Fiction: Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon

       Despite the uninspired title, Remnant Population is a compelling read starring a feisty aging protagonist and fascinating aliens.
       When colonists are forced to evacuate their planet, elderly Ofelia decides to rebel and stay behind.  Ofelia making her decision: 
       “She felt her heart pounding, and a delicious sense of wickedness rose from between her toes to the top of her scalp, bathing her in heat.”
       It is Ofelia’s rebelliousness I found most endearing.  We watch her transform from an oppressed older woman to a person embracing her vision for herself, but the journey is not easy.  Though she relishes her solitude, it’s hard to break her old fears of retribution from others. 

Early on, she hides in the forest to escape evacuation, enjoying a delicious sense of freedom—until it rains:
        “She wished she had brought dry clothes; she had not thought how wet she might be, or how stiff.  She did not feel free, from having slept on the ground in the open, she felt sticky and miserable, her joints aching sharply.  When it finally occurred to her that she could take off the damp garments sticking to her skin, she laughed aloud, then stopped abruptly, a hand to her mouth.  . . .She waited, listening; when no voice sounded, she felt her body relax, her hand drop from her mouth.  ...She peeled the clothes off, peering around to be sure no one watched.” [She knows everyone else is already off-planet.]

       Ofelia keeps the power plant running (fueled by refuse) to power her appliances and tends gardens to grow food.
        She has a moment of panic when the permanence of her isolation registers: 
​       “Silence wrapped its hands around her head, muffling and smothering.”
       But her irrepressible spirit soon rebounds and she is sewing wildly colored capes and painting beads (and herself): 
       “She would have loved her children better, she thought now, if she had realized how much she herself needed to play, to follow her own childish desire to handle beautiful things and make more beauty."

 I also enjoyed how the author invoked Ofelia’s memories of her first lover: 
“The tall corn with its rich smell that always reminded her of Caitano’s body.”
“When thunder rumbled, she felt it in her chest and belly, it shook her bones.  It reminded her of Caitano.”

       This is a world you can hear and taste.  ​Ofelia’s home during a rainstorm:  
​       “Soon the darkening evening filled with the sounds of water:  the rush of rain itself, the drumming on the roof, the melodious drip from eaves onto the doorstones, the gurgle of water moving in the house ditches to the drain beyond. "
​       [In the open doorway]:
​      "A fine spray of water brushed her face and arms as the water rebounded from the ground outside.  She licked it off her lips: more refreshing than any shower.”

      A new set of colonists arrive but start terraforming a different part of the planet.  Ofelia listens to them being slaughtered by an unknown indigenous population over the radio.  She grapples with this situation:
      “They had come; they had gone; she was alone again, and had wanted to be alone.
      It was not the same.
      It would never be the same.
      Something—no someone, some creatures, lived on this world and wanted to kill her—had killed humans—and she had not known any such danger existed.  She could not unknow it.”

 Ofelia’s aging body is deftly portrayed throughout the story:

       “She stood in the kitchen, unable to move in any direction until a cramp in her foot stabbed her with such pain that mere terror was forgotten.  She leaned her weight onto the cramping foot and her breath sobbed in and out, and finally the cramp eased.  She was tired and she hurt all over.  If the aliens wanted to kill her, they could do it while she was asleep.
       Her foot cramped again once she was in bed, and she rolled out clumsily to stand on it again.  She was too old for this.”
       “She hated not remembering; it made her feel foolish.”

       Ofelia’s solitude is disrupted by the arrival of alien scouts.  And then further complicated when scientists arrive to study the aliens—and threaten to take Ofelia off-planet and put her in a nursing home.           Her thoughts:  “the world, her mother had often said, does not shape itself to your wish, any more than dough mixes itself when you’re hungry.”

       Here the aliens respond to the new colonists’ destruction of their nesting ground by dispelling the ship's contrails, then calling down rain:
       “The scar in the sky blew away to nothing.  No more monster noises from the air, no more bad smells.  The People danced, winding around the burnt earth, sending out a long spiral coil of dancers to find live sprigs of grass, pressed from one to another inward, until the site had been replanted.  They danced on, drumming and dancing, until the wind drums answered, until the sky people gathered to dance in their own coils and spirals, weeping at the monster tracks, filling them with sweet tears that nourished the grass.”

       The novel’s conclusion is both surprising and thoroughly satisfying.  Remnant Population is a rich science fiction tale with a compelling older female protagonist and otherworldly aliens that nonetheless seem very real.

For another take on an older female hero, read my review of The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fischer

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