Wilderness Planets and the Human Frontier

Kathy Tyers, Shivering World

Dr. Graysha Brady-Phillips never intended to become a frontier scientist, but she needed the money. She needed something else the colonists on planet Goddard, orbiting Epsilon Eridani, might offer: their renegade geneticists might have a cure for her incurable chronic illness. But to achieve that cure, she must earn the colonists’ trust, no mean feat when your mother actively prosecutes geneticists. And when your planet may be terminally cooling.

Novelist Kathy Tyers, like her protagonist, trained as a microbiologist, then rediscovered herself as a schoolteacher. This novel brings these threads together: Graysha works as a soils specialist, but gets her greatest joy from teaching colonist technicians to become scientists themselves. And when her frontier job assignment becomes a murder mystery, she investigates the crime using the best tool available to her: science and hard facts.

Planet Goddard is an ice ball on the fringes of human exploration. There’s no hyperspace in Graysha’s world; travel between planets requires a long, slow, Oregon Trail-like slog. This means everything is literally life-or-death, and some attempts at terraforming worlds have resulted in tragedy. This reality is compounded, in this setting, because the terraforming agency is a for-profit corporation, and if frontier worlds can’t make bank, they aren’t worth working.

Brady-Phillips, however, believes human life worth living. That includes her own. Raised in her mother’s imposing shadow, Graysha wants a quiet life, teaching children and eventually having her own. Her genetic death sentence only compounds her problems. But a handsome colonial administrator with high ambitions reawakens her big-picture passions, especially when she discovers he possesses a spiritual confidence long missing from her life.

Kathy Tyers

Graysha’s mother runs the powerful Eugenics Board. Unlike past eugenicists, this board wants to prevent tampering with human genetics; a rogue sect of genetically engineered humans, in this world’s past, attempted to hijack human evolution; the Eugenics Board, backed by a powerful state church, wants to prevent that ever happening again. But that means they cannot countenance any human genetic research, even when a humble schoolteacher faces a terminal condition.

If this seems like many, confounding threads, I won’t disagree. Tyers offers a massively complicated plot, so intricate I haven’t even introduced every thread. She introduces a world where advancing technology has altered everything it touches. Though her story foregrounds a scientist, working in her laboratory, Tyers displays character conflicts and an complex community, battles of religion and faith, and even pop culture’s corrupting influences. The complexity is stunning.

Frontier mythology often looms large in science fiction: sometimes blatantly, as with Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds, but more often covertly. But despite the promise of wild worlds untamed by human hands, it frequently rebounds onto worlds already occupied by native species or prior colonists. (Indeed, like westerns.) Tyers, however, puts focus onto a planet previously unoccupied, and the tedious labor necessary to breathe life into a lifeless rock.

Besides this, I must acknowledge Tyers’ attention to a realistically crafted chronic illness. Her heroine has a condition she know will eventually kill her, and which she’ll pass to her children, should she ever have any. She’s designed elaborate and subtle ways to keep moving when her illness burdens her beyond coping, and has found work-arounds to avoid the outside moral judgements people often heap on the suffering.

All that being said, I particularly admire Tyers’ commitment to anchoring her storytelling on science. Graysha Brady-Phillips is a serious working researcher, specializing in life far removed from terrestrial origins. What goes into taking a lifeless world and making it settleable? Besides her own background, Tyers’ acknowledgements page lists several researchers she consulted, giving this story a firm scientific milieu, avoiding the rococo science favored by many paperback authors.

Tyers first published this novel in 1991, to moderate acclaim. Following her first husband’s passing, Tyers went into semi-retirement for several years, and re-emerged by revising several of her novels, emphasizing spiritual themes previously only latent in the story. This particular novel she re-released in 2004, and again in 2018. I never read the original, but appreciate how this revision investigates spiritual themes, without overwhelming real-world science.

I like saying a novel invites a large, diverse audience. Tyers writes the intrigue, action, and romance that novel readers desire, but grounds it in real science and plausible speculation. She’s created what Tolkein called a “secondary world,” a setting so complete and consistent that audiences feel we’ve traveled there. I grew up on science fiction, but have grown jaded recently. This feels like the books I grew up reading.