Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury..

[Fumesucker]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtship_Rite

Imagine a world so harsh that killing a person and *not* eating their remains is shockingly immoral.

That is Geta, the world of Kingsbury's Courtship Rite and the book is the story of the Maran-Kaiel family and their struggle to attain and keep power in an environment harsh beyond our most horrific dreams.

The inhabitants of Geta call the starship which brought their ancestors to the world "God" and have forgotten where they came from.

Courtship Rite is a bit like Dune but without the mysticism and with a great deal of hard headed extrapolation.

I've read Courtship Rite about five or six times and have somehow lost my copy in the last ten years or so, I'm going to get another one and read it again, it's that good.

Here is one customer's Amazon review:

I love this book, above all, for one scene: Oelita the heretic, who opposes her planet's custom of cannibalism and denies her planet's god, the starship that brought human beings there, has seen images of war from an ancient memory devices brought from Earth--and falls on her face in the mud, thanking her planet's god for rescuing her from Earth's horrors and giving her a world with nothing worse than recurrent famine and cannibalism. I believed in her feelings and empathized with them--and this kind of literary effect is what I read science fiction for. A fascinating book that deserves more readers.

http://www.amazon.com/Courtship-Rite-Timescape-Donald-Kingsbury/dp/0671460897/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top