Colony

In the future, everything is different, but nothing has changed. The Earth has been poisoned by pollution, choked by overpopulation, and ravaged by the mindless greed of power-hungry corporations. A fragile peace is threatened by landless revolutionaries, and global anarchy seems imminent.

Yet a single ray of hope remains, Island One is a celestial utopia, and David Adams is its most perfect creation, a man with a brain as advanced as any computer and a body free of human frailties. But David is a prisoner, a captive of the colony that created him, destined to spend his life in an island-sized cylinder circling a doomed and desperate home planet.

Thousands of miles below him, a world trembles; its people cringe in terror and despair in show more anticipation of an impending apocalypse. And as Earth's boundaries, fate has cast one extraordinary human in the role of savior. David Adams has a plan, one ultimately ensuring the salvation of his species or its annihilation. show less

Another science fiction book that confirms my theory that Minnesota is the safest place to be in the event of a global revolution/apocalypse!
Colony is the story of David Adams, a test-tube baby engineered and raised in Island One, the first (and so far, only) residential space station. The situation back on earth is nearing disaster, with population at 7.28 billion, there just aren't enough resources to go around, and a lot of them are in the hands of the huge international corporations. The World Government tries to help, but unfortunately also takes the brunt of the blame for the struggles of the populace. Various revolutionary groups threaten and David tries to fix things. This is a rough summary, and if this was the entire plot, show more the book would be a lot better. Unfortunately, it also contains several irritating subplots which might serve to deepen the characterization of supporting roles, but mostly just distract and seem unnecessary. Also, David spends a lot of time first trying to get to earth, and then trying to get from one part of it to another, which is also extensively described without adding much to the plot. I think it's an attempt at suspense-building, but it's not as effective as one would hope. The book is just about 75 pages too long, otherwise it's a fantastic future history.
I really think that my mild distaste for it comes more from having been reading it during the most recent (2010) election cycle and marveling at the similarities of what people are currently asking from the government and what the book describes. This is fantastic for a writer to be so forward-thinking as to be so predictive, but it is also upsetting because I think we might not be far off from the calamities that befall the fictional United States described within the text. show less

Some SciFi ages really well. This didn't. The treatment of women and black men is particularly awful. There are elements here that could work for a modern reader, but not nearly enough of them.

A bit dry but eerily prophetic in terms of the breakdown of Earth society that it portrays. My main gripe is that although Ben Bova had a great idea for a shorter piece of fiction, this feels a bit bloated at novel length.

Another book I just couldn't get into.