[5FA]≡ PDF Free Remnant Population A Novel Elizabeth Moon 9780345462190 Books

Remnant Population A Novel Elizabeth Moon 9780345462190 Books

Download As PDF : Remnant Population A Novel Elizabeth Moon 9780345462190 Books

Remnant Population A Novel Elizabeth Moon 9780345462190 Books

I am guilty-- I admit. I don't often "see" senior women in public places. Their short hair, their rounded forms, their fussiness. Yet they often are the driving force behind education, family-care, and social services.

You definitely don't see them in science fiction as the point of first contact with aliens. Usually that's left to men and women in their nubile prime.

That's why this book makes me so gleeful to read. Ofelia, the main character, is marginalized in her own home. The home she's scraped and worked herself to the bone to eke out a living on an alien planet as a colonist. Now, the company that sponsored the colonists is calling her life's work a failure and ordering an evacuation of the colony.

Adding insult to injury, the company calls her "un-useful" and not an asset, so her son must pay extra for her evacuation.

So Ofelia decides to hide out until everyone's left, and finally have some peace and quiet to herself without demands and expectations-- time to finally listen to the oft-ignored voice insider her telling her to wear ponchos and string beads and live a quieter life.

But it turns out Ofelia isn't as alone as she thought, and her newfound sense of self will be challenged as she begins one of the most important roles of her--and humanity's--life.

Okay, so there's too much summary of events sometimes, and a bit of wish-fulfillment here in the way that the aliens learn so very quickly language, culture, and understanding, and the part where the puffed-up, self-important male team leader threatens a child is unbelievably cliche, but boy is this a great book.

Ofelia's voice is spot-on. I love, love, love the fact that we get to spend so much time in the "boring" and "mundane" tasks of fixing, gardening, and basic life chores...the very things which feature so importantly in her relationship with the indigenes of the planet she's lived on for most of her life.

There is nothing like taking an outwardly science fiction framework (colonists on a planet; indigenes species first contact) and putting the flowing, draping, messy context of human relations and social issues onto it in order to highlight aspects not immediately visible in our usual lives.

As societies like the United States and Japan, amongst others, face aging populations, this book has a lot of interesting things to say about the value of age and life-experience.


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Remnant Population A Novel Elizabeth Moon 9780345462190 Books Reviews

I loved this story more for its character uniqueness than its plot and premise, good as they were. The plot is not that new, the aliens are not that unusual but this is a MOST unusual protagonist? Hero? Whatever! I am at a loss to describe just what she is other than a tired, cranky old lady, with all the health issues her age entails, who has been pushed around way too much and wants to be left the heck alone to live out her days doing what she wants to do and with no one bugging her!! She is very tired of having to care what others think of her or what they think she should or should not do!
She has no special powers, is not very educated, not skilled in martial arts, never uses a weapon, can’t fly a space ship, is not a driven individual, yet she TOWERS over the other characters by just being what comes natural to her.
You will love this character no matter what you think of anything else in this tale, and yet...it is all good.
(NO! This is NOT a “paid” review)
I thought this was a very well written novel from a unique point of view. Very rarely does the senior character in a story take center stage (unless they're a Yoda and extremely senior). The central character is very likable, and after just a few pages, I had to know how she survived on her own.

I recommended the book to my wife (who is NO fan of scifi). She enjoyed it very much, reading the book in one weekend.

Of course, as in all SciFi, there's a lot of wishful thinking, but even at my age, I haven't given up wishing for things to get better
Stephen Spielberg's iconic film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, appeared in 1977, starring Richard Dreyfuss and François Truffaut. Nearly forty years later, in 2016, Arrival covered similar territory with a cast headed by Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. Both films featured uniquely original ideas about the nature of the first alien encounter between the human race and an intelligent species on another world. In Remnant Population, originally published in 1996, American science fiction author Elizabeth Moon displays an equally imaginative idea about an alien encounter—on the printed page.

Remnant Population centers on the life of Ofelia Falfurrias, a widow who is seventy years old as the story opens. She lives with her unlovable youngest son and his demanding and disdainful wife, so it's no surprise that Ofelia resolves to stay behind when the whole colony is shut down and the colonists shipped off to another planet. Ofelia revels in her aloneness, tending the vegetable garden, the sheep and cows, the "fabricator," and the power plant that drives the refrigeration and stove in her home. For the first time in her life, nobody is telling Ofelia what to do. She loves it.

Months go by, then years. All of a sudden, a mission arrives on-planet to establish a new colony at a distant location. As the shuttles land, depositing teams of colonists, their landing site is viciously attacked and all the humans are killed in short order. The shuttles are destroyed by bombs some unknown species has placed there.

Much later, a group of the "monsters" who killed the human party begin showing up in Ofelia's village. To them, she's a monster, too. But each soon realizes that the other means them no harm. The locals, who call themselves the People, are endlessly curious. They follow Ofelia everywhere, observing everything she does. As Ofelia learns to distinguish individuals among them and to appreciate their child-like inquisitiveness, they grow to respect one another. It also becomes clear the People are extremely fast learners.

Then a second new human mission arrives to investigate why the colony's power plant remains open. The corporation that evacuated the planet had insisted they'd turned everything off to prevent any potential intelligent life from gaining access to advanced human technology. The survey team includes exobiologists and exolinguists as well as soldiers because the bombing of the earlier landing site suggests that, against all odds, there may be an intelligent species on the planet. As they arrive in Ofelia's town, the prospects for a friendly encounter seem dim. Ofelia is determined to keep things peaceful and protect her new friends among the People.

Elizabeth Moon skillfully tells her tale, building suspense all the while she develops characters as complex as humanity itself. The novel starts slowly, dwelling on Ofelia's thoughts and feelings over the initial months after her family and neighbors had left. But it's worth the wait. This is a truly delightful tale of an alien encounter unlike any you've ever imagined before.
I am guilty-- I admit. I don't often "see" senior women in public places. Their short hair, their rounded forms, their fussiness. Yet they often are the driving force behind education, family-care, and social services.

You definitely don't see them in science fiction as the point of first contact with aliens. Usually that's left to men and women in their nubile prime.

That's why this book makes me so gleeful to read. Ofelia, the main character, is marginalized in her own home. The home she's scraped and worked herself to the bone to eke out a living on an alien planet as a colonist. Now, the company that sponsored the colonists is calling her life's work a failure and ordering an evacuation of the colony.

Adding insult to injury, the company calls her "un-useful" and not an asset, so her son must pay extra for her evacuation.

So Ofelia decides to hide out until everyone's left, and finally have some peace and quiet to herself without demands and expectations-- time to finally listen to the oft-ignored voice insider her telling her to wear ponchos and string beads and live a quieter life.

But it turns out Ofelia isn't as alone as she thought, and her newfound sense of self will be challenged as she begins one of the most important roles of her--and humanity's--life.

Okay, so there's too much summary of events sometimes, and a bit of wish-fulfillment here in the way that the aliens learn so very quickly language, culture, and understanding, and the part where the puffed-up, self-important male team leader threatens a child is unbelievably cliche, but boy is this a great book.

Ofelia's voice is spot-on. I love, love, love the fact that we get to spend so much time in the "boring" and "mundane" tasks of fixing, gardening, and basic life chores...the very things which feature so importantly in her relationship with the indigenes of the planet she's lived on for most of her life.

There is nothing like taking an outwardly science fiction framework (colonists on a planet; indigenes species first contact) and putting the flowing, draping, messy context of human relations and social issues onto it in order to highlight aspects not immediately visible in our usual lives.

As societies like the United States and Japan, amongst others, face aging populations, this book has a lot of interesting things to say about the value of age and life-experience.