Through Alien Eyes

In Thomson’s The Color of Distance (1995), Dr. Juna Saari was accidentally abandoned on the planet Tiangi. Despite life-threatening allergic reactions to that world’s life-forms, she managed to survive thanks to the biological wizardry of the Tendu, Tiangi’s intelligent native species, who radically altered her body to thrive in their environment. Now, returned to human form, Juna comes back to Earth accompanied by two Tendu. They must learn aboard ship, while visiting a series of Earth orbital habitats, and then on Earth to adapt to a human environment, but it isn’t clear whether humanity will accept them in return. Despite the great biological gifts the Tendu can offer an environmentally distressed Earth, many humans find the aliens frightening. Escorting the Tendu through Earth society, Juna finds her life spun upside down when she discovers that she is accidentally pregnant, an illegal act on an Earth struggling to overcome critical overpopulation. Much of the novel’s tension stems from attempts to force Juna either to abort or to give up her baby attempts stemming, in part, from the father’s refusal to allow his child to be raised with aliens. Thomson is an excellent prose stylist with an obvious love for the kind of wild country that is the Tendu’s preferred habitat. Her major characters are well developed, though her secondary characters, particularly the good guys, are not properly differentiated. Overall, this is an amiable, unusually thoughtful novel of first contact that should boost Thomson’s growing reputation.