SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Small Beer Press has a reading group guide with an author interview and some excellent questions to ponder:
https://smallbeerpress.com/download/1...

Non-spoiler thread here: First impressions

Thanks for the link. These are also in the back of my copy of the book.

Of interest, the character of "Devil" introduced in chapter 3, is based on the real person A.O. Neville, who held the title "Chief Protector of Aborigines" (Coleman says as much in the interview). He was portrayed by Kenneth Brannaugh in the film "Rabbit Proof Fence" (also mentioned by Coleman), which is an excellent film revolving around the aboriginal schools.

His character may also appear unsubtle, but if you look at the man's own writings, he really was the straight-up the monster he's being portrayed as.

Wow, didn't know that. I read this for another book club; enjoyed it a lot.

The twist surprised me! Despite the twist, though, I am aware that very little else needed to have been created from imagination. The thoughts of various characters in the novel could have almost been copied from nonfiction sources.

I felt mixed—in terms of its confrontation with colonialism and its portrayal of a resistance movement, I loved it. I thought the writing and characters were excellent and compelling.

But with my genre lens, the fact that the twist was concealed for so many chapters meant that the author had to leave out a lot of information. Not everything needs to be structured as a mystery or a big twist—having it fall at the end of the first chapter would have given more narrative room to dive into the lives of Esperance and her people, the culture of the Natives, and the culture of the Settlers (how did they develop a religion that so closely paralleled the Catholic Church, but no art? Why do some have human names and others don't? etc.).

Rachel wrote: "I felt mixed—in terms of its confrontation with colonialism and its portrayal of a resistance movement, I loved it. I thought the writing and characters were excellent and compelling ..."

I completely agree with you about the strengths of the book and the compelling writing.

I needed to turn off my genre lens to appreciate the rest of it. Like so many "literary" (for lack of a better term) writers who dip into genre, Coleman treats genre elements as things that have no rules or requirements, but can be shoehorned into whatever allegorical purpose they are needed for. As you point out, it's almost impossible that the aliens would have what is essentially a Catholic Church without having art. Also that they would be so human-like when their physiology is so different. That Johnny Star would have read human philosophy, etc.

So, not a good Science Fiction book. But that’s not what Coleman intended, so I will try and interpret it based on what she did intend. I took that as “using an alien race allegorically to reframe the story of colonizer and colonized”. Coleman said something along the lines of wanting to evoke empathy in people who don’t normally feel empathy.

I think she was successful, to varying degrees, in breaking the binary of colonizer – native. That this was not just something that Europeans did to natives, but was something that one group did to another largely because of happenstance differences in culture and technology. Need and a power differential resulting in a supremacist attitude. As Coleman says in the above referenced interview, “I believe there is no such thing as an evil person, only evil acts, so I had to imagine how someone could logically and emotionally decide to do evil. Their behavior needed an internal logic.”

Something that I think Coleman was very successful at was portraying how colonization is a truly apocalyptic event for those who get the short end of the stick. It’s not just abuse and murder, it’s the end of a culture and way of life, and any feeling of home, permanence, or safety.

aPriL does feral sometimes wrote: "The twist surprised me! Despite the twist, though, I am aware that very little else needed to have been created from imagination. The thoughts of various characters in the novel could have almost b..."

Yes, the twist was really surprising.

And also, the way the desert is portrayed becomes almost a metaphor for resistance/limit of control.

I'm not entirely sure the narrative choice worked to conceal the nature of the Settlers for the first 100 pages, but once the subterfuge was revealed I enjoyed the story a lot more.