Celestis [Hardcover]

Paul Park (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1995

A human diplomat from Earth falls in love with an alien who has undergone plastic surgery to make her appear human, in a novel by the author of the acclaimed trilogy, The Starbridge Chronicles.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Paul Park's world of Celestis is not as dark and brooding as that of Paradise in his Sugar Rain books, but the story is even more disturbing. Humans have subjugated the planet's native aboriginals in those ways that humans often do. On the surface, all is calm and civilized: aboriginals appear happy with the lifestyle change, the cultural opportunities now available, and a victory over another native race that had enslaved them for centuries. But the calm is only a veneer that hides the decay and anger beneath, a short-term peace.

Park details the worms of decay through his description of Katherine, the daughter of a wealthy, Westernized native merchant. Katherine is a devout Catholic and takes drugs and undergoes periodic plastic surgery to make her more human; with her transplanted knucklebones, she can even play Beethoven on her concert piano. Katherine and Simon, a young diplomat assigned to Celestis, are thrown together when they're kidnapped during an uprising. Simon falls in love with her, but Katherine, cut off from the medication she needs to keep her humanlike, begins to revert to her natural--though to her quite unnatural--alien state.

A tangled predicament of violence, transformation, and loss, Celestis delivers an eerie view of history, psychology, and the perception of others. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Entering a Paul Park universe means slipping onto an eerily compelling plane where nearly palpable visions transform as disturbingly as the images in a sexually charged fever dream. While the world imagined here, with its imperial/colonial paradigm, seems planted on firmer ground than the world of Parks's trilogy, The Starbridge Chronicles, the oddly disengaging revolution through which the author's new characters wander tends to skew the fine-edged balance he is apparently trying to maintain between futility and passion. Katharine Styreme is an alien whose man-made medications have enabled her to organize conscious thought, appreciate the beauty inherent in religion and music and generally appear more human. But when Katharine, along with the human consul Simon Mayaram, are kidnapped by terrorists, she is deprived of her medications. As she and Simon seek sanctuary from the growing violence, her conscious mind slowly reverts back to a more alien, and much richer, interior perspective. Park produces some beautiful writing here, as well as compelling insight into the nature of "the world outside our small blinkered range," but his repeated emphasis on how sexual bonding promotes a false sense of communication detracts from an otherwise impressive treatise on the nature of mind, matter and reality.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 287 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (June 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031285899X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312858995
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,239,787 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grippingly difficult, February 24, 2001

By 

Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Celestis (Paperback)

Casual readers won't find this a fun ride at all, this is a book that makes a grab for literary status and just about succeeds. I'm not familiar with Paul Park's other works but this definitely impressed me and showed that science fiction can be more than just people shooting at each other with laser guns, it can be a frank examination of what we are and where we're going, just because the setting is another planet and the characters can't all be called "human", means nothing. Here we've got Simon and Katherine, the former a human working for the diplomats on Celestis and the other an alien that has taken drugs and had surgery so that she can be more "human" in both look and thoughts. But when they get kidnapped by rebels, Katherine is cut off from her medicine and starts to go back to what she was originally . . . her slow descent (or ascent, depending on your will) into her basic "alieness" is well handled and Park strings us along like a master? Does the book move slowly? Yeah, it does and the dream sequences at first glance appear to only be there as a literary exercise, something to fill space with. But when examined you can see that they're key pieces to the stories, like all dreams they have a bit of truth and a bit of nonsense to them but like the best dreams they reverberate. This isn't a happy book by any stretch of the imagination, the planet is shackled, the people don't want to be there, hope isn't in high quantities. But yet everyone survives and through Park's mastery of detail we get to see it all, he makes his aliens seem like aliens and his people, while they're people you might know, sometimes they don't seem too far from aliens themselves. Like I said, not an easy book but one of the more important SF works of the nineties and not one you can easily ignore.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, depressing, poetic and thought provoking., December 24, 1999

By 

John D. Costanzo "johndc" (Bensalem, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Celestis (Paperback)

On Celestis, humans have done what they have always done well throughout history: conquer, subjugate and assimilate the conquered without regard for the native culture. Then comes revolution and unrest. This is the setting for an alien - human love story that is like no other.

This was a darkly poetic, thought provoking novel. Park presents a gloomy picture and there isn't much here to cheer about. The relationship between human and alien is seen from numerous points of view. But it is the alien's point of view that is most disturbing and unfortunately most accurate. As the drugs wear off she begins to thinks of humans (and her "lover") as dogs.

This is an important work of science fiction. But if you are looking for fast paced sci-fi adventure this isn't for you. If the characters weren't all so pathetic I may have given this 5 stars. Recommended reading for the serious reader.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Landscape: alien's altered mind returns to itself, November 29, 1998

By 

Kim Ward: [e-mail] (Montpelier, Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Celestis (Paperback)

Paul Park has managed to create a spellbinding, meloncholic story which delves into the mind of an altered alien woman while she is returning to herself. When separated from the altering drugs that make her more 'human' the character of Katherine enters a world she has never experienced inside of her own mind. the poetry in Park's prose is almost enough to make it worth reading by itself. The story is engaging enough to make it doubly so.