Kraken of Eden by George Moakley

 Kraken of Eden

by George Moakley

George Moakley is an American writer. He started out studying biology with dreams of ecosystem modeling. However, driven by a powerful need to eat, he took a data entry position with a precious metals company. This was the start of a 40-year career in the tech industry but he never let go of his passion for biology and ecology. He kept that up through hiking and scuba diving but that has led him to first-hand witness how fragile our ecosystem is and he remains very concerned about the dangers we all face from climate change, overfishing, and invasive species. He currently lives in Arizona with his wife and visits his children and grandchildren regularly. Which, again is another writer in this overheated, sun crushed land. Kraken of Eden is his first novel so let’s take a look at it shall we?

It is the 23rd century and good news! Humanity has made it, we are an interstellar species spread out across dozens of star systems despite a lack of Faster Than Light travel. Humans travel by relativistic ships, accelerating to near-light speed and then decelerating on approach. What this means is that a single one-way trip might take 15 years but humanity’s life span has been extended to almost 200 years and if you’re on the ship you’ll only experience about 2 to 3 years. So the impact on you isn’t all that bad. Also communication lag isn’t nearly that bad so you can stay in touch through messages with friends and family members, not while you’re underway though. Plenty of people feel this is an acceptable trade-off to see new worlds and push the frontier, however. (I’d be down, but I doubt many people are driven by the colonial spirit so much as the other stuff you’re about to talk about. Historical colonization is driven by necessity and political/economic incentive and less by folks who just want to touch boots on new soil.)

The bad news, we may have made it but only after our best attempt to wipe ourselves and as much of the ecosystem as possible. Earth’s population hit 10 billion in the late 21st century and was rocked by a pandemic so bad that it outright killed a billion people. Now for those of you shrugging, I want you to realize that meant 1 out of 10 people died, and if recent experience has taught us that also meant many more suffered long-term issues. (A ten percent fatality rate would be an inconceivable catastrophe in modern times, we’re not built socially to absorb that kind of hit and utterly psychologically unprepared.) There were also mass extinctions, environmental disasters, and more. As a result the governments of Earth finally buried the hatchet and adopted a number of policies. Fast forward 200 years later and Earth’s population is 5 billion and under a draconian set of family planning, industrial, and other laws designed to prevent any further strain on the environment.

Part of the solution was also mass exporting people to other planets, first places like the Moon and Mars and when they realized this was leading to nationalist tensions between the 3 major settled worlds, they embraced a program of homogenization. This means convincing people to move around until there’s a high mixture of various languages, ethnic, and other groups in equal measure on all settlements. In the story, this is mostly done by carrots. If you agree to move to a colony that needs more people and has an imbalance of human groups, you get things like free education, stipends, etc but part of me has dark suspicions about how this was done in the past but it’s not part of the story.

Now for the most part humanity lives in orbital settlements and domed cities. (This is why other incentives beyond the novelty of new places needs to drive colonization. Yay, you’re the first colonists on the moon. It’s very exciting for a minute. Then you go about your life living every day in an unchanging external environment- no changing of the seasons, no tides of the sea, etc. We’re wired to a lot of things on Earth that we evolved to respond to that simply wouldn’t be present on a colony, and the excitement of new landscape would wear off pretty quickly in the face of the drudgery of survival. {In the colonies you have a lot fewer restrictions on family size and behavior, as well as those education and stipend benefits I mentioned.  Also, the movement tends to be from larger colonies to smaller growing colonies where there are more economic opportunities so those incentives exist}) Except for Earth, every world has either been a dead world or a very simple ecology made up of single-celled organisms that are biochemically incompatible with us. Until Eden is discovered. A lush green and blue world with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Deep Space Service Captain Elke Lubandi has been offered the job of a lifetime, to take a ship with 1000 colonists and the materials to build an orbital colony and be the leader of the first mass study of an alien ecosystem with complex multicellular life. She of course accepts, the poor woman.

Now right away there is tension and conflict between factions of colonists. Some want to keep Eden as removed from human interference as possible while slowly and carefully studying it. Opposing them are those who want to use the resources of Eden to fuel a new chapter of human existence among the stars. Others see the lifeforms of Eden themselves as just commodities to be used for their own wealth and prestige. As these groups form up their battle lines, Captain and then Governor Lubandi has to balance them and find what’s best for the planet and the colony. (It’s a serious debate. I tend to fall on the side that says if nobody else has a prior claim on the resources and the ecology is non-sentient, then we can freely claim it and make use of it. But I’ve seen arguments about the ‘strange imperialism of humans who think we have the right to just claim any rock in space as our own’, and that argument will only become sharper as we actually gain the capacity to fundamentally alter other places as we have Earth. {I have to admit I find that argument bizarre, who are we being imperialist to here?  If we settle Mars, or other uninhabited planets, whose rights are being infringed? Honestly, I find the whole line suspicious and vaguely just anti-human.  That said I would be twitchy about even poking my head into a star system with a sapient race, especially a tool using one})

Now what I do like is that the people who want to develop Eden aren’t presented as Captain Planet villains. They have no desire to strip mine Eden or cause another wave of mass extinctions and near ecological collapse. However, Eden is rich in heavy elements and in their view, even careful and slow mining will produce enough of these elements to fuel humanity’s expansion for centuries. (The rub here being that while Generation Zero may have this mindset, generation three or four might be all about the Benjamins. Which is why strong regulatory measures and ethos need to be baked in. {Kinda outside the scope of the story}) Meanwhile, the people who want to use the lifeforms of Eden are looking at the idea of capturing them for zoological displays, not hunting them down like Elmer Fudd. While I’m sympathetic to the scientists who are worried about repeating past sins, I do like the fact that the people they’re arguing with have good points and aren’t screaming to tear the planet apart. However, these disagreements quickly take a back seat.

