Review: It moves from crisis to crises really well
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 11, 2014
This book really contains three major parts.The first part is the journey on the ship from earth to the colony world, and its really well written, this part of the book deserve five stars. One of the best things about this part of the book is that the earth government used press gangs to draft new colonist at random. I have not seen that used in a sci fi story even though press gangs were a major part of life two centuries ago, and it really adds a lot of great randomness to the story. The press gangs I take it from the story are to make sure the ships reach capacity because the rest of the ship are filled with all the prisoners that earth gov no longer wants. Great ideas, and they have historical significance to back it up.The second part of the book deals with the colony and I would give this part of the book two stars. First of all if you ever played sim city or tropico this colony part of the book comes off as someone playing one of those games, cause the colonest do not do anything until they are told to by their government. I almost want to call it communism but it really felt more like I was watching someone play sim city or tropico especially since communism would have some sort of black market. Furthermore whenever the government made a bone head move the author said that it was the consivertives that pushed for the move, the problem is that the bone head moves were moves that conservitives would not make, for instance there was a decision made to keep everyone holed up in the colony, this was blamed on the conservitives, the problem is that conservitives are people who cant stand the urban life style and would be the first group of people to just leave for a rural life, without permission. The auther just came accros as one of those people who grew up democrat who says everything a democrat does is good and everything a republican does is bad, so if someone makes a bad decision he is a republican/conservitive. it irritated me. Furthermore there are a lot of people thrown together from all aspects of life, and this should have led to division in the colony but it never really did, the things that brought division was at least in my mind silly little things. One of the most annoying aspects though is through the course of the book you read about at least a dozen animals that can kill humans but there is no mention of any animal that does not have the ability to kill people, you would think that if there were all these preditors that there would also be a lot of grazing animals for the preditors to hunt. The second part of the book focuses so much on the crises in the colony that it never really lets the colony grow and its a crying shame. One of the things that should have been discussed is that even though they have all this great technology they have no way to build the infrastructure to continue it so they should make lower tech stuff that they have the infrastructure to keep up. Note minor spoiler after 20 years from staring the colony the colony has farms and a wall.The third part of the book is something I will not spoil but I will say I thought the whole thing was cliche. not badly written but nothing new so I give it 3 stars.All in all I would like to read another book in the series about a different colony ship going to a different world who actually made strides to build a colony where the people made decisions without consulting their government or despite their government. Where colony development was considered as important or more important than character devolopment. Where one group argued with another and went seperated to start their own town away from everyone else.If you liked this book though you should read "Farmer in the sky" and "tunnel in the sky" by robert heinlien. Both books are classics and are built along the same lines, are they better, you decide.