Godspeed

Sheffield dedicated this book to Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Heinlein; there's your first clue. Yes, this is "Treasure Island" channeled through a Heinleinesque SF adventure, but it works well nonetheless. The villain is far more thoughtful and focused than simply malevolent, though the spacer crewmen are pretty low-brow lumoxes: a chance to explore a complex crew dynamic was lost there. Since the main character is a teen, and a sheltered one at that, it does allow the author to skim the ramifications of a planetary culture facing population crisis and extinction. That culture's accommodations to the problems (such as decreasing fertility, environmental selection against live XX births, delayed onset of puberty for offspring) are show more credible if uncomfortable to our mores, but the future remains a dark one even after the book's fairly upbeat ending. This is better than average SF, even with its more-or-less YA bent, and I bump it up from a 3.5 to a 4 simply because of my love for TI. show less

Oh such fun. Not hugely thoughtful - but a classic adventure. A little exploration, too, of what it might be like to live on an 'almost' hospitable to human life. Might more aptly be called 'Quest for Godspeed' in my opinion. Some mature themes & graphic scenes make it 'iffy' for younger teens. (I mention this because, in my experience, readers of sf tend to read above their level.)

ZB7