Just finished reading ‘Star Flight’ which is an Omnibus edition containing ‘The Stars are Ours’ and ‘Star Born’ both written by Andre Norton in the 50’s. Baen released the omnibus as an ebook this month so I grabbed a copy and I liked it. The plot of the book is not very complicated but is interesting. In the first book, scientific thinking has been banned on earth (by the Pax) after an attack that destroyed most of the life on earth which was blamed on the Scientists. Now its death to be a thinker and any scientific knowledge is now taboo. But a handful of scientists are holding out and are secretly building a spaceship that would allow them to travel intergalactically under while the humans hibernate.
The person who developed the cold sleep is killed during a raid and only his brother knew the formula that he had developed. The book basically follows him and his niece as they try to join up with the scientists and then prepare the ship for flight. They make it to a planet that they call Astra after a few centuries of flight and settle happily over there.
In the second book, Centuries after the desperate flight from Earth, Pax has been overthrown on earth and humanity again reaches for the stars. A spaceship reaches the planet Astra, not knowing that the planet already has a colony established centuries ago by the fugitive humans from Earth . . . and that the apparently friendly natives of the planet are actually malevolent invaders from elsewhere, who are plotting to eliminate all humans from Astra, both the recent arrivals and the star born colonists.
I liked the first book better than the second one. A point which really bugged me was that when the colonists landed on Astra they didn’t face any major problems. All the food was edible, there were no surprises and everything was like it seemed. the only things that were different in the new planet were the colors and a couple of the plant life. The colonists had no trouble eating the native food and they pretty much faced no hardships. After reading books that portray landings on alien planets more realistically (At least to me) I thought that these guys had it really easy. The second one was better in this regard with the new guys getting pulled into an ongoing war without realizing that they were helping the wrong people.
Another issue I had with the book was all the spelling/proofing errors in the book. I have been proofing a lot of documents over the last few weeks so it really bugged me to find errors in the book. I guess they didn’t proof read it well enough when it was initially published.
In all the book was a good read. It didn’t require a lot of brain-power to follow the plot lines etc, good for light reading. When I want to do heavy reading I will read my programming text-books or Lord of the Rings (Which always puts me to sleep).
Now reading ‘Wolf Who Rules’ by Wen Spencer. Had read the eARC (electronic Advance Reader Copy) earlier and finally got my hands on the actual released version. There are not that many changes in the book (at least that I found so far) compared to the final released version.
This is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya