“Jesuits in space” is the elevator pitch a friend gave me and it’s accurate but undersells how much this book actually does. Radio astronomers pick up music from four light years away and a well funded religious order, not a government, gets there first, because they’re the ones set up to move fast and justify it to themselves. That premise alone would carry a lesser book. What makes this one something else is the structure, which cuts between the mission itself and Father Emilio Sandoz afterward, the sole survivor, being very gently, very insistently interrogated by his own order about what happened to him. You know from the first page that it goes wrong. You spend the whole book hoping you misread that.

The alien society on Rakhat is genuinely one of the smarter first contact ideas I’ve read, two sapient species sharing a planet in a relationship the humans completely misread because they only ever meet the more charming, more approachable one first. Russell trained as an anthropologist and it shows, less in exposition than in how carefully the mistakes compound, each one small and forgivable in isolation. The first hundred fifty pages are almost entirely setup, character work, who these people are to each other before the planet takes it all away, and I understand why some readers want to skim it, but I’d tell you not to. The friendships are the whole reason the ending lands the way it does.

One thing that’s stuck with me since, and that I’ve seen a couple other readers flag sharper than I initially processed it myself: the book’s central trauma is a male priest’s rape, treated with a gravity and a sequel’s worth of narrative weight that a female character’s version of the same violence, elsewhere in the story, doesn’t get. It’s a real fault line in an otherwise extraordinary book, worth sitting with rather than waving away. Doesn’t change my rating. The final chapters, where the meaning of the title finally clicks into place, wrecked me in the specific way only a handful of books manage a year.