The Book of Strange New Things

Michel Faber's The Book of Strange New Things is a novel with themes of communication, love and language across distance and cultures and within faith and doubt. The story unfolds against a background of apocalyptic societal collapse through a combination of climate change and food shortages. As a result, the novel shares themes with Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle For Leibowitz.

Sophia Waugh summarises effectively: 'Peter, ex-junkie, loving husband, cat-lover, sets off on a journey. The novel opens with his farewell to his wife, and we gather that he will be gone a while and that he might be in danger. It is not immediately revealed that he is a missionary, and when we do realise this, it comes as a surprise to learn that his mission is not in the far reaches of some Amazonian jungle, but in outer space. We are in a future in which Nasa no longer exists, but a major space programme does. Peter is being sent to a planet named Oasis, where he will be not so much a pastor to the crew stationed out there, but a missionary for its inhabitants, the Oasans.'

Hannah McGill writes that the novel 'is as much about the minor failures of communication that can erode marital intimacy as it is about contacting other beings, and as much about the existential terror inherent in putative parenthood as it is about travel to far-off worlds. As the once-inseparable Peter and Beatrice, now worlds apart, struggle to comprehend one another’s day-to-day lives, Faber lets a devastating possibility shuffle to the fore: every relationship is long-distance, and every person a strange new planet. The methods whereby we try to minimise difference, meanwhile, are themselves unstable – language most palpably so.'

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Lou Reed - Satellite Of Love.

Science Fiction reviews

I've been enjoying some Science Fiction post-Christmas in reading Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and watching James Cameron's Avatar.

The Sparrow is an unusual Science Fiction novel in that its theme is of a crisis of conscience for Emilio Sanchez, its Jesuit central character. It's a well written story, once it gets going, with an engaging central character who is honest about the deficiencies and the inspirations of his faith. The split narrative works well before meshing at the conclusion to bring together the events of the central crisis and the response to it. This central crisis is genuinely shocking although its resolution is probably a little too easy and dealt with too briefly but the novel, as a whole, provides an engaging and challenging exploration of God's presence and guidance in human exploration and suffering.

Avatar has been criticised as a simplistic eco-fable with good indigenous characters lined up against the evil exploitative humans but this is to ignore the conversion of Jake Sully, its central character. This conversion, supported by the other members of his immediate team, is that which is needed by the human race if climate change and peak oil are to be countered and a narrative and world in which we can be immersed, as is possible in watching Avatar, can have an effect in changing consciousness of the issues. For that to be the case, both the narrative and the world created and imagined have to be of sufficient depth for the viewer to become immersed and this seemed to me to be the case with Avatar.

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Woven Hand - The Beautiful Axe.