff in this way, Anzetti is also able to focus the story on his relationship with a second-generation colonist named Dilani, who is deaf, and as nearly isolated as Langstaff. Their common bond proves crucial to the plot when an alien consciousness, the third of the book's major characters, comes into the story.
Subtle, a native water-dweller, is a scholar like Langstaff, and he's searching for intelligent life in the dry world beyond the ocean surface. Anzetti has created a triumph of alien characterization in him -- we understand how he thinks, but seeing the world through his perspective creates a mystery about what he is and the author parcels out the clues with exquisite care.
As a result, by the time we've discovered how Subtle fits into the larger mysteries of Typhon, we're already looking forward to confirming our guesses about Typhon and Subtle's people. This technique makes the moment of revelation when Langstaff, Dilani and Subtle finally come face-to-face all the more exciting.
(Indeed, Subtle's joy at meeting the "aliens" and figuring out they want to communicate is infectious -- I found a big smile spreading over my face, which is a good measure of how much I identified with him.)
There's a similar level of care and detail throughout the book. Anzetti has given a lot of thought to the ecology of Typhon and the society of its colonists, including the history of humanity since space travel began and the nature of the colonists' homeworld.
It's all important to the story, but like the nature of the aptly-named Subtle, we're allowed to draw our own conclusions from scattered clues. That's a tough trick for a new writer to master.
Typhon's Children isn't perfect. Anzetti's action scenes are a little confused, and while she's already mastered the art of presenting a new setting, she hasn't quite learned how to introduce us to characters without simply dumping information.
Overall, this is an impressive first novel, one that suggests that Toni Anzetti is well on her way to becoming a major writer in science fiction.
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