This is a very earnest book which asks many questions on the top of everyone’s mind about humanity’s future: how will climate change shape our planet? What place will artificial intelligence play in our society? How will the nature of work change with advancing technology? I found some of the answers to these questions lacking, and other seasoned, hard science fiction readers might feel the same about the book's world building. If you can look past these elements, there’s still enough intrigue in the rest of the story to pull you in. While the characters might initially be sketched in a loose, cliche manner, with time they develop surprising depth. In particular, the lead Grace offers a unique perspective in how she feels most understood by robots instead of other humans. However, readers should go in expecting the story to take a while to come together.

I've been really into sci-fi thrillers lately and this was a good one. Great writing that built the tension and kept me turning the pages.

In this book, we follow a non-conscripted psychologist, Dr. Park, working and living among the unwelcoming crew of the Deucalion, a spaceship headed to the to-be-colonized planet of Eos. We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen is rich with innovative storytelling and universe-creating that made this book very unique in ways I was expecting, but also in ways I was not. Continue reading down below to get my full take on this book!

Dr. Park is the second psychologist on what starts as a pre-colonizing sweep of the planet Eos to determine its viability to support human life. All the humans aboard are both conscripted and non-conscripted employees of the Interstellar Frontier (ISF) creating an interesting mix of motivations and ethics for the crew. As a reader, you get such a unique experience of learning about the humans and androids aboard the Deucalion based on Park’s role as a psychologist who has her degree in phenotypology, allowing her to analyze the crew members based on body language and facial expressions. As an expert on the human mind and mannerisms, the reader gets insight about the other crew members that is particular to only our narrator and her superior, Dr. Keller.

In addition to this unique position of the narrator as a psychologist, within We Have Always Been Here there is also clear tension between the humans and androids on the ship, with Park stuck in the middle. This helps to lend the book to a constant feeling of unease. Who should you feel comfortable with as an audience member? Do we trust the androids? Or should we trust the Humans? This tension is palpable all throughout the book up to the end and it is a testament to Lena Nguyen’s writing.

World Building & Technology
Much of the book was spent creating the universe in which Earth is, for the most part, unlivable and humans have been living in space for years on different planets in order to survive. With this comes clear advances in technology, such as androids, biodomes, and optical inlays. Nguyen does an awesome job of incorporating these new technologies and creating this alternative space-based future, while not being heavy-handed about it. We Have Always Been Here creates this new universe seamlessly for the reader.
Nguyen’s story is so many things at once that it feels like I would be doing an injustice by trying to label or categorize it.

Overall,
Throughout the book, the storyline does jump in space and time, but it also jumps in its narrative structure, which gives a dynamic point of view. It was pretty interesting reading this book knowing it is a thriller while the conflict was not immediately clear. I was spending a lot of time waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is not necessarily a bad thing. We Have Always Been Here certainly had some peaks and valleys and at times the plot seemed to drag or be very slow to rise, but in the end, it built up a lot of anticipation and created so many questions that needed to be answered (and for the most part were).

I don't really have much good to say about this book. I haven't given it a 1 star because I don't feel comfortable doing it, but it wasn't far off. The characters were stupid, the plotline was even more so, and some of the choices in inner monologue/explanation Nguyen makes just defy reason.

An absolutely unputdownable sci-fi thriller about a psychologist on a spaceship. When the crew begins to succumb to strange symptoms and even the ship's androids start malfunctioning, everything Dr. Park thought she knew about their mission is called into question. And nothing--not the crew, not the mission, and not the planet itself--is what it seems.

Despite the intriguing premise, this book did not hold my attention long enough to continue further. I may pick it up again in the future but I found the first several chapters to be lacking. Thank you Net Galley for providing me with an ARC of this book.

This blew me away. Definitely one my top books of 2021! Loved the spooky spaceship atmosphere and AI ethics. Was a bit slow-moving in some parts, but I didn't mind, as the writing was lovely and had me captivated from start to finish.

