Here is a book I recently finished I think people ought to read, concerning a First Contact mission gone horribly wrong. Written by a Catholic, turned Atheist, turned Jewish it has some interesting things to say about evolution World building, Faith and cultural differences.
It does get really dark though, You could argue it's somesort of Christian Sci Fi/Evolutionary Horror, if that genre exists, maybe the Christian/Jewish version of Blindsight. Did
The basic plot is that in 2059 a Jesuit missionary ship returns to Earth bearing a single survivor of an expedition launched in 2019. He was found, badly mutilated by a UN(equivalent) expedition in an alien whorehouse where he promptly murders the alien child who lead them to him. The second expedition is disgusted and throws him aboard his AI controlled vessel and sends him back to Earth alone. They stay on the planet and then contact is lost. Its implied they were killed in the species war that was likely caused by the first expedition.
The actual story switches between the sole survivor talking to Catholic officials at an inquiry and scenes from expedition. The story is more of a mystery story as it slowly builds up to show you how it ended in disaster. The real meat of the story that it won awards for is the 100 or so pages involving the two alien species they come into contact with which are very, very engrossing, while a good chunk of the book contains Catholic theology and character backstory that I skipped. Like many Sci Fi authors the side characters aren't that interesting and they make some Prometheus level mistakes.
Full Summary:
To get to the meat of the story, In the distant year of 2019 the SETI program at Arecibo discovers radio broadcasts coming from Alpha Centauri. It takes some time to verify it but soon other radio telescopes around the world are picking up consistent broadcasts every few weeks from Alpha Centauri from a planet they name Rakhat. The transmissions sound like singing.
While the world is processing this and planning expeditions to the alien planet, the Catholic Society of Jesus (Jesuits, aka the Cool Catholics according to quite a few sci fi authors) decide to get ahead of everyone by sending out their own mission quickly with a small crew of 8 on a hollowed out asteroid on a 17 year trip to get there first. The main character is a Puerto Rican linguist, Father Emilio Sandoz who is experienced with missionary work but struggles with his faith. Also he is descended from Taino and Conquistadors.... (Yes this is "Important" and "Deep")
There also are 7 other characters but they are pretty forgettable even if the author spends 100+ pages of bad jokes and character development to try and make me remember them. Its better than Arthur C. Clarke characters though.
Anyway the 8 explorers reach Rakhat without incident. From space they can see that the planet is industrialized with hydroelectric dams and cities. They go down in their shuttle and after a few weeks of examining plants and animals there they make contact with the local villagers.
The first aliens they meet are called the Runa, they are peaceful herd creatures who are described similarly to (more) humanoid Kangaroos with large ears and are about twice the height of humans. The Runa think that humans are children because of their small size (This is.... important....). The villagers seem very friendly and tolerant of outsiders with the alien children being highly adept at learning languages because they facilitate trade with outsiders often. Emilio Sandoz is instrumental in translating their language and feels as if his faith has been solidified by his experienced with the aliens. The aliens seem to have little knowledge of fear or violence other than some stories about monsters that prey on them from outside their villages.
As the expedition spends time with the Runa they realize the Runa don't seem capable of developing radio. They are highly social and community based, but theres no technology and they don't farm either. The local area has plenty of fruit and vegetables they collect. Their industry just seems to consist of collecting flowers and vegetation to be shipped far away to an unknown city. The humans also notice that while the Runa are good at remembering where resources are located to harvest they are not critical thinkers and have no knowledge of the government or the cities they saw from space.
This is solved one day when they meet a different but similar alien called a Jana'Ata of slightly larger size who arrives at the village via a motorboat. The alien called Supaari is a highly intelligent predator compared to the Runa and even the humans somewhat, at first he thinks they're like children(In the same way the Runa do). He's a merchant who collects the materials the Runa gather, as the Herbivores are effectively peasants on his land.
This is where things go to shit gradually. Its actually about 2 years in book but its not very long page wise.
