Orphan Planet: Odyssey Earth, Book 1 by Rex Burke
Introverted Bloke Indifferently Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before
An Indie Book Review by Joseph Poopinski
4 stars
As far as I know, this was the first FiSci genre book I’ve read but it’s been a fantastic initiation. During the tale, some brainiac characters convey a little dirt about harder SciFi which we could summarize as too complicated to understand or essentially like magic. Probably my favorite element of Orphan Planet was its ironic asides, well-timed zingers & humorous wordplay: Kids vs aliens, “I’m planetfall only,” the oh-no-we-wouldn’t-want-that doctors’ skit, “Happy Birthday everyone,” and when an AI ultra-computer gripes after reading the entirety of Earth’s literature: “All the books. Another 20 seconds I’ll never get back.”The more profound elements of Orphan Planet hit home several times, especially when our (aptly surnamed) hero, Jordan Booth, realizes the spaceship kids had “never stood under a sky” while they gaze upwards, transfixed & overawed, staring at the starry heavens. And when he views his predecessor’s video journals, readers witness her bravely face an untimely fate. Perhaps borrowing a little reverse engineering from a Douglas Adams story, we see fate’s softer side too: “[Booth] was always going to end up stranded on one planet or another. It just happened to be this one.” Aren’t we all stranded someplace?
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