The Jerry Pournelle series continues with a collaboration with Charles Sheffield. This is an expansion of their story of the same name in Future Quartet and part of the Jupiter series from Tor. That was an attempt to resurrect, in the 1990s, the tradition of the Robert A. Heinlein juvenile novel. All the Jupiter books were unrelated in their stories.
Raw Feed (1997): Higher Education, Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle, 1996.
This book was a pleasant if not great read and, I suspect, a great deal like Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels of which I’ve only read Starship Troopers and, a long time ago, The Rolling Stones. [In fact, I may have read that before Robert Silverberg’s Revolt on Alpha C, but it was the latter novel which gave me a taste for science fiction.]
It’s the story of a youth learning adult responsibilities and a lot of math and science – the authors deliver some good minor science lessons in passing including one on why rings around planets can’t be solid.
The plot of corporate espionage and sabotage (I liked that the saboteur was allegedly from the Black Hills) was, if my memory is correct, added from the novella of the same name. In the short story, protagonist Rick Luban finishes training and his employer tries to recruit him for training Earthside. The novel ends with a similar pitch but after more training.
The main flaw is, given the supposedly even more decadent, ignorant, and violent schools of the future, Rick Luban and the other delinquents of his school seem way too tame in their behavior and lack of profanity (perhaps toned down for a juvenile reader?) to be the problem children of tomorrow. They seem like problem children of the fifties.
The future of the novel – aristocratic politicians ruling an over regulated welfare state – is obviously Pournelle’s and reminiscent of his Exiles to Glory which features a similar plot of a student being forced off Earth by circumstances and finding a new life in space though that character was an engineering student in trouble after defending himself from a gang.
Both novels feature government insiders (a teacher here and a policeman in Exiles to Glory) who steer their heroes into space.
More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.
Advertisements Share this:
