The second volume, in which Sandoz leaves the priesthood and marries, focuses on the Gender issues raised but not illuminated in the first volume. It is presumed by his music-maker owner that Sandoz should treat these circumstances as honourable. Realizing none of this, Sandoz is gang-raped, mutilated and enslaved. He unfolds a long drama of mutual misapprehension on several counts importantly, the music, which humans had thought of as a value-neutral form of Communication, turns out to be a manifestation of status, sectarian triumphalism, and sexual ownership. Twenty years later the sole survivor, Father Sandoz, is interrogated on his return to Earth in order to plumb the mystery behind the apparent death of all his fellows. A Spaceship (essentially a hollowed-out Asteroid or mini World Ship) is sent by the Jesuit order to the planet Rakhat, after broadcasts of haunting Music were picked up by a SETI program First Contact with a complex native culture is established, seemingly with success, though the Prime Directive is fatuously ignored, and the enterprise goes disastrously sour. The Emilio Sandoz sequence is both an sf adventure with some Planetary Romance elements, and a daunting scrutiny of the relationship between the challenged sureties of Religion and the unfathomable otherness of the Alien.
Both A Thread of Grace ( 2005) and Dreamers of the Day ( 2008) are historical novels Doc ( 2011) is a Western.
(1950- ) US paleo-anthropologist and author who established a strong reputation for cognitive subtlety and narrative power in her brief sf career after the Emilio Sandoz sequence – comprising The Sparrow ( 1996), her first novel, which won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the BSFA Award, the James Tiptree Jr Award, and inspired the granting of the John W Campbell Award in 1998 plus Children of God ( 1998) – she turned her interest to other fields.
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