Eager to finally find someone who can actually answer their questions and show them who is broadcasting the radio signals they talk to him and try to learn more about the world but due to the language barrier communication is slow and Supaari doesn't seem to know much about politics or have any political power or interest in government. He's quite happy to take their stores of coffee as trade goods though and take them by boat to the nearby city but in secret and only allowed to visit his own employees who are all Runa. The city seems to be a very nice place with electric power and modernish buildings. The city seems free from crime or any homeless people. The Runa live on the outer sections working as manual labor and servants while the Jana'ata rarely interact with them directly other than Supaari. They don't even speak the same language.
In the meantime the humans expect to stay on the planet longterm and plant a vegetable garden in the Runa village with seeds from their shuttle(they accidentally stranded themselves due to low fuel in a sideplot....). This spreads to the villagers who begin their own farming which seems innocent enough. For a year or two the humans don't get much done and mostly play dumb tourist until shit goes down...
Ok, so lets talk about, whats really happening, since the humans get somewhat railroaded into missing tons of details which are explained throughout the story after the events, back on Earth.
So the two alien species, Runa and Jana'ata. These species look similar, but are not closely related at all! The Jana'ata are predators that have evolved to look like their favored prey as a form of aggressive mimicry, so that they could get close to Runa herds and pull down stranglers. In time they increased in intelligence and the Jana'ata use them like dogs, both as beasts of burden and food. Through millenia of cultural and genetic conditioning the Runa stay in their villages and work for their predators. They have courts for legal disputes run by Jana'ata which naturally always rule against them. The Runa aren't smart enough to do anything about it. Supaari in particular takes advantage of their low intellect but fast spreading social memes by purchasing all the ribbon fabric in the region and then having a Runa female wear them so he can corner the market when all the Runa in the area want the same fashion.
Runa who are aggressive or disobedient are killed on the streets by the Jana'ata military and police. Otherwise the Jana'ata stay away from the Runa when they don't need them which is why the Jana'ata never leave their cities unless they are criminals. Most of them have little contact with their servants other than Supaari who is an outlier. Also the population is extremely skewed. Only 4% of the population is Jana'ata compared to 96% Runa. (At this point I was starting to wonder if this was going to be an extremely, insensitive allegory for Apartheid)
For this reason and others the Runa population is supposed to kept at a state mandated level which is why they are not allowed to know how to farm. When the Jana'ata need more Runa for labor or food they ship in food which leads to a baby boom until they are taken away to make a new village or to the city for use. If a village has too many people, the population is culled.
And the humans have been showing the local villagers how to farm and this has spread quickly to neighboring villages...
It ends badly. A group of Jana'ata soldiers enter the village one day, noticing that its highly overpopulated they order the villagers to gather up. The humans end up hiding in the middle of the group as (remember the Runa are twice their height and humans are the size of children... Have I mentioned humans are like children to the aliens?) but when they see the soldiers taking Runa away and executing them one of them begins to urge the Runa to resist. Shocked that a Runa is calling for resistance the soldiers begin slaughtering their way through the villager with their claws (despite being more advanced in a few areas than OTL 2020 they have no concept of firearms or ranged weapons) and kill all but two of the humans, Father Emilio Sandoz and a french guy they are marched along the road to the city by the soldiers who butcher the inhabitants of nearby villages who have started to take up farming. The humans are also not given anything to eat but the flesh of the villagers which the frenchman refuses(I think the author may have also implied that when visiting Supaari's home in the city he was actually feeding them Runa meat in some of the dishes they really liked....).
At some point Supaari 'saves' them and takes them back to his house. There he has their hands ritually mutilated to make them apart of his household but the french guy bleeds to death because of the differences in anatomy.