Not my favourite, the main for me was not relatable and for me I just couldn't get into the book. I ended up not finishing it as I just wasn't fully interested in the book

In this debut science fiction novel by Lena Nguyen, life on Earth is impossible and homes must be found on distant planets. As with many space exploration narratives, the Deucalion is operated by humans and androids who are tasked with evaluating a new planet for habitation.

The main character, psychologist Grace Park, has been employed by the Interstellar Frontier to use her specialized skill in phenotypology, interpreting the emotional states of patients through their facial tics and body language, to report on the mental state of the other 12 crew members. Somewhat of a spy. Strangely, when the ship lands on Eos, the corporation has strictly forbidden her to leave and view the new world.

Perhaps that is all right. Park has always preferred to interact with androids, not people. The evolution of this mind-set is made clear in flashbacks to her life on Earth, though her choice to be a psychologist for humans is decidedly odd. She hasn't impressed any of the crew with her clinical analyses of their stressors, either.

As a result, she is shunned by a suspicious, antagonistic crew. In this created future, life on the few biodomes on Earth is staggeringly expensive; most people work for the ISF as conscripts, essentially endentured servants to the corporation. Often their families are subtle hostages, able to live on Earth while the conscript ventures into space. The mix of conscripted and non-conscripted (Park is one) crew could manifest as a comment on humans who enslave other humans, but that theme doesn't emerge.

Confined to the ship by a radiation storm, things get even more tense and claustrophobic for everyone. There are no “windows” on the ship, aside from the bridge where Park is forbidden to go. Park is altogether isolated, and the mystery is why. What's out there on Eos, has it been brought into the Deucalion, why are the androids seeming to conspire against the humans, why are the ship's corridors changing? The shifting realities converge in the conclusion when Park learns who/what it is that has always been here.

Dr. Grace Park has always gotten along better with androids than with her fellow humans. Now the psychologist for an expedition exploring planet Eos for colonization potential, she and the crew are trapped on the ship by a radiation storm ravaging the surface. As the crew – both human and android alike – begin to behave strangely, Grace must unravel the hidden purpose behind their mission discover the root of their affliction.

This had a great sense of claustrophobia and impending doom, as Grace is trapped on a ship with something strange happening and not enough information. I also enjoyed the interspersed chapters from an unknown, previous expedition to the planet. And the questions of the line between human and android were interesting.

That was awesome! It has taken me a while to pick it, not sure why, but I'm so glad I read it now! I love the writing a lot and the story was very engaging. A very good read that I would recommend!

I received a free e-ARC from the author/publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[This review will be posted on my blog on 23 July 2021]

(Actual rating 4.5 stars)

We Have Always Been Here follows Dr. Grace Park, one of two psychologists aboard the vessel Deucalion, along with eleven other crew members. Their mission is to evaluate a previously unknown planet, Eos, for colonisation; while Park's mission is to evaluate the crew and report back to the Interstellar Frontier (ISF), the company that has funded the mission. But as soon as they land, things begin to go terribly wrong. People begin to have terrifying nightmares, and the androids start acting strangely. Park begins to suspect that information is being kept from her, and she doesn't know who she can trust.

I really enjoyed Park as a protagonist. If she had been any different, I don't think the story would have worked as well as it did. Park has always found humans kind of bewildering, and has always gravitated more toward the company of androids. Her childhood certainly played a large part, but I felt as if Park read as neuroatypical. Although I've seen synopses that say she is misanthropic, I don't really believe she dislikes humans, so much as she doesn't understand them. She ends up choosing to study phenotypology, wherein a psychologist analyses and interprets the emotional states of their patients through their facial tics, body language, and topography. She is really more of an observer than a traditional clinical psychologist, so she struggles when she is suddenly thrust into that role when her colleague, Dr. Keller, is suddenly given a special secret assignment. This difficulty is compounded because the rest of the crew distrusts her because of both her affinity for androids, and because they think she is a spy for the ISF.

