he generation ship Colony is returning from the stars, its mission—to colonize the worlds of Tau Ceti—a complete failure. Tails between their legs, the colonists have picked their original launching point, Earth, as the final destination of their creaky vessel. Their mission: to reseed from their ship the homeworld they know from centuries-old radio contact to have been devastated in a global war with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. A noble goal, the reader supposes, until we discover that the Colony has become a cruel dictatorship, its lowliest members treated like cattle and even its loyal proletariat brutalized and brainwashed. And the first step of these arriving Skyborn masters is genocide of the Earthborn, those who survive on the planet.
Our viewpoint on this rigid, cloistered society is a young ensign named Welkin Quinn, whose only relative is his sister, Lucida. Already in ideological trouble in Earth orbit, Welkin is sent outside after the controlled crash-landing of the giant ship in the ruins of Melbourne as part of the first expendable probes into the dangerous terran environment. His fellow scouts are quickly slaughtered by a combination of ferals—humans reverted to bestial status—and jabbers, a more organized pack of savages led by one Bruick. Welkin survives only thanks to intercession by Sarah, member of a third group, the preservers of a small remnant of civilization's technology and culture.
Soon Welkin is living among these Earthborn, adopted into their family structure. The arrival of the Colony has altered and accelerated the plans of Sarah's group to begin to restore some kind of civilization to the planet. With a raid on the ship that rescues Lucida and Welkin's pal Harry, the would-be restorers head for the hills. There, they begin to gather stragglers and small families into a larger community. Welkin, Lucida and Harry quickly adapt to their new, heretofore unimaginable lifestyle, and become leaders with Sarah. But when Sarah finally succumbs to one of the rampant endemic diseases, and her sister Gillian seeks to establish her own right to command, the community is left open to attacks by both Bruick and the Colony. And the operation of a spy in their midst will only make survival all the harder.
At play in the
post-armageddon
Paul Collins is an Australian SF writer with several books to his credit in his native land; this is his first appearance in the United States. And what he has delivered here is basically an Andre Norton young-adult novel which, regrettably, does not much advance the landmark books conceived by Norton herself some 50 years ago.
Collins' main conceit—that a generation ship, instead of following the classic path of degeneration and nescience as outlined in Heinlein, et al., would instead revert to a fascist state—is mildly intriguing. But the lineaments of this dictatorship are only roughly sketched in—after all, by Chapter 3, Welkin is out among the natives and we see very little more of the star travelers up close—and several comparisons to Nazis must serve as a kind of shorthand evocation of their nastiness. The culture of the other half of the ship's complement—those rebels and renegades exiled to the primitive "lower decks"—is barely adumbrated at all.
As for the post-armageddon landscape of Melbourne, we generically see only some uninteresting city ruins and some rural landscapes. There's not even one lousy psionically endowed mutant or grasping triffid or slavering giant rat to liven up the proceedings. Only the ogreish Bruick stands in for the perils of post-war existence, in the manner of the tribal chief from Wells' Things to Come (1936). Contradictory statements—the rain is poison, there's no vegetation, yet a thriving forest offers lumber for building—and implausibilities—weapons and other artifacts surviving in usable form after 180 years—abound. Moreover, frequent jarring shifts in point of view, from Welkin to Sarah and others, sometimes all on the same page, disrupt our identification with our hero, who's an otherwise likable sort, genuinely frightened at first of the savage homeworld, yet becoming adept and inventive in his new environment. That the book ends inconclusively, setting us up for sequels, is the final straw that will send readers scurrying back to classics of this type such as Andre Norton's Star Man's Son(1952).
