In Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014), a minister named Peter is sent to a distant planet, Oasis, as a missionary to humanoid aliens – the Oasans. The drama on the planet is muted – a proportion of the Oasans have become committed “Jesus Lovers” and require only pastoring and preaching; Peter’s job is not the stuff of nineteenth-century missionary adventure books in which the bearer of God’s word must endure cannibals. Life for the humans on Oasis is a little boring but not particularly dangerous or terrible. Yet Peter can communicate with his wife, Bea, through a kind of email system and from her he learns of the growing tide of disasters besetting his home planet. As the Earth fall apart, he feels disconnected from it and from his wife. Continue reading
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
15 Sunday Nov 2015
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