From the outset it is clear that things are not as they appear. There are so many layers to this story, that I could not even begin to guess what was happening most of the time. There are mysteries in mysteries. What is happening to the crew? Why are the androids behaving strangely? Why isn't she allowed to know anything about the planet they've landed on? Who can she trust? Is Park losing her mind? Why did the ISF choose this particular crew and this particular ship, which is unlike any other colonisation mission before? The whole atmosphere is tense and creepy, and the ship is particularly claustrophobic as well. I felt unnerved most of the time. What we have is a locked room mystery, crossed with a psychological thriller, and set in a dystopic science fiction world.

The narration is third person limited, and follows Park for the most part (though there are some mysterious interludes with letters and transcripts of video). We jump back and forth between the present, and moments in Park's childhood, teen years, and to the Antarctic training facility before the mission launch. I really enjoyed these chapters, because we got to see more of the world these characters inhabit.

The world is complex and fascinating. Humans have spread out across the solar system, and into the next, especially in the wake of the Comeback, a planet wide plant growth explosion, Human induced climate change has rendered most of the planet uninhabitable, and only a few biodomes remain, which are heavily regulated, and expensive to live in. Most people have had to go off-planet, which is also prohibitively expensive. As a result, people are conscripted to the ISF, who pay for their transportation and housing, effectively turning them into indentured labourers. Part of the tension between crew members is caused by their status as conscripted or not. This is also a world in which androids have become more and more complex, and appear more human, which makes people uncomfortable, and renders their jobs obsolete. And you can imagine how angry and unnerved that makes most people.

I won't be saying much about the plot because it would spoil the book. It's best to go in with only the basics. I'll just say this: I was satisfied that all the mysteries were wrapped up, and I thought the pacing was good throughout. There are little lulls here and there, but overall I think it kept it's momentum.

I admit that I don't read very much in the way of science fiction, so I don't really have comparisons. I think people who enjoy psychological thrillers or sci-fi with a twist might enjoy this book.

Park is a psychologist on a survey ship to a future colony planet. But all is not well: the crew hates her, and when their ship reaches its destination, people start acting very, very weird. With her employers out of reach, Park has to find out who, if anyone, she can trust—and make sure she isn't losing her mind, too.

In the middle of a pandemic and with strict lockdowns fresh in my memory, the isolation and claustrophobia aboard the Deucalion was deeply resonant. Park’s paranoia is intense and at times overwhelming; it was extremely well done, enough that at times I found it triggering as a person with social anxiety. Yet Nguyen also balanced Park’s containment and fear on the spaceship with layered, though still eerie, worldbuilding on a dystopic Earth. The depth of the android characters and of the scientific concepts on Eos gave me some breathing room between the paranoid thought spirals and life-threatening situations. Some of my favourite scientific and philosophical theories about consciousness came into play in We Have Always Been here, and I loved seeing them explored. If you’re into trippy scifi like this, you’ll probably be familiar with the concepts, but Nguyen framed them in really eye-opening, brain-stretching ways that defied my expectations.

The androids in particular are a major strength in this book. They were so convincingly non-human. The discussion around AI sapience is done best when writers and thinkers do away with the “they’re just like us” mentality, yet not everyone can do that without imagining a situation of inherent inferiority. Androids in We Have Always Been Here retained that uncanny otherness that makes them so interesting (and believable), yet Nguyen made it painfully clear in interaction after interaction that their biggest obstacle to intelligence, self-determination, and self-realization were the not their differences from humans, but instead the man-made fetters they had been intentionally designed with.

This was a page-turner that dug deep into its core ideas and delivered a satisfying blend of thrill and food for thought. I'll be watching Lena Nguyen's future work for sure.

I featured this book in a round up on my blog, sent links to facebook & twitter, and created an IG story. The details will be shared with the publisher in the next round of this review process.

Perhaps a bit too long at times but overall really strange and cool—I cared less about the actual main story and so much about Park's flashbacks and her love for/understanding of androids.

“This psychological thriller from a debut author follows one doctor who must discover the source of her crew’s madness.... or risk succumbing to it herself.”

This one started out a little slow for me and I found that I couldn’t gain much reading momentum with the perspective changing from present to past. Typically that format encourages me to read faster, but I had a time engaging with the main character, Grace Park, when she spoke on her past.

