Only Human is a solid end for The Themis Files

With another time skip at hand, Sylvain Neuvel’s Only Human handles the multiple time periods with ease and even gets a bit philosophical.

For a book that’s about alien giant robots, Sylvain Neuvel’s Only Human, sent this reviewer’s way by Del Rey, is perhaps the most philosophical of the books in The Themis Files. Don’t worry, though: if you’re here for Neuvel’s unique writing style for the series, you won’t be disappointed.

The book mostly picks up about a decade after Waking Gods leaves off, meaning that one Eva is all grown up and very much a teenager. Although it’d be easy for Neuvel to simply let the action pick up 10 years later, he makes a point of actually diving into what happens during that decade on an alien planet. That means coming up with an actual language and culture beyond what fans already learned of the Ekt. These parts of the novel shine the most.

Neuvel puts in a lot of work to make sure that the Ekt and humanity don’t seem so different, and it helps the debates at the center of the book — namely, how can humanity handle itself when it’s not entirely human, thanks to alien DNA — really shine through. Both sides of that debate, and others linked to it, have reasonable representatives in Rose Franklin and Vincent Couture. That’s what makes reading Only Human a pleasure. It does interrogate what that actually means.

However, the strongest character in this novel is probably Eva herself. Sure, she’s a fairly normal teenager, but normal also comes with growing up on an alien planet. Perhaps she overuses the Ekt word yokits, which gets irritating to read after a while. Still, in general, she has seriously strong character development. (Plus she also gets to pilot a giant robot. Not saying that that’s affecting how I feel about her, but it is pretty great.)

Weirdly enough, perhaps the most frustrating things about Only Human are the pop culture references. It’s not that they aren’t apt. Instead, they’re a little too on the nose and feel a bit out of place for where they come in. Talking about them might constitute a spoiler, so I’ll refrain from saying what they are.

What happens on Earth, meanwhile, mirrors the current political climate and dials everything up a bit. As it’s in the product description, it’s definitely not a spoiler to say that America and Russia have a tense relationship. What’s not in the description is that North Korea comes up as well. Based on the previous novels — and Neuvel also pointedly drops the Japanese internment camps of World War II at one point — this feels like a logical extension that just also happens to feel particularly timely.

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With The Themis Files now done, they seem like a great read for someone who likes something like Star Trek. In other words, someone who likes to think every so often even as they encounter “strange new worlds.”