Because something is waiting for humanity on Eden, a predator with a life cycle that will stress and test the colonists to their limit while subverting every precaution and procedure they come up with. The Kraken, now I won’t get too much into its rather inventive and complex life cycle here. Instead, I’ll ask you to watch the video of me discussing this with 2 actual biologists discussing the life cycle. I’m just going to say that the Kraken is a great opposing force to our group of security and administrative officers. It’s ruthless, merciless, intelligent, and terrifying in its ravenous hunger to devour everyone and everything it can.

The book plays a lot like a horror story complete with unsettling chapters from the viewpoint of the monster. Although Mr. Moakley takes pains to keep the Kraken from becoming just a pure movie monster by giving it an understandable biology that I, a layman, found more or less believable. Although you’ll want to see the companion video to this work for the opinions of actual biologists.  Its goals and motivations are also believable and understandable if frightening and disturbing. It seeks to feed so that it can mate and create more Krakens, which is the driving goal of most life forms, in a way the Kraken isn’t any more evil than your average lion. Unfortunately in this story, the role of the gazelle is being played by the livestock and human beings trapped on the orbital colony with the Krakens.

For me though the real horror was the fact that the Kraken sought to keep its victims alive as long as possible and flat-out enjoyed causing as much pain and suffering as possible while eating them alive. While I’m not sure Mr. Moakley meant for me to view them as a sapient lifeform, they are clearly intelligent as the Krakens realize we suffer pain and they then start making plans to enhance the pain they cause us. Doing things like eating children in front of their parents before eating the parents. In this, I find it a lot more evil than your average lion, who is rather unaware of the pain and suffering of its prey and takes no joy in causing fear. The lion is just here to eat to keep living. The Kraken is here to savor every moment of fear and suffering it can wring from you while eating you slowly.

Opposing it are scientists, security people, and the administrators of the colony who while often on the back foot and sometimes make the wrong decision are never acting in a way that makes you think they’re idiots. For example, they have everyone wearing environment suits on Eden as a safety precaution. They have people stay in groups and try to keep people out of the way. They don’t keep secrets from the population to “avoid a panic” but instead give out information so people can take reasonable precautions. They work quickly and efficiently to save as many people as they can but they’re up against an unknown factor that has the initiative.

If I had any complaints it would be that the conflicts between the human characters are mostly downplayed, although there is one conflict that quickly explodes. Also, we don’t get to explore any of the human characters and while we get information about them, I don’t end up feeling like I know them. The dialogue is just a little too professional and polished for it to feel like real conversations to me and it might be that there are too many officers taking up character space for me to develop an emotional connection to any specific character. I also wish that Mr. Moakley had spent more time on the character's emotional state as I think those states weren’t developed on screen as much as I would like.

That doesn’t prevent Mr. Moakley from effectively communicating the horror of the situation and creating a story that really drew me in and was hard to put down. This book was about 360 pages and I burnt through it in two days because it was that damn interesting to read. So I would say even if you’re not normally a science fiction fan, if you’re a horror fan you might want to give this book a shot because Mr. Moakley does a fine job of drawing from the horror genre for elements of this story.

We have body horror, the terror of being hunted, and the fear of the unknown all carefully and lovingly woven through this plot. That said we also have the use of science as a way of pushing back against that fear of the unknown. The Kraken starts this book as a complete mystery but it’s the scientists of the colony who decode its secrets and find ways to beat it. We also have a theme of people coming together in an emergency to overcome terror. So while this is a horror story, it’s a story that has an optimistic view of human nature and science and technology which I also really enjoy as I feel a lot of the horror stories I’ve read take the position that humanity is vile and monstrous and deserves what it gets.

So while there is a weakness in my opinion when it comes to the human characters here, it is counterbalanced by the plot and sheer skill with which the Kraken and the story itself is presented. The fact that no one has to be an utter idiot for this story to work removes one of my biggest complaints about this. The story was very well thought out and we are shown how these people are skilled professionals who didn’t do anything stupid but because they were walking into the unknown ended up paying a price for it anyway.

I wouldn’t say I personally love it as my love of horror is a rather limited one but I cannot deny this is incredibly well done and worth reading. I recommend it to anyone who likes hard science fiction, horror, or just flat-out weird biology. Kraken of Eden by George Moakley gets an A- from me and I hope you all try it out.

Blue text is your editor Josh Simpson Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders View the companion video here

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