Survivor

(this book is out of print and difficult to acquire, luckily my library had a copy) On an earth compatible planet a group of colonists struggles with the planet’s native sentient species (who as far as I can tell amount to something we would think of as a sasquatch-looking humanoid who have a chameleon-like camouflage capability). The human colonists are religious missionaries and are part of a group of the last “pure” humans since the earth has been infected/colonized with the clayark virus. The struggle is between the colonists and two separate factions of the natives. This book is kind of a mess and its very hard to follow the plot which is not helped by the changing narrators and the two similar-but-different groups of natives. The sci-fi elements are definitely dated and not super plausible even when OB really doesn’t try to justify her creations - She presents us with a distant planet where the native life is recognizably humanoid and can even interbreed with the human colonists (which, even though interbreeding is a theme of the patternist series is in this case, a bridge too far.) I am reading this as part of the OB curriculum and this book, as flawed as it is is included (I assume) because it has a digression about the situation on Earth that explains the interaction and resulting antipathy between the clays-ark survivors and her Doro-descended patternist tribe.