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Asterioids
Mar. 16th, 2015 10:14 amBased on reviews by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
james_nicoll, I bought two self-published SF novels, The Dark Colony and Freedom at Ferona. I will post some sort of review on the usual pages, but I wanted to make a few points here.
The books are set in a near-ish future (probably a bit too near) in which Mars and some asteroids have been colonized. Travel is exceptionally slow (maybe almost too slow for near-future tech) and the colonies are small. Both colonized worlds are under 400 people. In a refreshing break from the typical libertarian-gun-toting-free-for-all asteroids of fiction, asteroid living is largely communal. I think, alas, that Richard Penn, the author, has thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Travel is so slow that our main POV character, an 18-year-old junior police officer at one of the colonies has never seen a stranger! She finds a stranger - dead - at the start of book one (The Dark Colony) which sets off a number of events.
I have a lot of issues with the books, and here's the biggest one: in a world where Mars, AKA the nearest authority, is just voices and video on a 20+ minute time delay, when Mars tells our heroine to arrest somebody she's known her whole life she does so immediately. Not only that, there's very little local hue and cry about that action.
I'm sorry, but that just doesn't work. Unless one can physically exert authority, and that means boots on the ground (or deck or whatever passes for ground locally) people as a whole aren't going to just jump when somebody calls them up and says so. In short, even libertarians are right once in a while.
james_nicoll, I bought two self-published SF novels, The Dark Colony and Freedom at Ferona. I will post some sort of review on the usual pages, but I wanted to make a few points here.The books are set in a near-ish future (probably a bit too near) in which Mars and some asteroids have been colonized. Travel is exceptionally slow (maybe almost too slow for near-future tech) and the colonies are small. Both colonized worlds are under 400 people. In a refreshing break from the typical libertarian-gun-toting-free-for-all asteroids of fiction, asteroid living is largely communal. I think, alas, that Richard Penn, the author, has thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Travel is so slow that our main POV character, an 18-year-old junior police officer at one of the colonies has never seen a stranger! She finds a stranger - dead - at the start of book one (The Dark Colony) which sets off a number of events.
I have a lot of issues with the books, and here's the biggest one: in a world where Mars, AKA the nearest authority, is just voices and video on a 20+ minute time delay, when Mars tells our heroine to arrest somebody she's known her whole life she does so immediately. Not only that, there's very little local hue and cry about that action.
I'm sorry, but that just doesn't work. Unless one can physically exert authority, and that means boots on the ground (or deck or whatever passes for ground locally) people as a whole aren't going to just jump when somebody calls them up and says so. In short, even libertarians are right once in a while.
