Starswarm: A Jupiter Novel by Jerry Pournelle

It's interesting how Pournelle's books are looking more and more like Heinlein's juvenile fiction.  The outline to this story could have been written by Heinlein himself.

This book reminds me a lot of The Red Planet.  A kid grows up on another planet, which affords Pournelle the opportunity to have him raised in a rural setting.  It has a small town atmosphere.  All the adults are dedicated and hard-working.  The kids are taught in a one-room school and are very formal and polite when addressing adults.  This is a standard juvenile novel, where young kids act much more mature than the average adult in the real world.  Unlike a sit-com, these adults aren't idiots.  But circumstances make most of the adults largely impotent during the crisis.  And so the kids have to go on a journey all by themselves.

On Pournelle's website he's gone on a few times about how his childhood, and this setting has a lot of similarities.  I realize that an author's characters don't necessarily share the author's views.  But this story looks a lot like what I would expect Pournelle to think is a nearly ideal setting to raise a child.  My impression is that Pournelle would like to find some way to scale that up so that the majority of children were raised in a similar setting.  Not that I think such a setting is bad.  But it's rather specific to a rural setting and just doesn't apply in an urban or suburban setting, methinks.

The science fiction biology is fairly interesting.  The verisimilitude works okay.   The system he came up with is complicated, but I could follow what he was proposing.  The progression of discovery moves along okay.

Pournelle knows computers and networks, and he tried to project what they might be like several decades in the future (more than a century?  I'm not certain of the time frame.)  Again, I can see where he's coming from.  While I'm sure he'd agree that his projection probably isn't close to how it'll really turn out, it did work okay as a plot device.

Another juvenile fiction novel that works.  On Mighty's Total Book Value Scale, Paperback.

Back to Book Reviews

Please email comments, typos, errors, dead links, and any suggestions to webmaster@mightydrake.com. (Privacy statement)
Copyright © 1997-2007 Mighty Drake, Inc. All rights reserved.
Last modified: January 25, 2003

Best viewed with:	Hosted by:	Composed with:	In association  with:	Fight Spam
Opera or Mozilla or Explorer or Netscape	Site 5	FrontPage	Amazon.com	Spamcop.net &  Popfile & Greylisting