Emilio Sandoz survives but is crippled, but thats intentional since this ritual is the equivalent of foot binding. Depressed and alone, Sandoz is kept in Supaari's house for the next few months but Supaari quickly tires of him and doesn't find him nearly as sharp witted as one of the other now dead crew members. One day Sandoz wakes up as he is dragged out of the house and taken away to a different part of the city. He finds himself thrown into an expensive looking palace filled with Runa and Jana'ata, but none of them seem to speak the language he knows and they look to be completely different ethnicities from the local population. He realizes he must have been put in some kind of 'zoo'.
However there is a ray of hope. After some weeks he is then taken out of the enclosure and brought out to another room where he finds Supaari and a different and very rich looking Jana'ata. Father Sandoz realizes that this must be The Reshtar, the Jana'ata poet and musician that has been singing the songs that brought him here. Strengthened in his faith, Emilio Sandoz realizes that God has brought him here to share the faith with Reshtar. His journey has been long and perilious, many times he's had trouble believing in his path with the deaths of his friends. But he's persevered and this is his reward for his faith in God who has and will protect him on his path.
The Reshtar steps forward, examines him closely and then begins stripping Emilio of his clothes. Then the Reshtar takes off his own.
Have I mentioned that due to their small stature humans look like children to the aliens?
Have I mentioned that the author is Jewish?
God doesn't care.
Now, reading through the novel which interleaves the Earth and Rakhat sections you learn that the Jana'ata practice strict population control to make sure they have enough food and to keep societal pressures at a minimum. Each family only has 3 children. The first 2 get to do the important stuff like become leaders and artists. The 3rd child is a spare and they do the less important jobs like run businesses. Extras (and other misfits) get killed, which is why there aren't any poor or homeless people. They also aren't allowed to have sex with other Jana'ata to prevent illegal pregnancies. However, it just so happens that there is another species that's subservient and looks very similar to the Jana'ata. So the 3rd children can only satisfy themselves with Runa. But Supaari has dreams of his own family and the only way for a 3rd to do that is to do something famous or a get a massive favor from someone who is high ranking, such as a famous singer/poet who is the first person to be broadcasted on radio across the entire planet.
So yes, Supaari prostitutes Emilio Sandoz to a famous singer who has a fetish for alien pedophilia.
And so the novel (briefly) describes how The Reshtar brutally rapes Sandoz. And then how he's taken back to The Reshtar's home for months and The Reshtar invites his friends to join in. And his musical colleagues. Oh and sometimes its done for a viewing audience too.
And those musical broadcasts they recieved back on Earth? After he's done with Sandoz The Reshtar records songs based on his sexual exploits to broadcast to the world. Apparently erotic poetry is all ages listening on their planet. All the other Runa and Jana'ata from foreign lands in the "zoo"? Those are the inspiration for his previous songs.
Yeah...
And then Sandoz eventually gets rescued by another party from Earth who for some reason think he's a willing prostitute(once you know the second twist, this makes absolutely no sense. Unless they were complete idiots and missed every sign) and is sent home. The second expedition goes dark soon after, after reporting that fighting is breaking out between between the Runa and Jana'ata(presumably some of the Runa escaped the massacre and they began to realize that they outnumber their predators 24 to 1). I think that implies they got killed in the middle of fighting, but other online reviewers and analysts suggested that Supaari actually captured them and sold them as more sex slaves....
So thats the book although much of the rest of the story occurs after this with Sandoz talking to other Jesuits in front of a investigation panel and struggles with faith and personal healing.
Its also kinda depressing from both a worldbuilding and theological view. Imagine a society so unfair and terrible as Rakhat but its not deliberately engineered like the Draka or South Africa. A hundred thousand years of evolution has lead to this point and there is no escape that doesn't lead to societal collapse(and I think that is what happens in the sequel that I will read soon). Apply some of these ideas to other settings with predators and prey like Zootopia and think about horrible it can be.
Overall I both love this book and hate it. You should read it for sure.
However there is one last part of the book I want to go over. The author's afterward, specifically the first paragraph.
