Ooooo, this book gets me so tangled up in knots -- it has a lot of things I really enjoy (including apparently Jesuit priest whump, go figure) but then the actual treatment of in-universe responses to the expedition once they're out of Rakhat, both in wider society and within the Catholic Church itself, is absolutely baffling. I can buy all kinds of horrific misunderstandings, miscommunications, misrepresentations, etc. of traumatic experiences taking place in a literally-alien cultural context, but somehow just... not these ones. It feels like a fanfic AU of some other work where things like the handwavey approach to SF/science in general can be chalked up to the author's wheelhouse lying elsewhere. (Also like. The novel itself touches on this to some degree but not only is theodicy/the problem of evil a pretty damn big area of theology in general, atrocities perpetrated by and against Catholic clergy are a pretty big part of the history of the Catholic Church in general and the Society of Jesus specifically! Which I'd wager is part of the novel's inspiration, with the Early Modern Jesuits' queasy track record for cross-cultural contact with previously predominantly non-Christian cultures, but it should be possible to show the Catholic administration back on Earth having partisan beefs around the expedition itself/Sandoz as a figure without acting like this is the first time anything remotely like this has ever happened, ever.) Anyway, I obviously ended up here because you recced my own weird alien sex fanfiction so I am probably exactly the target market for this novel, but I have zero doubt there's room for a much better treatment of these same themes (like the fascination with first-contact narratives) and their relevance specifically in SF that is like... 20% less whumpy. At least.