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A review by storyonlystory
Une colonie by Hugh Howey
5.0
I cry easily … I’ll revise that. I have the urge to cry easily and often shed a tear or two. I’m not a sobber but I’m a very sensitive person. That said, I can’t remember the last time a book made me cry. It might have happened some time in my teenage years but I can’t think of an instance. For some reason, as much as I get into my reading, it doesn’t trigger the same response in me as a movie or hearing terrible things in the news.
Half Way Home made me cry. In a good way.
Porter is a boy who was conceived on earth and born hundreds of years later … on another planet … at the age of fifteen.
Earth Has sent out tens of thousands of colonial space ships consisting of an AI that runs things and 500 carefully chosen human embryos. The ship arrives on a distant planet a few hundred years later and begins its work in determining whether the place is “viable” or not. If it is viable then the humans are grown but kept inside vats and taught their careers through a virtual reality world. In thirty years when their education is complete they are woken up in order to form a colony and work the planet’s mines, sending anything valuable back to Earth.
If the planet is not viable the AI can abort everything at any time by burning and then nuking itself (to make sure no patentable information can be stolen). On this planet the AI is in the middle of self destruct when it seemingly changes its mind and the result is about 50 naked fifteen year olds running from the burning vats and rushing around into the rain and mud of their new home.
One thing you’ll notice when you look at this book on Amazon is that there are no bad reviews and no ratings below 4 stars. Most of them are five star and the reviews are enthusiastic. I am just as enthusiastic about this book.
Half Way Home replaces The Four Fingers of Death as my latest and greatest and most favorite. I want to urge everyone to buy it along with Howey’s excellent series Wool. His works are extremely cheap as ebooks.
Half Way Home made me cry. In a good way.
Porter is a boy who was conceived on earth and born hundreds of years later … on another planet … at the age of fifteen.
Earth Has sent out tens of thousands of colonial space ships consisting of an AI that runs things and 500 carefully chosen human embryos. The ship arrives on a distant planet a few hundred years later and begins its work in determining whether the place is “viable” or not. If it is viable then the humans are grown but kept inside vats and taught their careers through a virtual reality world. In thirty years when their education is complete they are woken up in order to form a colony and work the planet’s mines, sending anything valuable back to Earth.
If the planet is not viable the AI can abort everything at any time by burning and then nuking itself (to make sure no patentable information can be stolen). On this planet the AI is in the middle of self destruct when it seemingly changes its mind and the result is about 50 naked fifteen year olds running from the burning vats and rushing around into the rain and mud of their new home.
One thing you’ll notice when you look at this book on Amazon is that there are no bad reviews and no ratings below 4 stars. Most of them are five star and the reviews are enthusiastic. I am just as enthusiastic about this book.
Half Way Home replaces The Four Fingers of Death as my latest and greatest and most favorite. I want to urge everyone to buy it along with Howey’s excellent series Wool. His works are extremely cheap as ebooks.