- Title:
- Colonisation
- By:
- Richard Holliday
- Pages:
- 266
- Rating:
- 1
At the beginning of a new century, Earth stands polluted. Humanity has outgrown the home that brought it to life.
As the gears of civilization start to falter and seize, attention is turned to a new world that has been just out of reach but now looks like a prime territory for a new human empire.
But before the grandiose strides to intergalactic humanity can be made, the ground has to be broken and the baby-steps toward colonisation of Earth’s closest neighbour, Mars, have to be taken.
Join the two hundred or so pioneers that are tasked with making history as they prepare to leave their homes forever for a new life on the Red Planet, where adversity from both their own species and their new home tests their will to survive.
This was free, so I can’t really say I made a loss on it. But it’s seriously in need of editing (I didn’t see a chapter with an error in spelling, grammar, continuity etc) and the whole idea of the work is blatant nonsense.
Kids, being sent off to Mars, I can sort of swallow. But being lied to, supposedly forging out on their own and then doing the same thing to their peers is a little too thin, even for a teen romp.
None of the sections work; the opener is soppy, far too much time is spent on a journey to an academy, training is foreshortened, the landing on Mars is silly (nobody’s qualified, after all, we missed a shedload of training), and the decisions made post-landing are the sort of thing even a trigger happy Klingon may abjure. The command structure is laughable, the way “the baddy” takes charge is clearly just done for the author’s benefit and the whole work exudes a sense of 1950s space opera inexpertly modernized and rather trashed in the process. Remind me to send Holliday a Heinlein juvenile someday and perhaps I’ll check out one of his later works in another life.