Quick Word: 3.5 stars. Facinating subject study, but a little underdeveloped. ( )

review of
Pamela Sargent's Earthseed
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 9, 2013

This is the 4th bk by Sargent that I've read. The others are The Sudden Star, Watchstar, & Venus of Dreams. The only one I've reviewed is Watchstar ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6989152-watchstar ). I can't really say that I know her work yet. It appears that her writing is somewhat known as being targeted at young adults. I'd say this bk was.

As w/ Watchstar (1980), Earthseed (1983) is a 'coming-of-age' story - in this case it's not so much a story about a central character, even tho there IS a central female protagonist as there was in Watchstar, as it is about a whole community of characters 'birthed' by a 'mother' spaceship around the same time.

I reckon that there're enuf SF stories by now of groups of humans traveling to new planets in spaceships in order to spread humanity far & wide for this to be a subgenre. I think of Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars (1992) ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/464609.Anvil_of_Stars ) as a variant. I'm interested in reading the different imaginings of this possible future. At the same time, the basic idea isn't likely to surprise me precisely b/c it IS a subgenre.

It wd oversimplistic to call Earthseed the Lord of the Flies of this subgenre but it wd still be close. The spaceship, if I understood correctly, is an adapted asteroid. Inside there's a wilderness that spans 10s of miles. The coming-of-age Earthseed teenagers must live in this wilderness for awhile in order to develop their skills at adapting to an environment that doesn't machine feed them - as the mother ship had previously done. The Lord of the Flies aspect appears as the nastier side of humanity manifests itself in typical bullying Alpha Male ways.

While Sargent doesn't completely oversimplify human behavior into sexual stereotypes, there's a bit too much of the THE-MATRIARCHY-WILL-ULTIMATELY-BE-MORE-HUMANE -THAN-THE-PATRIARCHY in here for me. My own personal experience is that matriarchy is just as vicious & soul destroying & manipulative & hateful as patriarchy.

Maybe one of the more interesting aspects of this for me was the way Sargent had characters who were born w/ various health problems. I don't have a personal timeline of SF-stories-w/-characters-w/-major health-problems but Candas Jane Dorsey's A Paradigm of Earth (2001) comes to mind b/c of the character dependent on a wheelchair. Have any SF writers explored the possibilities of how zero-gravity might benefit a person w/o the use of their legs? I think of the movie Avatar.

Sargent's take on it appeals to me - the mother/father ship has created children from genetic banks as the ship has approached a potentially habitable planet. Not all of these kids have come out 'perfect'. One is blind, eg. Sargent's not going for the technology-is-a-perfect-Aryan-God routine, thank goodness. At any rate, I appreciate the sensitivity & realism of her treatment of the subject.

All in all, I whipped thru this, enjoying the tale & rooting for the least brutal, least selfish, & most cooperative & free-spirit encouraging path. So far, alas, Sargent doesn't strike me as particularly original either in terms of plot or in writing style. Instead, she's a 'solid' writer, as some might put it - a writer who imagines a very particular plot & then writes her way thru it w/ clarity & technical simplicity. ( )

Really I give it a 3.5 So I thought this book was interesting. Though I’m sure the kids would be more messed up for not being touched and held as babies. It was very interesting seeing how they repeated the same things that “earth” went through ( )

A good read if you have nothing better to do. Lacked some sense and knowledge at some points but overall an okay read. ( )

Re-read in 2012. A childhood favorite! ( )