CELESTIS

Humans fleeing an ecologically and socially collapsing Earth have founded a colony on Celestis, a planet that keeps one face turned toward its primary. The native Aboriginals were, apparently, enslaved by a second race, older and more powerful, known as demons, which the humans quickly decimated. To avoid re- enslavement, the Aboriginals accepted surgical and pharmacological intervention to make themselves more humanlike. But now a liberation movement arises among the natives—galvanized, incongruously, by what seems to be a demon. Young diplomat Simon Mayaram is ordered by his superior to attend celebrations at a remote country estate. During his visit, the estate is attacked by revolutionaries. Humans and altered Aboriginals are slaughtered; Simon is captured along with Katharine Styreme, the humanlike ``daughter'' of a wealthy Aboriginal, and conveyed to a prison on the dark side of the planet. Fortuitously, they manage to escape during an assault by anti-Aboriginal human terrorists. But without her drugs, Katharine begins to revert to her true nature, and she develops insights into the complex relationship between Aboriginals and demons—a relationship willfully misunderstood by Simon and his fellow humans because of its disturbingly close resemblance to human homosexual contact. Thoughtful, unsettling, and provocative; a pity that Park (The Cult of Loving Kindness, 1991, etc.) didn't develop the underlying ecological assumptions with greater rigor and clarity.