A book review by Elliot Jackman
BY WILLOW THOMSON
ASIN: B07NPZDCQB – Print Length: 269 pages
This is a great story about a pair that are doing their best to survive on Earth as homeopathic healers. Jada is the main protagonist, of sorts, who sees an add looking for volunteers for a colony ship and decides she wants to participate. She is able to, with very little effort, to convince her colleague and friend, Celie, to join her.
A short period later, they embark on a bus journey to the colony ship. After arrival at the ship, the story revolves around their preparations and getting to know a few new characters. The ship eventually launches and during their trip, there is some trouble that arises due to Celie’s daughter, Talleh. She is empathic and feels that there is a negativity among some of the passengers. They find that there are some on the ship that aren’t there for an altruistic fresh start for the humans aboard.
The ship arrives at the destination planet and they find that there is very little negative about the situation. The atmosphere is close to Earth, but not really directly breathable for long periods of time. They begin setting up their colony after dealing with the few people aboard the ship that didn’t seem to be going along with the other passenger’s plans.
They get a colony setup on the planet and much of the story revolves around the two healers, and the empathic daughter, Talleh. Soon, they find that there is more sentience around them than would be readily apparent by the naked eye.
They are joined by another colony ship that is related to their miscreants aboard their own ship. This group is there more to begin mining operations etc. than to colonize. The remainder of the story generally revolves around the interactions between these two colonies and how they try to work out their difference in agendas.
I did enjoy the story. I was interested to find out what was going to happen next as they progressed in their adventure. I’ll admit that I was thrown a little by the lack of conflict and adversity.
During their long bus trip, the description of things around was very depressing, yet there were no resulting issues to come from it. At one stop, an important member of the crew did not show up and they were waiting for hours after their appointed time. Then, she just shows up and they leave. It seemed very anticlimactic.
This type of theme prevailed in the story. Anything that came up as adversity was relatively quickly overcome and everybody was happy and moved on. This gives the story a very upbeat theme and gives a view of how this type of activity may progress if everything goes according to plan with only a few glitches.
While I know this story was not meant to be Hard SciFi, I could not help but notice that the colony ship only had about three hundred members. As most people interested in colony ship type stories probably know, that is not enough for genetic diversity in a new colony. There would start to be genetic effects due to inbreeding several generations in the future. While carrying frozen embryos etc. can help with that number, it is still a very small number to start with. It’s just something that popped into my mind while reading…
I feel that if you enjoy SciFi and some Fantasy then you’ll enjoy this story. They story does not have episodes that result in fighting or military type battles, so it revolves mainly around the characters and their adventure. My only hope is that more people follow their lead and the colony receives more people to insure their long term survival. I guess I’ll see in future installment of the adventure!
Review on GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3644757718