Skye Object 3270a

In this young adult novel, fourteen year old heroine Skye Object 3270a (the awkward moniker refers to the astronomical designation given to the drifting lifeboat she was discovered in) is found to have “puzzle pieces” in her blood, building blocks for a plague that could wipe out Silk, her home in space.

While Skye’s blood contains a potentially lethal infection, Nagata’s story has spliced, into the usual literary base pairs of the juvenile, aka young adult, sf story, a more benign packet of information: a collection of memes designed to rewrite the tastes of young readers.

I refer to the usual formulaic elements of the young adult story. There is the group of teens, sometimes cunning and sometimes rather clueless in the show more operation of the physical and social worlds: Skye, orphan and wild girl who has spent a lot of time under the surveillance of cute companion/robot/pet/city- designated overseer Ord and who lives with the city’s oldest citizen; her friend Zia, slightly older than Skye with parents who grow the octopoid lydras, creatures genetically engineered for construction work in the hard vacuum in space; the boisterous Buyu, would-be planetary explorer and victim of unrequited interest in Skye; Devi, a sixteen year old suffering from an overprotective mother who has cloned him from a brother dead far in the past. It will come as no surprise that young romance crops up between Devi and Skye. Adults are, of course, rather clueless to the threat to Silk.

You will note, I didn’t say these are clichés. I am not a fan of the young adult stories or, generally, stories with young protagonists, but I liked this story. I found the teen characters realistic and not annoyingly plucky or unrealistically competent.

Part of my enjoyment came from the story setting. Silk, you see, is on the midpoint of a space elevator with its anchor being Deception Well, a planet full of alien nanotech, and I’ve always found space elevators a nifty alternative to the more conventional rocket travel. And there is the back story of Deception Well’s original inhabitants and their enemies, the alien Chenzeme. With some of Nagata’s scenes hinging on concepts of gravitational acceleration and rotational velocity, some actual science and math is introduced in the manner of Robert Heinlein’s or Robert Silverberg’s juveniles. My adult brain was kept intrigued and entertained. The heavy use of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, realistically presented with a surprising amount of detail for a juvenile work, further added to my pleasure, and, I suspect, a young reader might find those elements and the space elevator intriguingly and realistically different from the wonders of the juvenile fantasy genre.

In short, Nagata, I think, has a good chance with this work to accomplish her goal of infecting the next generation with the meme of science fiction, the love of plausible speculation and the wonder of science. And adults like me will be happy to follow along.

I didn’t exactly miss Nagata’s work the first time around. I bought, on the strength of reviews, her first two novels which, coincidentally, are set in the same universe as this novel, but I didn’t read them, and they definitely are not prerequisites for jumping into this story. show less

I received Skye Object 3270a by Linda Nagata from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program a little while ago. It was great and I’m a little annoyed at myself for putting off reading it for so long.

It’s a book that can be classified as middle grade or YA — personally I’d call it YA because a) it’s about teenagers and b) I don’t really understand where the boundaries for middle grade are supposed to be anyway. On the other hand, the main character is 14, a little younger than standard for YA and the romantic story line isn’t super serious as in many YA books.

Skye Object 3270a is set on and above a distant planet in the far distant future. It’s about Skye, who was found in an escape capsule when she was a baby. No one show more knows where she came from or how long she was in hibernation in the capsule before being discovered. She is named after the astronomical designation for her capsule before they realised it was a capsule (which I thought was a bit mean of the civilisation, but at least no one teases her for it).

Skye and her friends are ados, adolescents in a world where people live for several centuries (perhaps indefinitely, but the planet they live above (up a space elevator) hasn’t been settled for that long and the oldest people were just under 300 I think). People are considered ados and aren’t taken seriously until they’re 100 and become Real people. Interestingly, this sees 14 year olds lumped into the same demographic as 99 year old and they’re all treated more or less the same. Which is to say, sort of taken seriously but also dismissed as a bit silly and reckless.

