2005 SF, sequel to The Getaway Special. With cheap hyperdrive
available to the world, things are falling apart; two people try to
work out their options.
A strange book, this one. It deals with Trent and Donna Stinson,
minor characters from the first book, as they lament the state of
Earth and go out exploring the stars in their off-road truck. They
visit the first colony world, move on to a French colony (the US has
gone to war with France, for reasons never clearly specified), and
continue to unexplored worlds.
The politics continue to be surprisingly subtle: yes, it's bad when
government interferes with people's lives without benefiting them, but
the author's preferred answer seems to be not joining a new colony,
getting a bigger government to interfere, or even setting up on one's
own planet, but rather trying to get involved in politics at home.
Very Heinleinian (yes, I have read possibly his most obscure book,
Take Back Your Government) even if it does make for a somewhat weak
ending.
In fact there's clearly a great deal of Heinlein's influence here:
lots of practical detail about how to turn a pickup truck into a
survivable space vehicle (it needs to hold air and survive a parachute
landing), and when our heroes are isolated on a world there's an
extended sequence involving their defence against the local wildlife
and their working-up of a practical power source. (Though I'm glad to
say nothing on the scale of Spacehounds of IPC.) Rather less
attention is paid to characterisation: Trent is pretty much a blank
except for his relative inability to do maths (though this doesn't
prevent him from being a practical shade-tree engineer); Donna can
hack the maths, but the only actual problem we see her tackle seems
like a relatively simple one that shouldn't take the time it does.
(Mind you, I'm a software person, and I can tell that Oltion's
experience of software is as black boxes that do stuff rather than as
things you can plug together and modify. So perhaps I'm being unfair.)
Pretty light and undemanding, but as fluff goes it's good fluff.
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