Rivers Solomon
A really fascinating space life novel in the vein of Dust and Across the Universe. We have a colony spaceship that is taking a group of people off to a new frontier (they are 300 years into their journey) and stuff is going wrong with the ship. What Solomon does here on the surface is to set up a social structure that pushes us to think about racism, segregation, and slavery. There are definite power differentials and the black/white division is the prime source of the antagonism between those without and those with power. Our protagonist is a young black girl who is an aspiring doctor (and is quite good at it), is probably quite autistic, and happens to be looking for her missing nuclear physicist mother who left her clues about what is going wrong with the ship. While this is not a book about race and racial relations, like in real life, the fact of race permeates all other aspects of the story, in often subtle ways that cannot be ignored, but don't really have to be paid attention to. This really is, for me, ideal science fiction. We are using the genre to initiate thinking about social issues and spark ideas about what change is necessary and possible.
3 stars (out of 4)
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