Paradise is an interesting novel in that the trappings of alien civilizations and far off planets are just a pretense for telling the story of colonial conquest and the subsequent struggle for native independence. Honestly, by some thirty pages into the book I had completely forgotten that the tale revolved around the contact of two different intelligent species, Homo Sapiens and Peponis, instead reading the tale of equals of which one was subjected by the other. Paradise reads almost like the post-colonial history of Africa replete with racism, bondage, economic and social inequalities, and the struggle of the people to define and strive towards their own vision of the future. Reading like the memoirs of one who has bore witness to the upheaval in Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria Resnick formulates the story with great care and sensitivity to all the characters.
It could have been very easy for Resnick to slip into dogmatic prose painting Homo Sapiens as the perpetrators of all the violence and all the evil wrought on the world of Peponi. The tale, however, like real life, is infinitively more complex and there is no black and white, in Paradise there is only gray for as far as the eye can see and I often found my sympathies stretched between the two species. Although great atrocities were committed on either side of the conflict tracing it to its root revealed only that no one is infallible and that, at least in this story, the great evil is a lack of foresight, the desire to remain bound by one’s ignorance, and a general tendency to resist understanding. In short, we all share the commonality of being unable to move beyond subjective reality.
Paradise is not a novel that should be overlooked for the sole fact that it is classified as science fiction. Resnick has written a moving portrayal of what happens when two vastly different cultures collide and the destruction that is visited upon the individuals trapped in the clash. In the end it is a story about how truly flawed we are as people and it should find a way onto your reading list.
