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thegrimmreader's review
5.0
An amazing novel. Will be forever processing, because it was written by my mother, who would have turned 90 the day before yesterday.
coffeeandink's review
Wilder appears fond of shipwrecks: her other science fiction series, the Torin trilogy, also features Earthlings cast away on an alien world. In the Rhomary books, the ship Rho Maryland crashed on an unnamed planet a few generations ago; the survivors still remember Earth, and still search the sky for signs of other ships, wrecked or rescuing. In Second Nature, a desert hermit and astronomer identifies six meteorites as potential spaceship debris, and the Dator of Rhomary, who has the hereditary responsibility of searching out information related to the Earth past, sets out to find the wreckage and any possible survivors.
This is a bright, dense little book. Wilder shows the busy industry of Rhomary's one city, its poor slums, its outlying ranches, its religious cults, and the lost Vail, a mysterious huge whale-like alien race who used to inhabit the oceans of Rhomary, and who spoke to humans for generations and have fallen silent, or dead--plus another mythical race of aliens. The author's bios say she was born in New Zealand, raised in Australia, and lived much of her adult life in West Germany, which may account for the interesting ways in which Wilder departs from the standard American myths of colonization frequently replayed in science fiction. Rhomary's settlers aren't conquistadors: they are aliens subsisting uncomfortably and stubbornly in their new home, in love and longing with their past and with the aliens of the world.
What is most effective about this book is the sense of lost people reaching to succor each other; my favorite scene is when the new castaways and the old finally meet: the new astonished and overjoyed to find they're not the only humans left alone on this world, the old brought to tears when the new recite the names of the lost ships, proving they are still remembered and grieved, out there among the stars.
This is a bright, dense little book. Wilder shows the busy industry of Rhomary's one city, its poor slums, its outlying ranches, its religious cults, and the lost Vail, a mysterious huge whale-like alien race who used to inhabit the oceans of Rhomary, and who spoke to humans for generations and have fallen silent, or dead--plus another mythical race of aliens. The author's bios say she was born in New Zealand, raised in Australia, and lived much of her adult life in West Germany, which may account for the interesting ways in which Wilder departs from the standard American myths of colonization frequently replayed in science fiction. Rhomary's settlers aren't conquistadors: they are aliens subsisting uncomfortably and stubbornly in their new home, in love and longing with their past and with the aliens of the world.
What is most effective about this book is the sense of lost people reaching to succor each other; my favorite scene is when the new castaways and the old finally meet: the new astonished and overjoyed to find they're not the only humans left alone on this world, the old brought to tears when the new recite the names of the lost ships, proving they are still remembered and grieved, out there among the stars.
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