Brilliant first novel about the discovery of extraterrestrial life and
the voyage of a party of Jesuit missionaries to Alpha Centauri. Russell lays
down two narratives: One begins in 2059, in the aftermath of the mission;
the other in 2019, when a young astronomer intercepts a transmission of
haunting songs from Alpha Centauri. In the latter, a linguist and Jesuit
priest named Emilio Sandoz swiftly organizes a group of Jesuits and civilian
specialists to turn an asteroid into a spaceship. The ship will reach
the singing planet, called Rakhat, in four years of passenger time, even
though 17 years will pass on Earth. In the narrative beginning in 2059,
therefore, the mission's only survivor, Sandoz himself, is only a decade
older. But he is a broken man physically and spiritually. The mission began
well: Rakhat was beautiful and bountiful, and the men and women from Earth
lived peacefully alongside a gentle and dreamy race, rather like the eloi
of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, here called the runa. Then, inadvertently,
the visitors improve the local diet, causing a surge in births among
the Runa; suddenly, another, fiercer race appears to put things right.
It seems that the Jana'ata raise the Runa like rabbits. The newborn are
slain and eaten, as is the party from Earth, except for Sandoz, who is taken
to the strange capitol city and sold into a brothel. There, he is raped
repeatedly by the great poet who wrote the angelic songs that fetched
the Jesuits in the first place. A startling portrait of an alien culture
and of the nature of God as well, since, in his utter humiliation and in
the annihilation of his spirit, Sandoz is reborn in faith. Shades of Wells,
Ursula K. LeGuin, and Arthur C. Clarke, with just a dash of Edgar Rice
Burroughs--and yet strikingly original, even so.

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