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In Colleen Dripé's story "Snakestail" (Whistling Shade, Summer 2002) we met a futuristic Christian missionary order known as the Star Brothers. The Star Brothers return in Godcountry, Drippé's most recent novel, but this time they share the pages with a Stoic—Eduardo Sabat, a follower of Epictetus who believes in free will rather than preordained fate.
Sabat is, like Epictetus himself, a former slave. Now he's living in comfort on the violent but beautiful world of Sachsen, working for hire. His old friend Otto Zeller comes to him with a new job offer: rescuing a prince of Hithia, a newly contacted civilization that the Star Brothers hope to Christianize. The kidnapped prince is being held on the backwards and repressive planet of Quele, whose inhabitants worship a pantheon of sinister gods and are hostile to other religions. Sabat knows Quele—he had formerly worked there as a slave—and his role in the mission is to get the rescue team into the Godcountry preserve, the closely guarded holy precincts of the gods of Quele. But once on the planet, his old fears and feelings of helplessness begin to punch holes in his illusion of self will:
Steed set off the way we had come, back around the escarpment to the forest, but the rest of us took the hill path, climbing awkwardly in the dusk as alien stars began to prick the sky above us. From the river, night singers filled the air with their haunting cry, "Chee-ap! How-twit-aaah!"
This too, I remembered from before. God. How it all came back to me now, far more strongly even than it had when we made the crossing. And though I hated this place with all my being, I knew I was a part of it and it was a part of me, even as the slave band I wore and might never lay aside.
Much of the book follows Sabat and his party on a rugged, open-air journey into Godcountry, and in this respect it is not unlike a Western, or an account of missionaries in South America. Godcountry, with its poverty, agrarian lifestyle, and religious zealotry, isn't the sort of place you typically read about in science fiction novels. It’s a fascinating journey though, realistically drawn through Drippé’s well turned, rather formal prose. And an exciting one as well. A surprise seems lurking at the end of each chapter, as Sabat and his associates run up against rangers, villagers and “perfect ones” (holy police), all while being pursued by the crazed and homicidal Maureen Kavanaugh, Sabat’s former lover from his slave days.
The plot in Godcountry turns rather byzantine, and the gods of Quele never emerge into anything more than an anonymous, sinister pantheon. Drippé makes up for this, however, with her memorable characters (Sabat and Otto in particular), and soul-searching theme. Godcountry actually has something of importance to say—a rare thing in science fiction novels—and in fact the message is not very different from the one Tom Wolfe presented us with in A Man in Full. Wolfe’s Charlie Croker became, like Eduardo Sabat, a student of Epictetus the Stoic. Epictetus, who believed in free will, and that one can live a worthy life by acting nobly and without fear, regardless of fortune or misfortune.
- Joel Van Valin
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