After the first 150 pages or so this book really picked up and I could not put it down! We Have Always Been Here is packed with deception, betrayal, the morality and dangers of artificial intelligence, and so much more.

Without giving too much away (as there a lot of twists I don’t want to spoil) my favorite quote from this book is:
“She was bewildered, and helpless, and tired, and sad. ‘Am I losing my mind?’
‘No.’ Jimex said. ‘You’re giving it to us.’”

This book was absolutely terrifying at parts, in the way only a sci-fi novel that feels a little too real can be. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves themes involving Scifi, robots, space travel, planetary colonization, thrillers, and mysteries!

Weird shit is happening on the Deucalion, and Dr Park cannot figure out what the hell is going on. It started ever since she and her survey crew landed on a previously unexplored planet in the middle of nowhere—crew complaining of weird dreams, strange shifts in the ship’s structure, members getting sick and being put in cryo sleep, the androids acting…differently. Something is up, but no one is talking. Park was hired on last-minute as the back-up psychologist, and as a person more comfortable with robots than people, she’s feeling pretty over her head when her supervisor goes on an all-important mission and disappears. Leaving Park to figure out whatever the fuck is happening before the crew mutinies.

People inexplicably ran out into the cold, stripping their clothes off. Clawing at invisible enemies. Dying with their eyes and tongues missing.

Well, this week has been something of a theme for reviews: I started off with robots and wilderness and humanity, then transitioned to wilderness and plants and magic, and now we are back with robots and humanity and the wilderness of reality, with introversion spread throughout like a balm. So I offer this as a reverse pairing, like a wine-tasting of adult science fiction: a shot of We Have Always Been Here, with its sharp edges and psychological mystery and bleakness, followed up with a glass of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, a red wine concoction that goes down smooth and hits you with the bitterness of the tannins and truth and sends you into the sleep of a warm hug and thoughtfullness.

She was more like a glacier, alone and adrift on a warming sea. Cold, remote. But shrinking rapidly under the circumstances.

Park read like someone who was autistic—human emotions are alien and odd, despite being her primary point of study. She was someone who knew herself and was fine while alone but adrift and bewildered when surrounded by people—the unfathomable social cues and strangeness, the oddity of humanity’s quirks and rituals. So when shit goes south and people are acting weird, she’s even more at a loss, particularly when she’s the expert who is supposed to be able to fix it (when she’s not—her study is basically as a human emotion monitor: monitor and analyze, not implement and correct).

She was not an easy character, but was someone I understood intimately.

And this was not an easy book, being more psychological thriller with the trappings of a science fiction book. I’m not going to say much more than that, as I think this is a book best experienced with as little information as possible, just like Park (fyi, that first quote is not really a spoiler and conveys the sense of dread and weirdness of exploring an alien world with a small, isolated crew where help is literally years away).

This is very much the story of someone who grew up relating more to androids than people, because just like her, the androids were monitoring and mimicking humanity in order to blend in (or not). And then she finds herself having to work more with people and trust them in a situation where no one and nothing is as it seems due to the secrets imposed by the company she is hired to work for (twists and turns of indentured servitude versus freelancers, and who is trusted and who is not comes heavily into play here, and help explain why Park knows literally nothing a year into this expedition).

Anywho, I really enjoyed it, although enjoy is not quite the right word.

For some reason, I felt deeply uncomfortable reading this. Feelings long suppressed oozed out of my being, unease flittered along my spine, and the ending hit me like a semi-truck—sudden and unsatisfying and right all at the same time. This is a strange collection of emotions, and probably a weird ending paragraph, but it’s hard to explain the funk this book sent me into. The best I can explain the mood I had during and after reading this was how I felt after reading The Bell Jar, and the two books are absolutely nothing alike.

This book explores the concept of being alien, in as many sense of the word as it can find. It dives into isolation and plunges into the core of humanity and sentience. And I feel that at its core, it’s meant to unsettle something deep inside us, despite its relatively simple plot.

Definitely a book to check out.

