A Handful of Stars

I wanted to do a honest reveiw of her first book - This is the second - improves on the first - more to come . For those of you who don't know her let it be said . . . . She is gracious charming and generous . If you comment on one of her sites she replies .

In "Second Star" the heroine, Star Svensdottir, oversaw the creating of the first self-supporting space habitat at L5 and led it to independence as the new nation of Terranova. This sequel starts off with Star launching a mining expedition to the asteroids, to obtain the materials which the new colony needs. Despite being pregnant with twins, she heads off to the asteroids with 250 people and two small ships. On the way she encounters plague, blood-feuds, and other minor difficulties, but none of them can stop her. The history presented in this book was pretty obviously not going to happen even by the time it was first published in 1991, but the author felt she had to stick with the background in "Second Star". Since then both technology and history have diverged even more drastically from the story told in the book. The history referred to in the novel includes a contact with an extraterrestial civilisation, the "Librarians," that the Soviet Union not only survived to 1992 without collapsing under its own contradictions but actually conquered Europe that year (pause for hysterical laughter) and that the world population reached 9.5 billion by the turn of the millenium. It also assumed vastly faster human expansion into space than we have actually seen. However, none of this really spoils the story, most of which is set in space, in the early days of the exploration of the solar system, and it's stilll entirely quite possible that when we, or our children, start building habitats in space and trying to mine the asteroids, the challenges and problems they face will be like the ones in this book. Not the greatest Sci-Fi ever written, but nevertheless an entertaining read.