Remnant Population (Elizabeth Moon)

Remnant Population
Elizabeth Moon
Random House
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Since childhood, Ophelia has been told what to do with her life, forced to give up any dreams of creativity or education to be a housewife, mother and, for forty years, a colonist. But when the charter company, having struggled for decades with declining populations and no profits, loses their contract, the people are given just thirty days to pack up and leave... only Ophelia refuses to go. Even her own son considers her worthless (save as cook and cleaner), and the company actually wants to charge a fee for transporting a woman well past breeding (read: useful) age to another world. The septuagenarian is beyond tired of being told how worthless she is. All she wants is peace and quiet to tend her garden, and that can't happen until everyone else has left.
Alone in the abandoned village, Ophelia feels joy for the first time since she was a little girl. She can go where she wants, wear what she wants, do what she wants, whenever she wants. If she feels any loneliness, it's more than outweighed by the freedom of being the only human - the only self-aware being - on the entire planet.
Or so she thinks... until she overhears a transmission from a new colony ship that ends in disaster when an previously unknown species attacks their fledgling settlement - a species advanced enough to coordinate a battle plan and even use war machines and explosives.
But that ship landed over a thousand kilometers away. Surely, if any of the natives were nearby, someone in Ophelia's village would've spotted some sign of them long ago... wouldn't they?

REVIEW: This title is something of a classic, or at least a notable title, in sci-fi circles, featuring an older woman, widowed and a grandmother, as the unlikely point of contact with intelligent alien life. It offers a somewhat different lens on human and alien interactions, though at times it meandered and drifted and ultimately fell back on some tired ideas, enough to narrowly cost it a half-star.
From the start, it's clear that Ophelia, and the culture she's part of, is a throwback to mid-century gender attitudes: women are discouraged from becoming anything but homemakers, men regularly belittle and abuse even their own mothers, and the status quo is stringently and violently enforced when anyone dares to question it. Ophelia knows something is not right with this arrangement, that she has been deprived of something vital and essential, but has tolerated it for lack of options for most of her long life, until the cancellation of the colony charter offers an unexpected opportunity for escape - if not an unlimited one. Earth-based lifeforms need Earth-originated food sources grown or fed with Earth microbes, meaning that any plant or animal native to the colony world cannot be digested (a restriction that goes both ways). Still, there's plenty of gardens and seeds and livestock to support one old woman for however long she has left to live, and the company didn't bother removing the buildings or machinery that powered the village and the orbital weather satellite. Ophelia finds the empty place to be a paradise, freed at last to rediscover joy and whimsy. She doesn't hate her fellow humans (though she had no love for her late, abusive second husband, and her lone surviving son turned into a petty tyrant of the household in his cruel father's image), but she never felt like herself when she was around them, and revels in the chance to discover who she truly is at the twilight of her life. The story drags a little here as the old woman plots her escape and establishes new routines in the empty village. (There are also hints, now and again, that some other force is at work behind her unusually strong bond to the planet over her own kind, but it's never explicitly followed up on.)
A year or so into her isolation, she overhears, via the satellite feed, the disastrous second colony attempt and learns that the planet holds more dangerous surprises. Ophelia tries to tell herself that nothing has changed, that she'll likely pass away of old age before the native culture discovers her settlement... but even then, part of her knows she's lying to herself, that it's only a matter of time before she is found. The People are a reasonably interesting culture, not nearly so simple-minded or "primitive" as Ophelia initially believes, though once again things bog down a bit as she finds herself trying to communicate with utterly inhuman visitors. At first she sees them as almost childlike, partly because the only way she knows how to begin teaching them is the way every parent teaches their own children, through gesture and repetition, though soon she must concede that the People are far more intelligent than that, possibly even more precocious than humans with how quickly they grasp new ideas. Even as she makes progress, her peace has been broken, and it's inevitable that the greater spacefaring government and military will arrive at some point, which could be disastrous for all concerned.
Though there was plenty Remnant Population did right, in the end I found the excessive meandering and drifting had worn on my interest. I also felt that it undermined its own oft-repeated ideas of women breaking free of oppressive patriarchal (and ageist) cultures that expect them to be nothing more than submissive mothers and grandmothers when it ultimately wound up making Ophelia's maternal instincts the most vital part of her personality.

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