Sunday, August 20, 2017

Book review - Legacy of Hereot, Beowulf's Children by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Steve Barnes


I read Legacy of Hereot years ago when it was given to me as a present.  Even though I read science fiction, this book wasn’t even on my radar, so it was a surprise to receive it as a gift.  However, I read it and was wonderfully surprised.  I picked it up again so I could refresh myself before I read its sequel Beowulf’s Children, which I’ve had in my bookcase for years.

I loved reading Legacy of Hereot again, but I should have skipped Beowulf’s Children. Oh, well.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Legacy of Hereot was all about establishing a new colony on a distant planet, fighting unknown terrors and coming together as a community to defeat the common enemy.

Beowulf’s Children was all about teen angst and sex. 

Legacy of Hereot opens with about 200 settlers coming out of a 100-year sleep after a journey to a new planet, 10 light-years from Earth.  The novel doesn’t delve much into the problems on Earth that determined the necessity of colonizing a new planet, but it wasn’t much of a drawback.  Cadmann Weyland is the colonel of the new group on Tau Cetin and soon realizes there is an indigenous threat to the settlers, but no one believes him.

At first.

Then an attack on the compound shocks everyone into action and they rally around the Colonel.  Much of the book centers on the settlers and their plans to repel a huge attack, once it is discovered that they have upset the ecological balance on the planet and soon they will be up to their armpits in grendels (thus, the connection to Hereot), the name they’ve given the monsters.

Legacy of Hereot is an exciting, sci-fi adventure about interstellar space travel and survival.

Beowulf’s Children is not.

The sequel is set 19 years after the events in Hereot.  The children born shortly after the Grendel attack do not have any recollection of the horrific incident which took the lives of many of the colony’s men.  As far as they are concerned, the Firsts or Earth Born (the colonists who came on the space ship Geographic) are all crazy from Hibernation Instability (HI).  Apparently, people, frozen for 100 years for a trip across the galaxy, have a tendency to lose a bit of intelligence, the result of ice crystals forming in the brain. 

Or as the Seconds (Star Born) refer to it, ice on the mind.

For this reason, the generation born on the new planet have established themselves a colony, Surf’s Up, a distance from the original settlement.  There they can do whatever they want, sleep with whomever they want, without the supervision of the adults.  And they remind the Earth Born constantly about their autonomy.  The leader of this group is Aaron, an Adonis-like 19 year-old Bottle Baby.  Bottle Babies were embryos frozen to be thawed out if female colonists turned out to be sterile after their 100-year journey.

Aaron has seduced the Star Born (all teen-agers) that they need to settle the continent and convinces them to lie, betray and steal from the Earth Born to cross the ocean and establish a permanent outpost. 

Although there are more dangers other than the grendels to face, the novel seems to focus more on who is sleeping with who (with no consequences) and the rebellion against the first generation. 
The ending of Legacy of Hereot ends with the final battle with the grendels.  It does leave the door open for a sequel, but Beowulf’s Children seems as if it was forced.  As if the publishers mandated a sequel without a clear path forward.  There is a third book in the series, but I’m not inclined to read it after Beowulf’s Children.


Legacy of Hereot is an exciting must-read.

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