|
Seeds of Earth – Book One of Humanity’s Fire by Michael Cobley |
|
|
|
|
Written by Maurie Breust
|
|
Friday, 26 June 2009 |
Orbit 2009: ISBN 978-1-84149-632-0
Michael Cobley is best known for his fantasy trilogy "Shadowkings". In Seeds of Earth, however, he has moved from heroic fantasy to big space opera, providing us with a solid work of 496 pages in the vein of Peter F Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds.
The Prologue to Seeds of Earth is set at a time when Earth was at its most desperate. During first contact with Earth, the alien Swarm turned out to be an aggressive alien hive mind, intent on wiping out the human race. This led to the launch of three colony arks carrying the ‘seeds” of humanity’s survival. The Epilogue sets up the next book in the series (no spoiler here).
One and a half centuries later, the descendants of one of the colony ships, Hyperion, have made a new home for themselves on Darien, alongside new and enigmatic allies, the indigenous Uvovo, denizens of the planet’s forest moon. The Uvovo have a deep relationship with Segrana, the spirit of the forest. The forest itself has deep powers as well.
Events change rapidly when the survivors of the war between the Swarm and the Allies of Earthsphere send a message to the colonists to say a vessel is on its way to Darien, along with Earth’s intimidating allies the Sendruka Hegemony, who seem to posses their own devious agenda. There are also intriguing secrets buried beneath the surface of Darien’s forest moon. To find and capture these seem to be the real intentions of the Sendruka.
Although the story takes a little while to gather momentum, the chapters are short and each one is titled with the name of the character featured in that chapter. This makes it easy to follow the main characters and helps avoid having to go back in the story to refresh character profiles. The narration takes place in the present day with the novel providing many but manageable story lines
There are many hard science fiction elements in the book such as the theory of hyperspace and faster than light travel, the presence of a warp well and artificial intelligence. Seeds of Earth takes a broad sweep of galactic history, complete with scheming shadow intelligences and high technology and space battles. The book combines many civilizations which mingle, communicate, cooperate, compete or fight. It is pleasing to see galactic cultural diversity on a grand scale.
If you enjoy a science fiction story that is multi-stranded, has a good range of characters spanning a variety of worlds with adaptive communities then Seeds of Earth is for you.
Michael Cobley has a blog and website at www.michaelcobley.com. |
|
Last Updated ( Saturday, 04 July 2009 )
|
