BooksOfTheMoon

The solar system is ruled by the tyrannical Plan of Man under the Machine, where every human has their place, and if they don’t perform as required, they’re sent to the Body Bank so that they can serve the Plan in another way. Dr Steve Ryeland is a Risk to the Plan, but the Machine needs him to work out the mathematics of a reactionless propulsion drive that will take the Plan out to the mythical Reefs of Space, where the tiny Fusorian lifeforms have created vast habitable areas beyond the orbit of Pluto.

This was a reasonably entertaining space opera in a rather unpleasant dystopian future but with a hopeful ending. The Plan or something like it has appeared in a lot of SF as a solution to a very large population and finite resources. Here, the Reefs are used as a frontier that could potentially act as a release valve for a population that has no more frontiers.

This book is set some distance in the future from Starchild, after the Plan of Man has collapsed. Humanity has entered the galactic community (although they’re still regarded as barely civilised) and many humans have joined with a group of sentient stars as parts of a group mind. Andreas Quamodian is a Monitor of the Companions of the Star – not part of the group mind, but working for it and doing what it cannot do. A call from Molly Zaldivar, the woman he loves but who has left him, brings him back to Earth to try and stop an ex-colleague from creating an artificially sentient star – one that could go rogue and try to destroy the whole solar system and beyond.

This was easily the weakest in the ‘Starchild’ trilogy with an incoherent plot, unlikeable characters and poor characterisation. Quamodian spends large chunks of the book running around being a lovestruck buffoon and throwing hissy fits whenever something gets in his way. I didn’t particularly enjoy this one.

Set some time after The Reefs of Space, it seems that the hope expressed for the Reefs have come to nothing. The Plan of Man has tightened its grasp on the solar system and established a space-wall between it and the Reefs so that no person may escape and no ideas may enter. However, a strange and powerful entity calling itself the Starchild has arisen out there and is threatening the very Plan itself.

The Reefs of Space had a fairly hopeful ending; this novel indicates that that hope was misplaced, although it never quite goes into details about what went wrong. It also introduces new elements – the Fusorian microbes from the first book are expanded upon, and we get to see a new side to the universe: the idea that the Fusorians can also inhabit stars and make them sentient. Somewhat more convoluted than its predecessor and not so well structured, this is still a fairly entertaining book.