Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Derivative aliens. The spacefaring cat-people from Wing Commander (a huge hit videogame when McCaffery was writing this) and the Not-Sandworms. Hmm, sandworms are attracted to vibration and hate water. The underground species in this book are repelled by vibration and love water. How original. Even the faceless overlords are a cliche. Her best cat friend is Zainal, who I never built an affinity with. I don't care about him any more than Kris. So if I don't care about her, or him, or their relationship, then there isn't really very much to talk about with these books.
Yes, but not in a good way. I thought this book would be easy reading. It’s not hard reading, but it’s not easy reading either. It’s more… “easy going”, where there’s not much actual conflict and the story is very episodic and not much is at stake, or very important. This makes it easy to put down and harder to stay invested. Not wanting to help those who were hunting the one laying in front of her, she decided to help him. Using water and some slaps to his face she got him up and running as the other ones in the flyers continued to shoot at the downed flyer until it exploded. In Freedom's Landing, the Catteni routinely round up human troublemakers and drop them on empty planets – if they survive, the world is suitable for their own people. Kristin is included in such a group, which is dropped on a world they name Botany (after the Australian destination for transportees, Botany Bay). Surprisingly, a Catteni noble, Zainal, is among their group - the same one Kristin helped earlier. While trying to cope with their new situation, they discover the existence of another alien race that is using the planet as a gigantic farm. Kristin is at first the only one to vouch for Zainal but he soon proves his usefulness to the rest of the improvised colony. They steal technology from the mechanisms that are used to farm the planet Botany. She and Zainal fall in love. [2] To me, it would have made a LOT more sense to start the story earlier, say with her abduction from Earth, struggle to survive as a slave, struggle to survive as an escaped slave, maybe give me some reason to sort of like the rapey love interest. Boom. There you go. Novel. Not very Anne McCaffrey but why does anyone, even Anne McCaffrey, have to write like ANNE MCMFINGCAFFREY EV-ER-Y time? Second-string Anne McCaffrey novels suffer from a lot of this-- whenever she runs out of steam she starts filling in with introductions. By the second or third time the entire cast of NPCs gets entirely ditched in favor of more introductions, the whole thing starts to feel video-gamey. (How IS that arrow to the knee doing, Generic Racial Stereotype #4?) I don't really care about any of the nobodies, whose problems are all resolved off-screen anyway. I don't really care about the relationship between Kris and Zainal, either, because there is a male lead who is not Zainal, and-- while there is no love triangle-- this secondary male lead gets positioned as the logical choice for Kris. (Who, for some reason, wants babies here on Planet Stranded?)However, since he’s refused to return to his duties, his brother is forced to take his place. The raging hatred that Lenvec feels for Zainal interest an Eosi named Ix and soon IX curiosity make him want to know more about planet Botany and find Zanal. Those stranded on the planet easily set up a community and improve their situation drastically in a short time. They handle the situations with ease and aren't terribly challenged. You can argue that the world was set up to produce food and would be easy to survive on, based on how it was engineered. Yet, even the personal relationships aren't terribly challenging. There are creepy dudes and another band of aggressive people, there are people who - understandably - don't like the non-humans, but none of these challenges really threatens in this first book. I have not read the following ones. Just wished for more conflict and hardship. The inhabitants of Botany - a mixture of humans and extra-terrestrials - had managed to build a thriving and productive world out of what had originally been intended as a slave planet. And now they had plans to try and overthrow the terrible Eosi, who for centuries had existed by subsuming members of the Catteni race, living in their bodies and ruling space through them. I bumped into this by accident in the library, and since McCaffrey died I’d been meaning to read something by her, and the blurb looked to be promising SF with a dash of romance I decided to take the entire series with me on Christmas break. I’m so glad I did, because I really liked this first book. Crazily competent survivors ... cast out with a hatchet, cup, blanket and knife each and within a couple of weeks they are smelting ore. There's an internal conflict here for the author, who apparently wanted to write an up-from-the-ashes tale without really considering what it might entail. And if you accept it, it makes more "believable" the concept that the survivors could actually challenge a species with terraformed planets and spaceships the size of a small city.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. The original short story, "The Thorns of Barevi" (1970), had a rape-fantasy component that was removed when it was reworked into the first novel, Freedom's Landing. McCaffrey wrote: And one last moan - the whole sex thing is just done really clumsily. And I don't just mean between Kris and Zainal (and that's cringy enough!). The constant reprimands of some of the men for harassing the women stretched my patience to almost breaking point - it just seemed a needless plot device and didn't ring true half the time. You'd honestly think that a group of abandoned refugees on a strange planet would have too much to think about! Now standard in the middle of a corrective planet, dumped along with hundreds of other aliens and human prisoners, Kris decides she’d better keep an eye for the Catteni named Zainal for he’s likely to get killed by the human and alien alike who disliked his Catteni guts. One bit about Anne's writing that drives me crazy is her childhood development gaffs. Perhaps her children were extraordinary, but most likely, she no longer has any idea of what children under 5 years old are like. These children have no relationship to reality. Don't base any of your ideas on childcare on anything that Anne has to say.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Anne McCaffrey, one of the queens of science fiction, knows exactly how to give her public what it wants' - THE TIMES Q: HOW is it possible for the late great Anne McCaffery's early foray into furry rape porn be translated into a book salable to her mostly YA-friendly, dragon-loving audience, familiar with her collection of female coming-of-age stories in fantasy settings with low-heat romance sub-plots? The two previous books in this series had huge casts. Freedom's Challenge adds several more characters making it hard to remember everyone. Kris and Zainal continue their efforts to make Botany a successful colony, raise a family, and free the galaxy from Eosi domination. I love it when writers do that, though, become their own inspiration and teacher, evolving a story that doesn't work so well into something better. The short story morphed into a series of novels that I am finding unputdownable.
Great Deal 
New Comment