Earthborn Wars

Book 1: The Earthborn
Book 2: The Skyborn
Book 3: The Hiveborn

Tor Forge (2004)
ISBN: 0 – 765 – 34199 - 9
US$5.99
Buy this Book
Back to Reviews Page
Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack, May 2007

The Earthborn is a fast moving science fiction adventure story aimed primarily at younger teenagers. It tells the story of 14 year old Welkin Quinn. He is a crew member on Colony, a space ship that left Earth 300 years ago to colonise Tau Ceti III. Unfortunately the planet proved to be uninhabitable, and instead of settling another planet, the ship returned to Earth. On the long return journey, the ship monitored broadcasts from Earth, and so knew about the increasing troubles which culminated in a nuclear war. The elders on the ship have convinced themselves that Earth is now inhabited by savages, who must be crushed so that the superior crew of Colony can re-colonise.

All is not entirely well on Colony itself; many people have voiced opinions that disagree with the elders, and some have sought to take over the governance of the ship. Labelled mutineers, these people have been banished to the lower decks, where they struggle to survive in quite savage circumstances. Shortly before they arrive on Earth, Welkin is accused of being a mutineer and is threatened with the lower decks. Instead, he accepts a dangerous assignment to be one of the first to go outside on Earth and undertake some reconnaissance. Naturally, the mission goes wrong, and he winds up in the clutches of some of the “earthborn” – who are not at all like the picture painted by the elders. The rest of the novel covers Welkin’s struggle to form his own views, and then to try to act on his own beliefs. It focuses significantly on the attempts of some of the earthborn to rebuild their society. Although the novel is complete in itself, it easily lends itself to a sequel.

The story is well paced, with plenty of action but not so much that it comes across as frenetic. The language is well suited to young adults; some younger readers may need to use a dictionary once or twice, but that isn’t at all a bad thing. There is a minimum of subplots – the story follows Welkin almost exclusively, and focuses on his concerns and interests. This will make it easier for younger readers to follow, but there’s enough complexity and action that older teenagers won’t be bored either. The broad outline of the story – spacefarers returning to an Earth which is nothing like the one they left – will be familiar to older readers or those who’ve already read a bit of science fiction. However, Collins fills these outlines in with considerable verve and originality in the detail. It’s unlikely that anyone will feel they’re reading a story they’ve read before. I certainly didn’t, although that broad outline has formed the basis of a lot of stories I’ve read.

One of the strengths of Collins’ story is his characters. The dearth of older characters, and their almost complete absence from the society, gives his young characters the chance for considerably more independence and autonomy than characters with parents or teachers in the background. However, the characters still experience many of the crises common to young teenagers – trying to disentangle their own beliefs from what they’ve been taught; noticing the opposite sex for the first time; longing to expand their horizons while still needing the security of what they’ve grown up with. Although the characters are clearly products of the environments in which they’ve been raised, today’s teenagers will find a lot to empathise with here.

There were some logical inconsistencies in this novel that bothered me, but I’m not sure how many of them would have been noticed by a younger (and perhaps less analytical) reader. For example, a critical point in the story, repeated several times, is that most people die around the age of 18 years and never get a chance to have children. Despite that, there seem to be not only a lot of people in the world, but a considerable number of children – at one point there is a reference to 85 younger children in just one settlement. This doesn’t quite jibe. And despite the fact that civilisation has taken a big slide down the technology ladder, and education is now almost non-existent, and much that we take for granted now has disappeared – one character has eyeglasses, although it’s apparently not possible to replace them when they get broken. The children joke about optometrists and prescriptions for glasses. When reading and writing have become archaic skills, it didn’t seem entirely realistic that concepts like these, or the correct terms for them, would have survived. But these weren’t things that impacted on the main plot, they were just details that didn’t seem to quite fit.

More seriously, I had some concerns about the recommended age group for this novel. The back of the novel recommends it for those aged ten years and up. This novel contains a scene of attempted rape – not very explicit, to be sure, but very clear to me and I suspect older readers. Certainly even a younger reader would have been aware that something very upsetting was happening. In addition, the children in the novel are positively murderous – they kill a lot of people in a variety of ways, with very little moral discussion or thought. It’s essentially a case of “well, it was him or me.” While these things are realistic behaviours given the society Collins has created in The Earthborn, I’m not sure that all ten year olds would have the maturity to cope with some of these scenes. I’d probably feel more confident if it had been recommended for those aged 13 and above. If you’re going to give this book to a pre-teen, you should probably consider the child’s individual level of maturity, and whether their parents might object to their child reading some of this material.

Overall, however, this was a well judged novel for young adults. The engaging, realistic characters and lively plot will draw readers in. I found this an easy read; while it would be more challenging for younger readers I doubt that most would find it particularly difficult either. At the same time, readers who are old enough to think about the implications of the behaviour of the characters will get a great deal out of it.

Bohemian Ink Publishing (2006)
ISBN:
$
Buy this book
Go back to Reviews page
Reviewed by George Ivanoff, Apr 2007

This is the third and final book in the Earthborn Wars trilogy, the first two being The Earthborn and The Skyborn.

The first book set up the premise and introduced us to the main characters. Generations after it was sent out, the giant spaceship Colony returns to Earth having aborted its mission of colonisation. Earth is now a post-apocalyptic land with tribes of squabbling humans — the Earthborn of the book’s title. The Skyborn aboard Colony see the Earthborn as degenerates and plan on wiping them out. Aboard Colony lives a teenaged boy named Welkin Quinn. Welkin soon finds himself exiled from Colony and allied with an Earthborn named Sarah and her tribe, ‘the family’. Together they struggle against Colony’s attempts to ‘cleanse’ the Earth.

In the second book, Welkin, Sarah and ‘the family’ take the struggle aboard Colony. And despite the odds it seems they have a chance of winning — until the arrival of Crusader, another of Earth’s colonising ships.

The third book deals with the new threat brought by Crusader — the Hiveborn. A race of parasitic hive creatures, the Hiveborn take over their human hosts. They are not violent, antagonistic foes intent on wiping out human-kind. Rather, they are on a mission of peace — wanting to bring unity to all sentient life. Of course, unity and peace means being taken over and assimilated into the hive mind.

All three novels are a damn fine read. Good old-fashioned sci-fi adventure. But there’s more to them than that. It’s not just action and adventure — there’s real depth to the characters and the dilemmas they are faced with. Collins also displays a real talent for creating convincing worlds and societies — three distinct ones: that of the Earthborn, the Skyborn and the Hiveborn.

The first book does a great job of setting things up and starting off the adventures. The second books ramps things up a little. But it’s with the third book that the author really shines. One of the major strong points of this novel is the motivation of the ‘Hiveborn’. Their mission of peace and unity makes them a believable and all the more dangerous threat. After all, the best, most frightening villains are those who truly believe that they are in the right. So what we have here is a struggle between two rival ideologies: that of peace and unity brought about through mind-numbing conformity; and that of freedom to make individual choices, even if those choices involve violence and suffering.

Lots to think about when reading this novel. Highly recommended!