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brettt 's review for:
The Seeds of Earth
by Michael Cobley
"Space opera" is a label given to science fiction that doesn't spend a lot of time on its science except as a backdrop for the story and characters. Think Star Wars. It derives from the older term "horse opera," used about Westerns that followed patterns as familiar as any opera and varied only with the characters inside the story and how they handled the tried-and-true conventions of their genre.
Michael Cobley's "Humanity's Fire" series, begun in 2009 with Seeds of Earth, is space opera in its purest form. Human beings fled Earth when an alien race moved to destroy it, relying on three colony ships that scattered themselves randomly through the galaxy. One of the ships found a habitable world humans named Darien, and they settle there with the cooperation of the native life forms, a sentient species called the Uvovo that has a kind of semi-mystical connection with Darien's ecology.
One day, the political conflicts of the rest of the galaxy catch Darien's little backwater up in their maelstrom, and the colonists find that Earth was not destroyed but rescued by another space nation. Although they seem like benefactors, those other aliens have their own agenda, and what happens to the humans or their adopted world in pursuit of that agenda doesn't concern them much. The humans of Darien, Earth and perhaps the other two lost colony ships need allies to survive, let alone win.
Cobley is a competent stylist who draws good word pictures and creates easily relatable characters. Yes, his aliens act an awful lot like humans and the technology of his universe as uneven as the plot needs it to be, and Seeds is too long, especially as the beginning of a series of equally long books, and too sloppy to be first-class space opera. But it's a good diversion and done well enough not to overly strain the disbelief suspension system.
Original available here.
Michael Cobley's "Humanity's Fire" series, begun in 2009 with Seeds of Earth, is space opera in its purest form. Human beings fled Earth when an alien race moved to destroy it, relying on three colony ships that scattered themselves randomly through the galaxy. One of the ships found a habitable world humans named Darien, and they settle there with the cooperation of the native life forms, a sentient species called the Uvovo that has a kind of semi-mystical connection with Darien's ecology.
One day, the political conflicts of the rest of the galaxy catch Darien's little backwater up in their maelstrom, and the colonists find that Earth was not destroyed but rescued by another space nation. Although they seem like benefactors, those other aliens have their own agenda, and what happens to the humans or their adopted world in pursuit of that agenda doesn't concern them much. The humans of Darien, Earth and perhaps the other two lost colony ships need allies to survive, let alone win.
Cobley is a competent stylist who draws good word pictures and creates easily relatable characters. Yes, his aliens act an awful lot like humans and the technology of his universe as uneven as the plot needs it to be, and Seeds is too long, especially as the beginning of a series of equally long books, and too sloppy to be first-class space opera. But it's a good diversion and done well enough not to overly strain the disbelief suspension system.
Original available here.