#and then NE introduces the idea that if left uncontained and uncontrolled it will fuck you (fledgling society) up equivalent to a plague

[anonforlackofabettername]

I binged all of Network Effect yesterday and I’m still thinking about how Martha Wells slowly built up alien remnants as a big fucking deal only to finally show us just why they’re a big fucking deal.

ASR introduces the idea of what alien remnants are and the fact that staying away from them is the one thing that everyone in the Corporation Rim can agree upon. AC brings up the importance of being able to identify “strange synthetics” with the stolen data. RP takes place on GrayCris’s secret remnants mining installation/fake failed terraforming facility. ES probably has the least to do with alien remnants beyond to the ongoing crime leading to GrayCris’s downfall being tied to their illegal mining operations and subsequent bad choices.

Alien remnants are a constant topic of interest in the story but it’s always been through the lens of GrayCris’s illegal exploitation. They’re a thing to be found, filtered out, studied, and like all resources in the CR, exploited (if you can get away with it). With what we know about the CR’s capitalist hellscape where corporations have more rights than individual people, the fact that this specific activity is illegal enough that they can’t bribe their way out of it is extremely damning. NE takes this ongoing detail and then takes it out of the context of GrayCris and the CR and puts it in context with colonization and then suddenly it’s not a resource to be exploited but something doing the exploitation. The explanation of why the whole CR is on the same page about alien remnants has always felt a little lacking and NE answers it by introducing and enforcing the idea that unknown remnants are a clear and present danger not to the corporation as a whole but to the individuals that make up the corporations.

Alien remnant contamination as an idea is introduced early on in the story and then slowly and surely built upon as the characters go from speculating about possible contamination to MB waking up from a systems failure next to the remnant and the source of the contamination. It’s masterfully done horror and excellent worldbuilding. I don’t want to go deep into spoilers but the book takes a concept that has been stated constantly to be bad in general, and explains in detail why this is bad for our characters specific.