Passing for Human

About this book

Passing for Human is a quiet, moving, unusually intimate science fiction novel told in the first person by someone who is not human, and who has spent four decades as an ordinary member of a Japanese coastal engineering team. Hideo Sasaki, as he is called now, arrived on this world in the eighteenth century and has held eleven working lives since. He is not an explorer, a soldier or a spy. He belongs to a small profession whose entire method is restraint: find a species that is already working on a hard problem, take an ordinary job near the people doing the work, and over the years supply one thing only, the step that nobody in the room would have thought of, in a form a human colleague can test and then own. Never explain. Never lead. Never take credit. Leave before anyone notices you do not age, and never attend the funerals.