Celestis

by Paul Park

Book Overview

Paul Park's Nebula-nominated novel is an extraordinary, challenging work about a human colony on an alien world. "A "Martian Chronicles" for the nineties possessed of a haunting power".--"Locus". This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031285899X
• ISBN13: 9780312858995
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 287 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Celestis

Paul Park definatly made an impression on me about the way our country and our life form lives our lives. We all depend on wanting to be something we are not. Here we've got Simon and Katherine,a human working for the diplomats on Celestis and the other an alien that takes drugs and has surgery so she can be more human physically and mentally. Park definately shows detail in how Katherine develops sexual tendancy, almost too much detail. When these two are kidnapped all her forms of drugs are no longer available and that is where the book becomes very exciting.

Grippingly difficult

Casual readers won't find this a fun ride at all, this is a book that makes a grab for literary status and just about succeeds. I'm not familiar with Paul Park's other works but this definitely impressed me and showed that science fiction can be more than just people shooting at each other with laser guns, it can be a frank examination of what we are and where we're going, just because the setting is another planet and the characters can't all be called "human", means nothing. Here we've got Simon and Katherine, the former a human working for the diplomats on Celestis and the other an alien that has taken drugs and had surgery so that she can be more "human" in both look and thoughts. But when they get kidnapped by rebels, Katherine is cut off from her medicine and starts to go back to what she was originally . . . her slow descent (or ascent, depending on your will) into her basic "alieness" is well handled and Park strings us along like a master? Does the book move slowly? Yeah, it does and the dream sequences at first glance appear to only be there as a literary exercise, something to fill space with. But when examined you can see that they're key pieces to the stories, like all dreams they have a bit of truth and a bit of nonsense to them but like the best dreams they reverberate. This isn't a happy book by any stretch of the imagination, the planet is shackled, the people don't want to be there, hope isn't in high quantities. But yet everyone survives and through Park's mastery of detail we get to see it all, he makes his aliens seem like aliens and his people, while they're people you might know, sometimes they don't seem too far from aliens themselves. Like I said, not an easy book but one of the more important SF works of the nineties and not one you can easily ignore.

Dark, depressing, poetic and thought provoking.

On Celestis, humans have done what they have always done well throughout history: conquer, subjugate and assimilate the conquered without regard for the native culture. Then comes revolution and unrest. This is the setting for an alien - human love story that is like no other.This was a darkly poetic, thought provoking novel. Park presents a gloomy picture and there isn't much here to cheer about. The relationship between human and alien is seen from numerous points of view. But it is the alien's point of view that is most disturbing and unfortunately most accurate. As the drugs wear off she begins to thinks of humans (and her "lover") as dogs. This is an important work of science fiction. But if you are looking for fast paced sci-fi adventure this isn't for you. If the characters weren't all so pathetic I may have given this 5 stars. Recommended reading for the serious reader.

Landscape: alien's altered mind returns to itself

Paul Park has managed to create a spellbinding, meloncholic story which delves into the mind of an altered alien woman while she is returning to herself. When separated from the altering drugs that make her more 'human' the character of Katherine enters a world she has never experienced inside of her own mind. the poetry in Park's prose is almost enough to make it worth reading by itself. The story is engaging enough to make it doubly so.

A walk thorough humanity's dark side.

Decay is the single word that best describes Park's brooding and dark examination of a distant human colony planet, Celestis, which is very much an Outback. Reeling under ecological disasters, Earth is the slowly dying center of a once-thriving human interstellar society. Celestis sits at the edge of that civilization, a planet whose harsh enviroment has been tackled in large part because of its mineral wealth.The aboriginal peoples of the planet were either exterminated or assimilated during the heady days of human expansion. Now, however, retrenchment is the watchword. The indigenous peoples are very different from human beings, and frequently adopt surgical and medicinal approaches to make them more like their conquerers. The plot revolves around the relationship between Simon, a low-level member of the foreign service, and Katherine, the modified (and attractive) daughter of a wealthy aboriginal merchant. Their capture by native freedom fighters who deny Katherine access to the medications that maintain her "humaness" ignites a twisting relationship between her and Simon. Park explores the question of "humaness" by following Katherine's slow loss of this quality. Like most good SF, Celestis is really about us and now. Park uses the SF vehicle to ask fudamental questions about human nature. He uses Katherine's slow unraveling to probe this issue. One of the difficulties with this approach, however, is that the reader knows too little about the unaltered state of the aboriginals to determine whether some of the changes are simple reversions or true illness produced by drug-withdrawl. Further, some aspects of sexual relations in the novel are unnecessarily explicit. Graphic descriptions can be a very useful vehicle to make literary points. They must, however, be used carefully and judiciously. Park fails somewhat in this respect.