Farseed by Pamela SargentMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read Earthseed a while ago and almost started Farseed but it seemed almost a bit leaning toward the Lord of the Flies and I'm more into science fiction than the the whole psychology of survival of potentially degenerate societies. I finally picked it up to read and almost read it through at one sitting. This is definitely a book that you have to read carefully.
As a part of the trilogy it has its position and usually number two can tend to take a dip. This novel is not all that bad and I would have given it the highest marks if there hadn't been that whole section where the main character seems compelled or maybe forced to repeat herself numerous times while everyone should be packing up and moving on before someone gets killed.
The story itself is quite compelling in the sense that we have Nuy the daughter of Ho (from the first book) fighting against the will of her father in an almost naive manner at the beginning. This leads to the death of a stranger she's befriended with the hope of improving the lifestyle of her settlement. In the previous novel Ho had taken his people off away from the other settlers to see more of the new world and to get away from the other people they felt were so disagreeable. Since then some sort of virus has wiped out many of them and Ho blames it on the other settlers since the infection occured after he had sent people to trade with them. For ten years they have remained isolated from the others and have lived a hard life.
Ho is described as being near to madness half the time and it seems predictable that he won't be welcoming Nuy's new friend with open arms, but she has hopes that trade with the other settlers will make life easier for her and the other youths in their camp. When things go bad it leaves one of the three travelers dead and the other two are unable to return to their settlement.
The remainder of the book is the quest of the other settlers to find the missing three and the story of their own self imposed isolation from the new world itself as they try to live in their own little bubble of life that mirrors what they know of Earth. I'm not partial to the--we've blown everyone back to the stone-age type of books and this really is more a survivalist fiction to be honest; but elements of it tend to slide in the direction of civilization taking backward steps.
One redeeming feature of the book for me is that it's also a story of evolution within that framework of backward steps and this whole novel is a building block to get to the final book which I had recently obtained and that was the main reason to push to read this one. This is the story of Nuy mostly as she tries to survive and perhaps even make right the horrendous outcome of her mistake. I love character driven stories and Nuy is one complex character for a savage.
As usual Pamela Sargents characters are all well drawn and finely tuned and the conflicts are plenty and as I mentioned the real one quibble I have is that at the most exciting part we have the main character over dramatically explaining herself too many times and a corresponding breakdown in leadership that tends to muck around for a whole chapter and I could have done without that.
Otherwise this is a great addition to my library of everything Sargent. I would recommend this to Young Adults and lovers of SFF and of course anyone who has read the first book Earthseed.
J.L. Dobias
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