Review: Line and orbit
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 21, 2013
In a far future, humanity is genetically engineered to be perfect, and lives clean, useful lives in cities. The travelling bands of raggle-taggle Bideshi are thieves and live in dirty home-ships, inbred and useless. That's the version as taught to schoolchildren, anyway.Adam Yuga is heading for promotion with a planetary mining firm and just has to pass a few standard checks. He is stunned when a medical check fails and he is stripped of job and privileges - nobody wants to be around someone with a disease. His credits are used on medical costs but the illness progresses to weakness and tremors. To feed himself he has to steal; but he's a computer engineer, and he can't resist taking too much once he hacks a bank. An alert is issued and he is saved only by a scruff with dreadlocks who drags him onto a small spaceship and off the planet.The Bideshi man, Lochlan, thinks Adam might be useful. However the Bideshi can help Adam, because their spiritual healer is able to arrest the progress of the illness for a time. Then the Protectorate fleet comes hunting him down, and it is clear that more than just money is at stake. In LINE AND ORBIT there are obvious echoes of films Silent Running and Avatar, as the Bideshi live in spaceships full of forests and grasslands, programmed to replicate seasons. The sterile-by-comparison Protectorate consider these gypsy people as little better than animals. Adam is so well engineered that he learns to fire weapons and be a fighter pilot almost instantly, and fights not just for himself but for Lochlan and his new community. An alien race he meets, the fearsome Klashorg, turns out to have more in common with the Bideshi than their 'pure' cousins.Adam also learns that the Bideshi are relaxed about alternative sexuality and he starts a relationship with another man. However this is not a large part of this story and need not deter the nervous. While this is an adult novel for several reasons, including language and violence, men and women should equally enjoy it.