From bestselling author Annalee Newitz, A Wall Is Also a Road is a thought-provoking science fiction adventure about the meaning of life and love, seen through the many eyes of an alien grad student studying a familiar backwater planet. Perfect for fans of Becky Chambers, Ryka Aoki, and Martha Wells.
Gardenpath is a graduate student in biology who desperately wants to pass their exams with the highest honor possible: a prize given to scholars who discover something truly novel in the universe. Gardenpath also happens to be an amoeba–a slime mold, to be exact–from an ancient civilization that dwells in a vast network of towers between the stars. Seeking their prize, Gardenpath heads to a remote, dangerous planet that other researchers have dismissed as dead and uninteresting. There, they are surprised to discover a complicated ecosystem unlike anything they've ever encountered–including some peculiar, multicellular animals who seem to have language and culture.
To learn more about these animals, Gardenpath changes their shape to resemble one of them. And that's how they meet a creature named Murtis, who lives in a city she calls Pompeii and works in a brothel known to locals as "the lupanar." Unfazed by a visitor who says she's from the stars, Murtis takes Gardenpath into her care, introducing her to the seaside tourist town full of immigrants and shopkeepers who are just trying to get by.
A Wall Is Also a Road is a story about what happens when the alien becomes familiar–and beloved. Gardenpath expected to finish their research, present their discovery, and take their place among the decorated scholars of the floating cities. But when they look at their wild new friend Murtis’s sensor bulb, attached to a bizarre electro-chemical control system, they begin to realize there’s more to life than academic achievement. They're not sure what it is, but they're going to use science to find out.

My Review:

I picked this up because I absolutely adored The Terraformers and especially Automatic Noodle, and was hoping, well, not necessarily for more of the same because they’re not the same as each other except for the spark of hope at the end. I was hoping for something as good and as thought provoking – and that I definitely got.

At first, this is a kind of dark academia story. Only it isn’t the usual kind of dark academia story because this isn’t fantasy. AT ALL. It’s dark academia in a science fictional setting like Malka Older’s Mossa and Pleiti series that begins with The Mimicking of Known Successes.

Gardenpath is not human. In fact, their society believes that humans – or any other multicellular species – can’t possibly be sapient the way that their own species is because multicellular species – like ours – are incapable of organizing the way their bodies work to reach sapience. AND they live in a part of the Milky Way galaxy that is scientifically proven to be barren of life.

(I never did get a picture in my head of exactly what Gardenpath’s people look like – and it doesn’t matter. It’s clear that we’d think they were as incapable of sapience as they think we are and we’d both be wrong. We’d also both be reflecting our own prejudices which is kind of the point. Actually, a lot of the point.)

But we’re able to get into the story because whether or not Gardenpath’s people or their world resemble ours at all, their academia certainly does – in all its terrible abuses as well as the joy of learning and the glory of discovery.

And in all its terrible prejudices and assumptions and hide-bound rules and petrified hierarchies. “The Memory” as it’s called by Gardenpath’s people, certainly lives up to – or perhaps that should be DOWN to – the old aphorism that “academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.”

Gardenpath and their friends are on the first rung of the ladder of what we would call “higher education”. If they complete the decades of grueling exams and survive predatory advisors, they’ll be permitted their own lab and allowed to do independent research outside the bounds of what has already been proven to be acceptable. Maybe, sorta/kinda – although it takes them years and abuses to recognize that the system is stacked even higher against them than they thought. (A situation which also resembles the mess that Ro finds themselves in in The Language of Liars.)

Which is where the other half of the story comes in. Because Gardenpath’s academic enquiry is forbidden. Forbidden in the sense that it has already been dismissed as wrong. Wrong to the point that if they prove they ARE right, they will be ejected from The Memory, their research will be destroyed and their reputation will be ruined. (If you remember Stargate, the situation is a LOT like Daniel Jackson’s in that series. The entire scientific community believed he was a crackpot because aliens couldn’t possibly have been involved with the early centuries of Earth civilization because there was no evidence that their closed minds could accept. But Jackson was right along, which the story proved in the opening movie.)

But Gardenpath is RIGHT – just like Jackson was. There is life on one of the planets in the barren area of the galaxy. Sentient life. Sapient life. US. A kind of life that has been so thoroughly proven not to exist that Gardenpath must use all of their cunning to protect their proof while releasing just enough to keep going. Unfortunately also just enough to allow one of the most powerful and predatory leaders of their academic community to weaponize it.

Unless Gardenpath and their friends are willing to buck the whole entire system to fight back against a highly respected and reprehensibly abusive department chairperson and remove them from their seat of power. Not to put themselves in that place – but to change the system for the better.

If they can. And if they can’t, to protect themselves and their work from that system and beat it at its own game from the outside.

Escape Rating A-: It took me a bit to get into this, BECAUSE the opening was so familiar. It’s not just that we’ve seen this view of academia before frequently and often in science fiction (back to The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Language of Liars), in fantasy (A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, among many others) and in contemporary fiction of all genres. It doesn’t matter that Gardenpath’s people are not ours because in this, they are in all the ways that count.

In other words, there’s a lot of setup, because even though Gardenpath and their friends and institution resemble ours in the broadest sense, Gardenpath and their friends are not physically us and those differences are a part of that. They can literally reach inside each other’s bodies and probe each other’s thoughts and feel each other’s emotions.

Gardenpath starts out hiding a LOT about their own origins. And yet they still make real friends even though they’re lying by omission all the time and it’s even more of a struggle than it is for us. AND it creates more tension because their exams include a physical probing of their memories by the professors in order to determine whether or not the work is worthy of passing onto the next level. It’s bad enough that one of the professors is using this probing as an opportunity to test experimental ‘drugs’ on their students for the military, but it also represents a direct hazard for Gardenpath as they have to walk a tightrope between protecting their work while presenting just enough to get them to the next level.

Which is where the work comes in. Because Gardenpath hasn’t just discovered life where it isn’t supposed to exist, the life they’ve discovered is Earth. Specifically historical Earth, pinpointed as Pompeii in the decades before Vesuvius destroyed it and in the surrounding area among the survivors afterwards.

Gardenpath doesn’t just observe us, they craft a ‘galaxysuit’ that allows them to pretend to be one of us and to get directly involved with humans. One human in particular. Which absolutely does throw their scientific objectivity straight out the window. Even as it helps them to grow as a person and to learn to see the world through more perspectives than just their own and those of their own people.

It’s the making of them and very nearly the breaking of them as well. What makes it all work is that Gardenpath brings that new perspective back home and not just grows from it but shares it so that their friends grow and change as well. It may seem a bit neat and tidy in that Gardenpath goes off the literal rails but matures as a person and a scientist and becomes kind of a rebel because they experience other rebels, but it does work if you let it.

(Part of what makes it work is Gardenpath’s “luck” in finding a REALLY open-minded human to serve as translator, teacher and eventually lover. Part of what makes it work is the same kind of language exchange/training montage that happens in The Mulai, Lake of Souls, The Mountain in the Sea and Project Hail Mary. And part of it is that Gardenpath’s relationship with the human Murtis gives the reader an easier path into Gardenpath’s own head.)

Which allows the reader to be both sad at the inevitable ending of Gardenpath’s relationship with Murtis and to cheer as they turn the wall that “The Memory” has built around itself into a road that leads to a new perspective on their own society after their intimate exploration of ours. Leading to an ending that has the same notes of hope as The Terraformers and Automatic Noodle, but in an entirely different way.