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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