At first blush, the plot seems very much like a juvenile science fiction novel. I settled in comfortably to read and thought it was a lot like the early Heinleins I’d read. Robinson did an excellent job of matching his voice to Heinlein in those years.
However, I wasn’t happy with the end result. I really liked the way Robinson played into the overall world view that Heinlein constructed in his Future History timeline in the 1950s. The line marriages, the technology, and the major events are all here.
Robinson doesn’t stay content in playing with Heinlein’s world, though. He throws in his own views of the current Iraq War and advocates freeing up certain aspects of the current drug laws. Reading about characters using drugs or advocating their use in what reads like a juvenile Heinlein novel was disturbing to me. It also spoiled the whole gee-I’ve-just-found-a-new-Heinlein-novel-I-haven’t-read feeling the book was going toward.
The book was off to a rather slow beginning, but I didn’t worry about that because I figured Robinson was just getting his feet wet, just trying out the voice and trying to get everything right.
Then the middle came along and I got bogged down in the seemingly endless adjustment problems Joel had to shipboard and colony life. Even that might have been interesting if Joel had actually gotten somewhere. Not to spoil things too much, but Joel and the colony ship never get where they’re going. We learn a few nifty facts about the world they’re headed to, but we never get to see that world.
Not only that, but the whole novel reads like a set-up to a long series that would have brought forth another Starship Troopers world. We never found out anything about the enemy that attacked – and destroyed! – our solar system. That war, somewhere, is still waiting to be waged.
The book read easily enough, but I wanted the action and excitement of those early Heinlein novels. That’s what I felt I was being offered. Although I’m glad I read it because it did remind me so much of all those pleasant years spent at an impressionable age, I wish it could have been what I’d hoped it would be.
The book is coming out in paperback this month, and is a much better investment in that format.
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