And reckless is a pretty good description of Skye and her friends. From bungee jumping down the space elevator shaft the maximum allowed distance (4.3 km) to breaking many rules for a variety of reasons, there are lots of entertaining shenanigans in this book. There’s also a more serious underlying mission to find out where Skye really came from.

What really struck me about Skye Object 3270a is the depth of the world building. From the space elevator to the freefall scenes to the nanobots and biological oddities, Nataga’s world was not only physically plausible but rich and detailed. An exemplary example of SF worldbuilding. Apparently, Skye Object 3270a is set in the same world (but different characters) as Nagata’s Deception Well (which is indeed the name of the planet in Skye Object 3270a) and a few other stand alone novels. I bought the Locus Award-winning The Bohr Maker (also in that universe but set earlier in time) a while ago and it has just jumped up a few places in my virtual TBR pile.

I highly recommend Skye Object 3270a to lovers of quality science fiction and adventure. Although it is written for younger readers, I think it can be enjoyed by all (even if older readers, like myself, shake their heads at the dangerous stunts the characters pull).

5 / 5 stars show less

Ich lese ja nicht so oft und auch nicht so gern Young Adult fiction aber da Linda Nagata erst ganz frisch auf meinem Radar aufgetaucht ist und mir The Martian Obelisk so gut gefallen hatte, musste Skye-Object 3270A auch auf meinen eReader wandern. Leider gibts das Buch nicht in Deutsch.

Gefallen hat es mir aber gut. Skye ist gerade 14 geworden und mit ihrer besten Freundin Zia stellt sie so allerhand an. Die Stadt Silk befindet sich auf einer Plattform entlang des Seils eines riesigen Weltraumfahrstuhls, das bis zum Planet Deception Well hinunter reicht. Die Menschen in Silk leben ein glückliches und zufriedenes Leben, Krankheiten und Krieg gehören der Vergangenheit an. Jeder, der noch keine 100 Jahre alt ist, wird als ado bezeichnet, show more die Abkürzung für adolescent, während alle über 100 Jahre real people sind. Mir hat diese Herangehensweise an das Thema ‚ewiges Leben‘ sehr gut gefallen und entsprechend nachsichtig gehen die echten Erwachsenen mit den ‚Jugendlichen‘ um.

Skye ist überzeugt, dass es noch weitere lifeboats da draußen gibt. Lifeboats wie das, in dem sie gefunden wurde. Aber die Leute in Silk haben kein Interesse danach zu suchen, überzeugt, dass man sie schon längst entdeckt hätte, wenn die da wären.

Zusammen mit Zia, Buyu und ihrem neuen Freund/potentielle erste große Liebe, versuchen sie, die Obersten der Stadt vom Gegenteil zu überzeugen.

In typischer Manier Pubertierender und überzeugt, es besser zu wissen als alle anderen, verfolgen sie ihr großes Ziel, mit typischen Fehltritten und viel Risiko. Nagata hat eine tolle Art zu schreiben und auch wenn ich mit den ‚Teenagern‘ nicht so richtig warm werden wollte, so lagen sie mir doch irgendwie am Herzen und es war schön, ihre Freundschaft und ihre Abenteuer zu verfolgen.

Fazit
Meiner Meinung nach ein YA-Roman, der durchaus auch den Weg ins Deutsche finden sollte, denn Skye und Zia sind mal nicht die typischen Protagonistinnen, die verliebt und mit rosa Brille dumme Dinge tun, sondern sie haben ihren eigenen Kopf und der ist mal irgendwie so erfrischend anders. Aufgrund der Kürze des Buches und dank des wirklich schönen Schreibstils Nagatas, war das Buch ein wahrer Leckerbissen für zwischendurch, den ich sehr gern weiterempfehle. show less

An enjoyable, if fairly limited young adult novel. Being used to fantasy and sci-fi epics, it was a bit hard to accept the relatively low level of detail of the world of the story, mostly toward the beginning of the novel. As I progressed through the story, I was engrossed in the world more and more, taking delight in getting more questions about this universe than answers.

