Planetary colonists are required to evacuate the planet that has been home for 40 years as the interstellar corporation that runs the colony has lost the ‘franchise’ for this planet. So they must move everyone to a new planet whilst another corporation will take over and bring in their own colonists. One of the colonists, Ofelia, now in her late seventies, takes exception to being forcibly moved on from her home, avoids the evacuation and is left behind in blissful solitude. After the new colonists arrive, a thousand kilometres distant, and are promptly all massacred by a previously unsuspected group of intelligent but low tech indigenous aliens, Ofelia realises that she is not as alone as she had hoped.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough; after sixty or seventy pages of a slightly slow but comfortably mellow start this book had me gripped and I was unable to put it down for the remaining two hundred, eventually finishing at 3 o’clock in the morning!. That is quite an achievement for a book with such an aged main character and it wasn’t done by turning her into some improbable superwoman; she is still old, arthritic, set in her ways and with a memory that is becoming a little less reliable than she might wish. This is such an unusual approach to a first contact book that it stands out for that alone but it is also a well-reasoned, plausible and thoughtful take on first contact. It does have its flaws; I do get tired of that all too common trope of uneducated people working the fields enslaved to the big uncaring corporations and find it to be an unrealistic scenario. I just can’t see how subjecting people to work at such a low level of technology in a modern high technology society would produce any sort of profitable interstellar trade for those big corporations. But that’s not what this book is about and sidestepping that issue Remnant Population had me enthralled throughout.
It’s interesting that almost all of Moon’s output has been series that are either fantasy or space opera adventures; good intelligent space opera but there’s definitely nothing highbrow about them. Other than that she has written two standalone books – this one and The Speed of Dark – both of which I consider to be her best work and far more thoughtful than those series (enjoyable though they are), though I’d guess that neither would have been her most lucrative works! As I said before Remnant Population definitely gets my recommendation.
5/5 stars
I cannot recommend this book highly enough; after sixty or seventy pages of a slightly slow but comfortably mellow start this book had me gripped and I was unable to put it down for the remaining two hundred, eventually finishing at 3 o’clock in the morning!. That is quite an achievement for a book with such an aged main character and it wasn’t done by turning her into some improbable superwoman; she is still old, arthritic, set in her ways and with a memory that is becoming a little less reliable than she might wish. This is such an unusual approach to a first contact book that it stands out for that alone but it is also a well-reasoned, plausible and thoughtful take on first contact. It does have its flaws; I do get tired of that all too common trope of uneducated people working the fields enslaved to the big uncaring corporations and find it to be an unrealistic scenario. I just can’t see how subjecting people to work at such a low level of technology in a modern high technology society would produce any sort of profitable interstellar trade for those big corporations. But that’s not what this book is about and sidestepping that issue Remnant Population had me enthralled throughout.
It’s interesting that almost all of Moon’s output has been series that are either fantasy or space opera adventures; good intelligent space opera but there’s definitely nothing highbrow about them. Other than that she has written two standalone books – this one and The Speed of Dark – both of which I consider to be her best work and far more thoughtful than those series (enjoyable though they are), though I’d guess that neither would have been her most lucrative works! As I said before Remnant Population definitely gets my recommendation.
5/5 stars
