This book is so complex and raises such intricate issues that we obviously weren’t able to exhaust discussion about it. I agree with Tim, it was interesting to focus on who would be qualified for such a mission and try to make a list out of it. I think our discussion concerning that got most interesting when people started raising the issue of what would be the goal of the mission: making contact or gathering information? Which led to the whole idea of a series of missions and what kind of mission should go first. I think we established as a class that the Jesuit mission didn’t think things entirely through, but then again what can you expect, they seemed to have expected God to take care of the things they overlooked.
The other part of discussion that I think was very important originated with Phil saying that the people on the mission got too comfortable. And that led to the question of how scientific were they actually acting and at which point did they make their mistake(s). I am also interested to see how the second book will flip things around. I think that it will be able to tell us more about the mistakes of the first expedition.
Lastly I want to mention a thought that crossed my mind during discussion. While we were discussing Supaari and debating how they should have interacted with him and viewed him, the thing that I thought is: despite his appearance, claws and carnivorous nature, he exhibits very human qualities. He desires to have a family and although he is marginalized by society he does his best to figure out a way to achieve his goals. We may find him selling Emilio as a means of getting what he wants as “inhumane” but if we look at our own history, humans have used other humans to reach their own goals on numerous occasions. And if you think about it when people have created aliens (in various forms of fiction) the aliens always to some extent exhibit human characteristics and desires; that is because that is the only way we can perceive things, I don’t know if anyone can actually create a truly “non-human” alien.
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The last you said rings true to some of our earlier conversations. Aliens in both books and visual media tend to be very similar to humans so that the aliens and humans can at least relate to one another, even if it is on a very low level.
Good point about the Alien thing. I feel the closest we have come to the "non human" alien is the Crystalline Entity in Star Trek: TNG. But still, the reference for it came from something found on our world.
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