Alternative Worlds
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- Jun 20, 2015
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Gradisil
Adam Roberts
PYR, Mar 2007, $15.00
ISBN: 1591025389
Decades after the last moon landing, NASA still struggles with strategic objectives and vision. Many of the wealthy class feels NASA is a failed earthbound bureaucracy that cannot get a mission to reach the stars. In 2059, wealthy American Kristin Janzen Kooistra makes a deal to pay an exorbitant fee to hide from her government in the “Uplands”. Now Gradisil’s grandfather has the finances to turn over the paradigm caused by that former Nazi von Braun when he persuaded the Americans to go fixed wing aircraft in the 1940s and 1950s. Thus he builds airtight flying houses to orbit the earth with families residing inside them that will be free of government intervention and intercession on their lives. Over the decades however, the earthbound governments especially the tax hungry United States see things differently from the Utopian freedom lovers.
Told in three parts with the first two sections being novel length and the final segment more of a coda novella, GRADISIL is a much more complex tale than the above paragraph provides in order to avoid giving away what happens to those orbiting the planet. The story line follows the orbiters over several decades as a stratospheric Utopia is under increasing scrutiny from below. Key players like Gradisil come across as fully developed yet lacking a motive of why anyone would voluntarily live such a limiting lifestyle. It is sort of turning Swift’s of Gulliver Part III, The flying island of Laputa, upside down, Adam Roberts captures the attention and imagination of cerebral science fiction fans with his tale of a nation in the sky formed from courage and conviction not continual conquest.
Adam Roberts
PYR, Mar 2007, $15.00
ISBN: 1591025389
Decades after the last moon landing, NASA still struggles with strategic objectives and vision. Many of the wealthy class feels NASA is a failed earthbound bureaucracy that cannot get a mission to reach the stars. In 2059, wealthy American Kristin Janzen Kooistra makes a deal to pay an exorbitant fee to hide from her government in the “Uplands”. Now Gradisil’s grandfather has the finances to turn over the paradigm caused by that former Nazi von Braun when he persuaded the Americans to go fixed wing aircraft in the 1940s and 1950s. Thus he builds airtight flying houses to orbit the earth with families residing inside them that will be free of government intervention and intercession on their lives. Over the decades however, the earthbound governments especially the tax hungry United States see things differently from the Utopian freedom lovers.
Told in three parts with the first two sections being novel length and the final segment more of a coda novella, GRADISIL is a much more complex tale than the above paragraph provides in order to avoid giving away what happens to those orbiting the planet. The story line follows the orbiters over several decades as a stratospheric Utopia is under increasing scrutiny from below. Key players like Gradisil come across as fully developed yet lacking a motive of why anyone would voluntarily live such a limiting lifestyle. It is sort of turning Swift’s of Gulliver Part III, The flying island of Laputa, upside down, Adam Roberts captures the attention and imagination of cerebral science fiction fans with his tale of a nation in the sky formed from courage and conviction not continual conquest.