Orphan of Creation

Orphan of Creation is the Roger MacBride Allen novel that I would press into the hands of anyone who tells me they have written off Allen as a tie-in writer. The premise is genuinely strange: a young African-American anthropologist returns to her family's Mississippi land to do a dig in a slave cemetery and instead uncovers the bones of a small australopithecine, and then a living one, in a piece of marsh that has been forgotten for a hundred and fifty years.

Allen handles the material with seriousness and patience. The slavery history of the property is treated as the moral foundation of the book rather than as exotic backdrop. The scientific procedural is rendered with care. The ethical questions that emerge (who has standing to make decisions about the living creatures, what their discovery means for paleontology, what it means for the plantation's descendant family) are handled with weight.

Four stars. A book that should be on more SF reading lists. Recommended to readers who like SF that takes its moral questions seriously.