The Book of Strange New Things

Part of what I love about this novel is that its basic premise–an English pastor is sent to a distant planet to preach the Christian gospel to aliens–sounds so absurd that it’s hard to imagine it feeling real. But Faber does a wonderful job of taking the glamor out of space travel and foreign worlds.

The atmosphere of this novel is all empty cafeterias and unpleasant humidity–I love the banality of it all! In its portrait of a loving but strained marriage (with the husband getting excited over aliens and the wife struggling to hold it together on a dying… show more.

This book tells the story of a religious man selected to meet the most alien of aliens far across the galaxy, leaving the woman he loves in the process. But their physical distance is the least of their concerns as he finds himself starting to question his most core beliefs as a missionary, and becoming ever more alienated from his own people even as he struggles to communicate his new, alien-inspired insights. Faber wrote this book as his own wife was dying, and I have to think that feeling of urgency and loss was interwoven into this amazing story. As… show more.

I love books that are not just set in haunted or “alternate” places but also books set in space. It seems to me as both a reader and a writer I am attracted to stories that are set in worlds that are both imaginable and “strange.” Faber’s book is strange in the best possible ways. A husband and wife are separated when he goes to another planet to work for a corporation that wants religious teachings to take root on the planet. The “natives”—who can be wounded but can’t heal—embrace these new teachings eagerly, at the same time Earth, the… show more.