Do You Dream of Terra Two?

This is a novel about the development and beginning of a 23-year space colony expedition featuring a crew of which half are young adults groomed from a very early age to become astronauts who will be able to take over from their elders and still be alive to start the colony at the end of the journey.

What I really enjoyed about this novel is the worldbuilding: the reasons for the space colony expedition, and the structure that was set up to achieve that end. The author does a pretty good job of fleshing out a diverse group of personalities amongst the characters. I also really liked that it was from a non-Americentric point-of-view: the main characters are all British, and it's a slightly-alternate-history world where the British Interplanetary Society's Daedalus Project was developed to fruition, sending probes to a distant star system where a Goldilocks planet similar to Earth was discovered.

What I liked less was possibly what people who read a lot of YA books like more. I was hoping that since the young crewmembers are all at least 18 for most of the book, and there are older crewmembers as well, that there would be a lot of adulting going on, but... not so much. Yegods, the DRAMAs: childishness, romance, petulance, envy, spite, sex, existential crises, and on and on.

And maybe it's unrealistic to expect a group of kids who've been groomed from the age of 13 in a somewhat cloistered environment to be psychologically-well-adjusted -- but if you're going to expend millions of dollars and immense human resources on such a program, wouldn't you at least try to ensure that they're reasonably mentally-healthy??? This is at least the third SF novel featuring astronaut programs I've read in the last couple of years where the psychological screening of candidates seems to be nil, and the astronauts get lots of technical training, but no attempt has apparently been made to give them the extensive psychological training they're going to need to be able to cope with the stress, isolation, and crises of the job and still stay reasonably sane.

And then there's the dodgy astrophysics. I can overlook some little things (like an imaginary, extremely-fast propulsion system, and calling an unmanned deep-space probe a satellite), but late in the book there's a pivotal shuttle excursion to a nearby space station, when the ship is traveling at a non-trivial fraction of lightspeed by that point, from which they're supposedly going to return to the ship -- which, in reality, would have been long gone and uncatchable upon their return.

It sounds as though I enjoyed this book less than I actually did. It's really a fairly-good debut novel (far, far better than either The Wanderers or Spaceman of Bohemia), with some lag in the middle of the book and an ending which seems rushed, but it was interesting enough for me to finish it. I do have to warn readers, however, that the ending is very much a cliffhanger, and that there's obviously a sequel on the way.