I received an ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

An interesting science-fiction twist on the locked room mystery, with the substitution of a spacecraft for the room. The protagonist is psychologist Dr. Grace Park, assigned to the Deucalion, a survey ship that has landed on a newly discovered icy planet named Eos. The mission is supposedly to scout out the planet for future colonization, but the crew compliment does not make sense--nor does the high percentage of androids. Crew conflicts intensify when a radiation storm keeps them onboard; then the communications systems go down. When a mysterious illness afflicts crew members with bizarre dreams and hallucination, more and more of them are placed in stasis, placing the success of the mission in jeopardy.

The narrative is interspersed with two flashbacks. One is a series of transcriptions of video logs from a spaceship called Wyvern. They were provided on the sly by the sister of one of the ship's officers, and at first their significance to the present-day story is not obvious. The other is the story of Park's childhood in New Diego, a biodome on an Earth that has been transformed by the Comeback (an event in which plant life overtook most of the surface of the planet). A central part of her life there was her relationship with the android Glenn, who served as her friend and protector. The Comeback doesn't figure into the present story directly, but it explains why an organization called the Interstellar Frontier (ISF) has assumed a central role in space colonization.

Mysterious events on the ship include changes in the androids, who are apparently becoming increasingly self-aware. Park's long-term empathy with androids make her role more and more significant, especially after she learns the real purpose of the mission--and becomes part of the resistance to an attempted mutiny. The key to the climax is almost mystical, involving a physical anomaly on the planet and its effect on consciousness itself. The conclusion is satisfying, but I can't say the narrative path is. The flashbacks take a long time to meaningfully contribute to the storytelling: it was hard to understand why they were there until near the end, which made them feel like a distraction. The novel would have benefitted from more brevity, too, whether from fewer flashbacks or faster advancement of the main story.

Thanks to NetGalley for the prepublication ARC.

A very different story, but well worth the time.

The plot is not easy to see. Motives are murky. AI consciousness, rebellion and murder all add to the story. The ending is non determinate but very positive.

Ce récit coche toutes les cases de ce qui pourrait être soit une bonne histoire de SF soit un pavé mortellement ennuyeux. Si vous lisez ces lignes, rassurez-vous, il s’agit de la première option.
De qui parle ce livre ? De Grace Park, psychologue profondément asociale, embarquée à bord du Deucalion, un vaisseau d’exploration devant déterminer sur la planète glacée Eos est propice à l’accueil d’une nouvelle colonie humaine. Sauf que Grace n’est pas autorisée à poser un pied à la surface de la planète.
De quoi parle ce livre ? D’un équipage de vaisseau qui perd peu à peu tous ses repères. Les humains semblent contaminés par un virus mental qui trouble leur sommeil et modifie leurs comportements. Les androïdes de bord se dérèglent et semblent se doter d’ébauches de sentiments. La source de ces ennuis est-elle à chercher sur la planète même ? Dans les entrailles du vaisseau, interdites également au Dr Park ? Ou dans son propre passé sur Terre ?
Tour à tour, ce récit de Lena Nguyen va évoquer le huis clos du Dragon sous la mer, l’angoisse des couloirs sombres et hantés d’Alien ou les interrogations sur l’empathie des machines de Blade Runner. Bien qu’humaine, sa narratrice n’a que peu de points communs avec les autres membres « naturels » de l’équipage. Élevée par des androïdes en l’absence de figure parentale sous un biodome terrien, elle ne comprend pas les colons nés hors du système solaire qui, en retour, se méfient d’elle.
Les choix narratifs de Lena Nguyen sont aussi déroutants que la situation dans laquelle est plongée sa protagoniste. Comme elle, nous découvrons l’histoire par petites touches. Les chapitres flashback s’intercalent à la narration principale et tous ne concernent pas toujours Grace ou le Deucalion. Si la fin justifie pleinement ces détours, ceux-ci entraînent parfois un problème de rythme dans la lecture. Comme dans tout bon récit de terreur psychologique, la tension monte doucement par petites touches avant le dernier tiers du livre où toutes les trames se rejoignent pour une conclusion pas aussi convenue et prévisible qu’on pouvait le craindre. À lire et une plume à suivre…