Remnant Population

I read Remnant Population from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I had a lot of fun reading this. This is a first contact novel with the main character being an older woman in her seventies. At the start of the book, Ofelia is living with her only remaining adult son and his wife. When the colony she is on loses their contract and evacuates, and she decides to hide and stay. It turns out that the planet had undiscovered intelligent life, and these aliens come to investigate her. In the end, she's caught in the middle between these friendly aliens and returning humans.

I think what I most appreciate about this book is the wry internal perspective and character development of Ofelia. She is an old woman who has put in the work, and whose primary character trait is that she's just tired of putting up with other people's expectations and attitudes. Her daughter-in-law harangues her about how she dresses, and the fact that she will be free and able to live blissfully in solitude is the real motivating factor for her to not leave with the rest of the colonists.

When the aliens show up to curiously investigate her, Ofelia begins by treating them like irresponsible children; when they track mud in her house, she tries to teach them how to mop. The aliens certainly interrupt her solitude, but ultimately give Ofelia the community and respect that she never previously had, even despite the language and species barriers.

When more humans show up, they're a threat to the aliens, but they're just as much as threat to Ofelia's new-found independence. These new humans treat her more or less the same as the previous ones (via an ageist and ableist lens), rudely unable to take Ofelia or her experience seriously or believe that she can communicate in rudimentary ways with the aliens, let alone that she has an accord with them. In the end, it's an opportunity for Ofelia to come into her own and be able to finally ignore the people-pleasing internal voice that tries to keep her small.

Ofelia reminds me in some ways of the aiji-dowager Ilisidi from CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. Ofelia is not crafty and maneuvering like Ilisidi, and instead leans on her own introverted stubbornness. That said, they're both irritated at all of these condescending youngsters who think they know better, who can't even bother with politeness or sharing some tea. And, when confronted with the unknown, they both treat it with kindness and courtesy.

Ofelia is in her seventies, no longer considered a useful colonist, and considered more of an embarrassment than a help by her one remaining child and his disagreeable wife. So when the company decides to abandon as unprofitable the colony world where Ofelia has spent the last 40 years of her life working, she decides to stay behind and live out her remaining years alone in peace for once. This works pretty well for her until members of an intelligent indigenous species discover her there, and suddenly she is the first human to make contact with a completely new alien race. She finds ways to communicate, and helps teach them the basics of the human technology that was left behind. Eventually a team from the government is sent to make official contact, and Ofelia finds herself caught in between the aliens, who she's come to view as friends, and the official team, who see her actions in sharing human knowledge as irresponsible and borderline traitorous to humanity.

Overall really liked this book, Ofelia is an unusual protagonist and pleasantly three-dimensional, and the aliens are very well described and very alien. The one thing that annoyed me is the outright stupidity of the team of supposed alien experts sent by the government for supposedly the most important alien contact in the history of ever. They are just ridiculously incompetent for the most part, which made it seem like a contrivance for many of the problems Ofelia has to sort out. Nonetheless, apart from that I really enjoyed the book and the feisty protagonist with her excellently characterized alien friends.