Point of View

Children of God is told in the third person past tense by an anonymous, omniscient narrator, who is fully sympathetic to the long-suffering, cantankerous protagonist, Emilio Sandoz, without downplaying his character faults. His immense sufferings have made him resign from the priesthood and from the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and lose all faith in God. Emilio nearly finds happiness with a woman and her child before being kidnapped for a return trip to the planet Rakhat, where he had been tortured.

A second thread follows the forty years that the only other survivor of that first expedition spends on Rakhat, living in hiding from liberated Runa who want to kill all Jana'ata as revenge for generations of being enslaved and serving as food. She brings up an autistic son among the noisy but caring Runa. There she is reunited with an old Jana'ata friend, Suupari, and...