I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas and New Year! I was in Brisbane for Chrissy and it poured with rain just about non-stop. So I went shopping, which I can't complain about at all cos I picked up some beautiful dresses and shoes in the sales. I also raided my dad's bookshelves for some sci-fi reading, particularly books pertaining to colonisation and space travel. I'm researching for a novel in these directions and want to see how the masters do it.Farmer in the Sky (1950) by Robert Heinlein follows a teenage boy, Bill, and his family on their emigration to Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. I'd like to tell you all about Bill, but unfortunately he's a rather forgettable character. Bill is little more than the words he speaks and the things he observes. The same can be said for the other characters.
This book reads more like a manual on how to colonise Ganymede than anything else--or rather, it reads as a direct reflection of the colonisation of the New World; the ship that took them to Ganymede was called the Mayflower, for instance. I gave this book a low Goodreads rating because as a book it's rather sparse on plot, tension and characterisation. But that's not to say I didn't enjoy it for other reasons. As far as the science went, it was pretty interesting. Heinlein made most of it sound very plausible. Good research material for budding sci-fi writers.
A short, interesting read if you want some hard science served up with a minimum of emotional interference.