I too remember the part in the history books where the Tainos captured Christopher Columbus and gang raped him repeated and then sang songs about it around the campfire.
You can fuck right off with this shit. I don't think I need to write a few more paragraphs explaining why this is ass backwards.
This is one of the reasons I found this is to be an extremely 'rugged' novel, its as if you are going through ups and downs of quality. Anyway though, you should read it.
In the meantime the humans expect to stay on the planet longterm and plant a vegetable garden in the Runa village with seeds from their shuttle(they accidentally stranded themselves due to low fuel in a sideplot....). This spreads to the villagers who begin their own farming which seems innocent enough. For a year or two the humans don't get much done and mostly play dumb tourist until shit goes down...
Ok, so lets talk about, whats really happening, since the humans get somewhat railroaded into missing tons of details which are explained throughout the story after the events, back on Earth.
So the two alien species, Runa and Jana'ata. These species look similar, but are not closely related at all! The Jana'ata are predators that have evolved to look like their favored prey as a form of aggressive mimicry, so that they could get close to Runa herds and pull down stranglers. In time they increased in intelligence and the Jana'ata use them like dogs, both as beasts of burden and food. Through millenia of cultural and genetic conditioning the Runa stay in their villages and work for their predators. They have courts for legal disputes run by Jana'ata which naturally always rule against them. The Runa aren't smart enough to do anything about it. Supaari in particular takes advantage of their low intellect but fast spreading social memes by purchasing all the ribbon fabric in the region and then having a Runa female wear them so he can corner the market when all the Runa in the area want the same fashion.
Runa who are aggressive or disobedient are killed on the streets by the Jana'ata military and police. Otherwise the Jana'ata stay away from the Runa when they don't need them which is why the Jana'ata never leave their cities unless they are criminals. Most of them have little contact with their servants other than Supaari who is an outlier. Also the population is extremely skewed. Only 4% of the population is Jana'ata compared to 96% Runa. (At this point I was starting to wonder if this was going to be an extremely, insensitive allegory for Apartheid)
For this reason and others the Runa population is supposed to kept at a state mandated level which is why they are not allowed to know how to farm. When the Jana'ata need more Runa for labor or food they ship in food which leads to a baby boom until they are taken away to make a new village or to the city for use. If a village has too many people, the population is culled.
And the humans have been showing the local villagers how to farm and this has spread quickly to neighboring villages...
It ends badly. A group of Jana'ata soldiers enter the village one day, noticing that its highly overpopulated they order the villagers to gather up. The humans end up hiding in the middle of the group as (remember the Runa are twice their height and humans are the size of children... Have I mentioned humans are like children to the aliens?) but when they see the soldiers taking Runa away and executing them one of them begins to urge the Runa to resist. Shocked that a Runa is calling for resistance the soldiers begin slaughtering their way through the villager with their claws (despite being more advanced in a few areas than OTL 2020 they have no concept of firearms or ranged weapons) and kill all but two of the humans, Father Emilio Sandoz and a french guy they are marched along the road to the city by the soldiers who butcher the inhabitants of nearby villages who have started to take up farming. The humans are also not given anything to eat but the flesh of the villagers which the frenchman refuses(I think the author may have also implied that when visiting Supaari's home in the city he was actually feeding them Runa meat in some of the dishes they really liked....).
At some point Supaari 'saves' them and takes them back to his house. There he has their hands ritually mutilated to make them apart of his household but the french guy bleeds to death because of the differences in anatomy.
Emilio Sandoz survives but is crippled, but thats intentional since this ritual is the equivalent of foot binding. Depressed and alone, Sandoz is kept in Supaari's house for the next few months but Supaari quickly tires of him and doesn't find him nearly as sharp witted as one of the other now dead crew members. One day Sandoz wakes up as he is dragged out of the house and taken away to a different part of the city. He finds himself thrown into an expensive looking palace filled with Runa and Jana'ata, but none of them seem to speak the language he knows and they look to be completely different ethnicities from the local population. He realizes he must have been put in some kind of 'zoo'.
However there is a ray of hope. After some weeks he is then taken out of the enclosure and brought out to another room where he finds Supaari and a different and very rich looking Jana'ata. Father Sandoz realizes that this must be The Reshtar, the Jana'ata poet and musician that has been singing the songs that brought him here. Strengthened in his faith, Emilio Sandoz realizes that God has brought him here to share the faith with Reshtar. His journey has been long and perilious, many times he's had trouble believing in his path with the deaths of his friends. But he's persevered and this is his reward for his faith in God who has and will protect him on his path.
The Reshtar steps forward, examines him closely and then begins stripping Emilio of his clothes. Then the Reshtar takes off his own.
Have I mentioned that due to their small stature humans look like children to the aliens?
Have I mentioned that the author is Jewish?
God doesn't care.
Now, reading through the novel which interleaves the Earth and Rakhat sections you learn that the Jana'ata practice strict population control to make sure they have enough food and to keep societal pressures at a minimum. Each family only has 3 children. The first 2 get to do the important stuff like become leaders and artists. The 3rd child is a spare and they do the less important jobs like run businesses. Extras (and other misfits) get killed, which is why there aren't any poor or homeless people. They also aren't allowed to have sex with other Jana'ata to prevent illegal pregnancies. However, it just so happens that there is another species that's subservient and looks very similar to the Jana'ata. So the 3rd children can only satisfy themselves with Runa. But Supaari has dreams of his own family and the only way for a 3rd to do that is to do something famous or a get a massive favor from someone who is high ranking, such as a famous singer/poet who is the first person to be broadcasted on radio across the entire planet.
So yes, Supaari prostitutes Emilio Sandoz to a famous singer who has a fetish for alien pedophilia.
And so the novel (briefly) describes how The Reshtar brutally rapes Sandoz. And then how he's taken back to The Reshtar's home for months and The Reshtar invites his friends to join in. And his musical colleagues. Oh and sometimes its done for a viewing audience too.
And those musical broadcasts they recieved back on Earth? After he's done with Sandoz The Reshtar records songs based on his sexual exploits to broadcast to the world. Apparently erotic poetry is all ages listening on their planet. All the other Runa and Jana'ata from foreign lands in the "zoo"? Those are the inspiration for his previous songs.
Yeah...
And then Sandoz eventually gets rescued by another party from Earth who for some reason think he's a willing prostitute(once you know the second twist, this makes absolutely no sense. Unless they were complete idiots and missed every sign) and is sent home. The second expedition goes dark soon after, after reporting that fighting is breaking out between between the Runa and Jana'ata(presumably some of the Runa escaped the massacre and they began to realize that they outnumber their predators 24 to 1). I think that implies they got killed in the middle of fighting, but other online reviewers and analysts suggested that Supaari actually captured them and sold them as more sex slaves....
So thats the book although much of the rest of the story occurs after this with Sandoz talking to other Jesuits in front of a investigation panel and struggles with faith and personal healing.
Its also kinda depressing from both a worldbuilding and theological view. Imagine a society so unfair and terrible as Rakhat but its not deliberately engineered like the Draka or South Africa. A hundred thousand years of evolution has lead to this point and there is no escape that doesn't lead to societal collapse(and I think that is what happens in the sequel that I will read soon). Apply some of these ideas to other settings with predators and prey like Zootopia and think about horrible it can be.
Overall I both love this book and hate it. You should read it for sure.
However there is one last part of the book I want to go over. The author's afterward, specifically the first paragraph.
I too remember the part in the history books where the Tainos captured Christopher Columbus and gang raped him repeated and then sang songs about it around the campfire.
You can fuck right off with this shit. I don't think I need to write a few more paragraphs explaining why this is ass backwards.
This is one of the reasons I found this is to be an extremely 'rugged' novel, its as if you are going through ups and downs of quality. Anyway though, you should read it.
