Show Your Working

Jun 2020
Dark Eden - Chris Beckett – Corvus, 2012 (kindle edition)
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I always think of Beckett as the social worker science fiction writer. All his previous stories have had an earth-based setting, albeit transformed by alien invasion, religious conflict or whatever, which allowed him to embed his characters' actions in a recognisable social matrix, giving them emotional weight. The pure science fictional location of this one, a planet alone in space without a neighbouring sun, perhaps explains why this lost colony story felt relatively thin to me, despite the interesting embedded critique of heroic saviour narratives. Though the similarities to a book that I really disliked didn't help.
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