April09_1
It's bloody hard to keep up with this. 'Orbital Resonance' (John Barnes) is a neatly shaped, engaging, tidy sci fi: post Collapse, a generation of spaceborn kids grows super-fast to maturity, socially engineered for coherance and high achievement. It's a closed society, manufactured but rational, calm and appealing. The input of a Earth-born teenager dirties up the social pool, plots are uncovered and untidily resolved. It's a great read, and modestly scaled (scoring high on my current number 1 measure). John Barnes wrote 'Mother of Storms', a personal fave from a decade or so ago, about extreme weather and global catastrophe, which has moved from whimsical to topical in the recent decade.