Evan is sent to a recently discovered world by the company he works for to learn why the research team they sent hasn't been heard from in months. Evan quickly confirms the answer is because they're dead, though he's not quite sure how they were overwhelmed so completely by the native life. With one member of the research team unaccounted for, but a location beacon pointing the way, Evan sets out to try and get that answer, only to find himself quickly in over his head.
Foster presents a world of mostly silicon-based life, and with habits, defenses, and senses entirely different from anything Evan has encountered before. Most of them run off light, but not by using it to create sugars like plants. They just turn it into energy like a solar panel. Some are motile, others lurk beneath the soil. Some eat flesh, some are just looking for minerals. Even though the company outfits him with the most high-tech, sturdily built, exo-suit they've got, it isn't enough.
Foster writes Evan as extremely confident in himself, so the entire book is basically one big exercise in Evan slowly being humbled. He does better at surviving without the suit than he probably ought to, but it's in the clumsy, makeshift manner of a person doing the best he can in an environment where he doesn't know the rules. Is the giant crystalline structure an inanimate tree, or the host to a mass of worms that'll love the iron in his blood? Is that a pool of water, or some sort of jellylike predator that would try to engulf him?
Foster eventually introduces intelligent species, each of which have a specific function they perform in what they call an "Associative." Some are scouts, some are knowledge-repositories, some are literally block-shaped things that prefer to group together and form walls to protect the rest from predators. A lot of the book is Evan interacting with them, trying to understand how their society, not to mention biology, works, while they're doing the same with him. There's some body modification, not all of it consensual, but Foster doesn't lean too heavily into the body horror aspect of it. Evan is written as being so reasonable, or more so self-assured, that the drastic changes in his inner workings are quickly accepted.
It's all generally interesting stuff, but it does mean the mystery of the final member of the research team, as well as what happened to them, gets sidelined for a big portion of the book. His exo-suit breaks at about the one-quarter mark, at which point the focus shifts to Evan's survival/the Associative for the middle half. Only in the last quarter does Foster finally resolve the mysteries. Even that involves a chapter with some bizarre creature calling itself The Integrator, which doesn't really feel like it fits with the rest of the world as it's been presented. Like this was the main antagonist of some other book, and shuffled into this book to try its luck.
'This is swell, Evan thought. I'm standing here debating political philosophy with a glass caterpillar by means of antenna stuck into my feeble mind. Furthermore, I am enjoying it.'
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