The characters were mostly standard, typical teenage characters, but they didn't need to be more. What flatness or blankness was there allowed the reader to more easily step in to this strange new world.

Overall, it was a fun, quick read, that has intrigued me about the universe Linda Nagata created in her other novels.

Linda Nagata has created a wonderfully interesting world, thousands of years in the future, when humankind has spread out into space and yet are as alone as they ever were on Earth.

Skye Object 3270a was named after the life pod in which she was discovered when she was two years old, cryogenically frozen. The life pod stopped working when Skye was rescued and all information the life pod may have kept, including any about Skye and why she was in the life pod, were unretrievable. Skye has lived the 12 years since then on Silk, the only city hanging above the mysterious and secluded planet Deception Well. Skye's background is still equally mysterious and she is believed to be the lone survivor of some kind of catastrophe. But Skye can't show more help believing there must be other survivors still undiscovered.

This story brought me back to when I was twelve years old and had just discovered the books of Monica Hughes, exciting science fiction in which independant young teens were exploring environments both dangerous and wonderous, risking their lives to find solutions to problems and using wondrous futuristic technology. Reading about Skye and her friends was fun edge-of-your-seat adventure and I found myself, just like when I was 12, believing these teens capable of doing all the exciting things described. show less

Alistair Reynolds lite. The YA version, where instead of the darkness we have a happy shiney world of well adjusted people. But the basic background story remains the same - out there in the dark a robotic intelligence is systematically clearing the galaxy of biological life. The nano-tech and constraints of real-world physics remain the same though. It is almost a hard SF story for teenagers.

Skye Object 3270a is the name that was given by an astronomer to the speck of light he observed. It turned out to be the solar sail of space ship's lifeboat, containing only a 2yr old girl in suspended animation. She was recovered safely but kept the name, and grew up as a normal child on this distant colony world. Now she's 14 and about old enough show more to begin exploring, although it will be nearly another 100 years before she's considered real. Her nagging doubts about whether she was the only survivor from the unknown ship eventually prompt her to attempt to discover some more about how she was found. However she then falls ill to a particularly nasty disease, and her friends rally round seeking an unofficial cure before she has to inform the authorities.

It's all good fun, and you never feel she's in any particular danger. Quite why the authorities would be so lax is a question never posed, and equally inexplicable is the lack of jealousy between the two main boys. The plot just about hangs together although there is quite a bit of distance between the two subplots of her illness and finding the others. It is somewhat simplistic at times with the kids able to resolve all the problems they encounter - but then again the descriptions are also good, especially the impulsiveness of teenagers. The brief bits of science are correct, (a novelty!) and don't interrupt the story.

Fun and well written, there is a little space for a sequel, but also intriguing enough to see what the author's adult novels are like. show less

This was a free ebook offered in exchange for a review. Many years in the future, humanity has spread across the galaxy. But humankind is not alone and there has been conflict with another species. Humanity has survived however. So has Skye Object. Skye believes herself to be the survivor of an attack on her spacecraft. Jettisoned in a lifeboat she is found by people living on the planet Kheth. But she is an orphan with no knowledge of her background, no name (Skye Object 3270a is the code for her location in space where she was found), and no connection to her past - because hers was the only lifeboat found. But Skye believes there must have been others, so with the aide of her friends she sets off on an adventurous search for other show more lifeboats - a search opposed by the adults and governing council of her world. Skye and her friends believe, however, that this search is not about them, but about the other survivors adrift in space awaiting rescue. This is a well written and easily read work of sci-fi that moves very quickly. Nagata builds believable characters and the plot is fast-paced and engaging. The theme of sacrificing yourself for others is perhaps a bit obvious to an adult reader, but the target demographic is the juvenile reader. The book was well done, and I believe, will not only appeal to the juvenile reader of sci-fi, but will offer insight into what it means to overcome tremendous odds, sacrificing your own desires and needs to accomplish something worthwhile. A timely theme offered in an entertaining and well written work of science fiction. show less