They were defending their nests, and they saw the ship as a “monster” and the people who came out of it as “monsters in gray and green….A lively debate followed, whether the stinking corpses of great flyers had been shells or garments or separate creatures, allies of the monsters.”Įventually the indigenous people find Ofelia. Occasionally, then, we get a few pages of narration focusing on the way the indigenous people of this world see the humans. She lives alone as she pleases for months, until she hears an attempt to land another human ship on a different part of her planet go wrong, with what seem to be indigenous aliens attacking and killing all the humans. They were not her grandchildren, but she had been telling stories to small children for so long it didn’t matter.”Īfter hiding in the forest for a couple of days while the spaceships take off, Ofelia makes the colony her own, turning on the power plant, cleaning out everyone’s refrigerators, and checking on the livestock. Ofelia sat for a while in a padded rocker in the passage, telling stories to small children. “She had always enjoyed figuring out ways to do things, though usually someone just gave her directions.” Ofelia helps with the sewing and “when her shoulders tired, someone always noticed, and came to knead them and take a turn at the machine. More than the petty rules, however, Ofelia resents the way her natural curiosity and creativity have been continually confined to what her male relations consider appropriate to the low-status jobs they assign her–taking care of children, cooking, and sewing.Īs the novel begins, the younger colonists, who’ve never had to move before, are puzzling over how to pack their clothing, and Ofelia designs luggage they can make with the material and sewing machines they have at the Center, a community building. She resented her daughter-in-law’s “determination to enforce on her mother-in-law all the petty rules intended to preserve the virtue of virgins” including covering every inch of skin and her hair.
She enjoys being free of the rules, which sound like they were established by some kind of fundamentalist religious group. They send ships to evacuate the colonists, but Ofelia stays behind. Remnant Population is about a 70-year-old woman named Ofelia who has lived on a colonized planet for 40 years and decides to stay after the company who sponsored the colony, Sims Bancorp, declines to invest any further. Remnant Population, by Elizabeth Moon, was recommended to me by my friend Elizabeth, and it was balm to my soul in many ways, not least because it was such a page-turner that I stayed up really late one night finishing it.
0 kommentar(er)
