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Paul Park

Author of A Princess of Roumania

30+ Works 2,220 Members 68 Reviews 6 Favorited

About the Author

Includes the names: Paul Park, Paulina Claiborne

Image credit: Fantastic Reviews

Series

Works by Paul Park

A Princess of Roumania (2005) 725 copies
The Tourmaline (2006) 240 copies
Soldiers of Paradise (1987) 177 copies
Celestis (1993) 176 copies
The White Tyger (2007) 171 copies
Sugar Rain (1989) 117 copies
The Hidden World (2008) 116 copies
Gospel Of Corax (1861) 100 copies
All Those Vanished Engines (2014) 78 copies
The Sugar Festival (1987) 50 copies
A City Made of Words (2019) 32 copies
The Rose of Sarifal (2012) 26 copies
Three Marys (1819) 19 copies

Associated Works

Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists (2002) — Contributor — 197 copies
Other Earths (2009) — Contributor — 180 copies
Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (1994) — Contributor — 147 copies
Year's Best SF 17 (2012) — Contributor — 127 copies
Year's Best SF 16 (2011) — Contributor — 126 copies
The Best of Interzone (1997) — Contributor — 99 copies
Sideways In Crime (2008) — Contributor — 99 copies
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition (2010) — Contributor — 94 copies
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2011 Edition (2011) — Contributor — 93 copies
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012 Edition (2012) — Contributor — 89 copies
After the End: Recent Apocalypses (2013) — Contributor; Contributor — 87 copies
Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy (2010) — Contributor — 81 copies
Full Spectrum 5 (1995) — Contributor — 73 copies
Galileo's Children: Tales Of Science VS. Superstition (2005) — Contributor — 42 copies
The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on tor.com (2013) — Contributor — 38 copies
Omni Best Science Fiction One (1992) — Contributor — 24 copies
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 37 • June 2013 (2013) — Contributor — 18 copies
Conjunctions: 67, Other Aliens (2016) — Contributor — 14 copies
Postscripts Magazine, Issue 32/33: Far Voyager (2014) — Contributor — 10 copies
Exotic Gothic 5 [Vol 2] (2013) — Contributor — 9 copies
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 83 • April 2017 (2017) — Contributor — 7 copies
Infinity plus two (2002) — Contributor — 2 copies

Tagged

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Common Knowledge

Members

Reviews

This was a strange book. To say the least.

Apparently, many people strongly disliked it; I actually found it interesting, confusing, misleading, meandering... and a good read.

But I fully understand people not liking it. This is a book that requires a certain... reader? attitude? patience? point of view? ...a certain something to enjoy, and is definitely not for everyone.
 
Flagged
dcunning11235 | 6 other reviews | Aug 12, 2023 |
I came to Paul Park's Celestis after reading his more recent Roumania series. Although Roumania is portal fantasy and Celestis is exoplanetary science fiction, they share a great deal in style and content--and neither sits placidly within its genre.

Park has clearly worked out a terrestrial future for background to this book, but Celestis is the site of the tale, and Earth is far away. Readers get little exposure to it, except via fragmentary memories and remarks of the diplomat Simon, who is part of the most recent (and possibly last) cohort of terrestrial emigrants. There is a subjugated species of indigenous humanoids, and another native race acknowledged to be more intelligent than humans but now largely exterminated after generations of human settlement and conflict.

Reviewers are generally quick to remark the political dimensions of this novel, but I think it is far more than a parable of colonialist decline. The religious features are conspicuous, with Christianity figuring notably in the cultivated mentality of the semi-protagonist Katharine, who is an assimilated aboriginal. (I suspect that her name is deliberately spelled to evoke "Cathar" i.e. Albigensian heresy.) The priest Martin Cohen (another allusive moniker) is a key character, if not exactly an admirable one. The differences in the native sensorium create an explicit multiplication of experiential worlds connected by symbols.

Despite its large themes, the book's action takes place on a very personal level. There is a fair amount of sex and violence, all of it suitably disturbing and difficult. Almost every interaction is fraught with misunderstanding, much of it willful. I was less than twenty pages from the end, and I said to myself, "This can't end well." Indeed, while a screen adaptation might superficially present the final tableau as "happy," any attentive reader should be left with a profound uneasiness. Questions of "fact" about events in the story may prove insoluble, not least because of irreconcilable perspectives, and the ending throws this feature into almost painful relief.
… (more)
 
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paradoxosalpha | 7 other reviews | Apr 7, 2023 |
 
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freixas | 23 other reviews | Mar 31, 2023 |
Imperialist HUmans find a planet to sustain life after the Earth is all used up. Two Aboriginal races live there and the humans genocide one of the races, and force the other to take a medication that limits their senses; to enslave them. A good story for a misanthropa like myself, but not for a misandrist like myself.
 
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burritapal | 7 other reviews | Oct 23, 2022 |

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Statistics

Works
30
Also by
28
Members
2,220
Popularity
#11,547
Rating
½ 3.4
Reviews
68
ISBNs
64
Languages
2
Favorited
6

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