And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: post apocalyptic, science fiction
Pages: 112
Published by Tordotcom on May 19, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
An intergalactic art heist by a ragtag group of underqualified misfits. What could go wrong?
For three hundred years, humanity’s greatest works of art have been on loan at the Museum of the Seed-Born. It was finally time for them to come home...but the alien curators were disinclined to return them.
Force was out of the question. Earth’s government was they were not going to press the issue. So, all we had was guile and hubris to fuel our little intergalactic art heist.
My old friend Tarquin was our leader, but not the captain. That was Tchik-tchik, though whether Tchik-tchik was our insectoid pilot’s name or species is still unclear to me. Misora, with her extremely illegal biotech mods, was our muscle.
Jack was there to hack the security systems of the biggest museum in the galaxy. He was a sensynth, a sentient synthetic being, and the most powerful machine intelligence on Earth uncorrupted by alien technology.
My name is Fennel Tycho. I’d like to tell you I was there because of my expertise in Art History. Truth is, I was there because without me, Jack would not have agreed to go. He was notorious for being difficult to work with—but it was a mistake to think I could make things any easier.
A meditation on the nature of love, life, and the "culture of the copy," And Side by Side They Wander asks the In a future where there are clones, androids, and a sentient mycelium that creates fungal simulacra, who is real and what is fake?
My Review:
There are PLENTY of science fiction stories that begin in the aftermath of humanity having reached the brink of self-destruction. Sometimes we fail the test, leading to a post-apocalyptic dystopia where our descendants curse our self-centeredness. I’ve read and reviewed LOTS of those stories.
Sometimes we succeed in spite of ourselves. Both Star Trek and the In Death series, two ‘verses I never thought I’d be grouping together, have a World War III or equivalent in their backstory. Both cases where humanity stepped over the line of self-destruction but managed to claw themselves back from complete annihilation before it was too late.
But in Star Trek, along with many other stories including this one, humanity manages to either save themselves or reach for the stars via alien intervention. (The movie Star Trek: First Contact sets up that future. I still hear “Magic Carpet Ride” whenever I think of this one. I digress AND I’ve possibly given you an earworm.)
And Side by Side They Wander takes place three centuries after that alien intervention on this future version of Earth. The Celerians gave Earth everything they needed to clean up their pollution-filled environment, roll back climate change, feed, clothe and house their people, and just plain move on from multiple near-extinction level catastrophes to booming post-scarcity economy.
It all sounds too good to be true – but Earth’s remaining governments were WAY too desperate not to take the deal. After all, by the time that particular flock of chickens would come home to roost – if they ever do – those politicians would be long dead and it would be their successors’ successors’ problem.
The cost of all that generosity was simple. The Celerians celebrated artistic creativity – and Earth’s history was a veritable treasure-trove of art. The cost of saving the planet was to let the Celerians take all of Earth’s greatest artistic treasures back to their home planet for safekeeping – and the treasures absolutely did need safekeeping.
The Celerians promised to let Earth have their treasures back when THE CELERIANS decided that Earth had not merely survived but had made the strides necessary to be careful and responsible stewards of their own planet and their own artistic legacy.
Did you notice the catch there? The humans who made the deal clearly didn’t – or were too desperate to care. Probably both. The Celerians get to decide when Earth is ready on their schedule and their timeline by THEIR criteria. We all know how that’s going to go, don’t we?
Earth thinks they’re ready after three hundred years. They certainly are by their own definition. But the Celerians never intended to return Earth’s artistic treasures and Earth hasn’t yet developed the faster than light travel they’d need to come to the Celerian homeworld to argue their point.
Which is where this story comes in, a story which, on the one hand, manages to prove that the Celerians are right, that humanity is not yet “civilized” enough to get their stuff back, and on the other, that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, and on the tentacle hiding behind my back, that some gifts do come at just too high a price for everyone involved.
Escape Rating B-: That’s a lot of intro for a rather short book. I’d apologize but I believe that this novella is using all of that SFnal trope-y backstory to make itself short. Meaning that it kind of expects that the reader knows at least bits of what sorts of SF came before it so IT doesn’t have to get into the weeds of all of that.
So if you’ve ever seen Star Trek: First Contact, or read any post-apocalyptic stories however they turned out, or heard of the famous Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” where the rescuing aliens’ equivalent of the Prime Directive turns out to be a cookbook, the history that leads to this story will have some familiar notes to it.
For this reader, the clearer antecedents besides the above were Down in the Sea with Angels by Khan Wong, Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Revis and At Stars’ End by Anna Hackett. While the story actually within these pages had a lot of both Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon and especially To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers. This one starts out seeming to be like To Be Taught but ends up more like Volatile Memory – with one hell of a twist.
On the surface, this is a heist story. The Celerians aren’t going to give up Earth’s treasures, so this ragtag crew is going to steal them back. What makes the reader follow along is the way that the individuals on the crew – and their relationships with each other – both embody and reveal the way that the world has developed in the centuries since the Celerians’ intervention – and the ways that it hasn’t.
After all, humans are STILL gonna human, and the warts and all of human behavior are writ very large across this small story. As it drills down through the relationships, it also takes on two rather big topics. One is the nature of art and creativity, and what the differences are, if they exist, between an original work and its perfect copy, and whether and how much that matters.
The second, much more intimate topic, is the difference between love and obsession. What is love if it’s not requited? What will we do for love? And what happens when the lover realizes that the object of their affection is incapable of returning it because love wasn’t programmed in?
In the end, there was a LOT going on in this novella, but I’m not sure it stuck the explosive dismount. The philosophical meditations on art and artists and originality were interesting, and I’m left wondering if the book was intended as a vehicle for those meditations. The romantic elements aren’t romance at all – and I don’t think they were intended to be. I think they were intended to poke at the nature of romantic obsession with unattainable people and how toxic and self-erasing and defeating it can be.
I wanted this to be about the heist, and it’s really not. The heist is more of a frame for everything else, up to and including the self-centered, self-absorbed, destructive capabilities of humans to break the toys they can’t keep for themselves.
In the end, I liked this more for what it reminded me of than I did for what IT actually was. Your reading mileage may vary.
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