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After Worlds Collide

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This book is available on another web page on amazon:

See When Worlds Collide (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) for 43 reviews and "Look inside this book"

See When Worlds Collide (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) for 43 reviews and "Look inside this book"

"After World's Collide" picks up right where "When Worlds Collide" left off. Earth has been destroyed after colliding with a wayward star which, luckily enough brought another planet along for the interstellar ride. A raw deal for Earth turns into a major jackpot for a few human survivors - the new planet settles into orbit perfectly. At this point, the novel could present its characters with the challenge of making a life on the new world for themselves. Unfortunately, this slim novel has little time for characters who rise to the occasion. Instead, "After" has our characters (already on a lucky-streak) discover a huge city left behind by the planet's original inhabitants. Apparently not that far removed from the human newcomers, the original natives did not survive the interstellar trip, but left their cities in perfect shape for the human refugees - right down to stocks of apparently edible food. In a more enlightened time, "After" would have had our characters discover that even a peachy-life in a new world has its downsides - as the Vikings discovered when they starved to death despite finding paradise in Greenland.

Rather than learn the natural limits of their new world, "After" turns dated and moralistic - pitting the good survivors against another group, the bad survivors who escaped on a rocket built by hardcore Stalinists. These enemies commandeer the largest of the alien cities, and choke off power to the smaller ones (meaning the ones occupied by the "good humans"). Will good win out over bad? I was more interested in whether the either of the two would wake up and realize that their war might threaten the planet. Just how dated is this story? The good survivors are led by a Moses figure who hints at the bad survivors in biblical terms - Midianites, he calls them. The novel never hints at the possibility that the miraculous feat of planetary physics that brought the new world to our solar system may have been off - with the planet either flying into the sun, or taking a hostile orbit, or simply careening away into the void again, looking for another, less complicated species with which to selflessly bring its promise of a new life.

Admittedly this sequel is set in times that had a vastly new set of things occurring to them. Nuclear warfare, biological warfare, and chemical warfare were major things just being considered at the time of this text.

Today,we can perserve millions of bodies in lab vials for AID (artificial insemination by donor) and a whole host of other things unknown or simply not concieved of then. The ability to manipulate genes in plants and animals (including humans) is a practical vista to consider now.

One group of people seeking to subjugate another group is a theme that will never go away. The "Western DOG {Proper spelling of GOD}' is a fox that won't hunt now as in this text.

We have a space station, differing crafts that can leave the planet, the ability to do in depth analysis of planets from a distance, and the list goes on. By the time that a planet that would likely achieve any kind of viable orbit after the destruction of our globe would have been subject to long range visitation by orbital as well as surface probes. (Anyone heard of Mars...}little robots just keep going on.

The realities of leaving and starting on another (dislike the term new) planet boggles the mind. A little creative license needs to be allowed. Like Vulcans making babies with Humans. Doesn't Intraspecies DNA preclude something like that? Kind of like Tarzan and Cheeta having a heck of swinger for a kid..

Bottom line... I enjoyed this book in the past. I wanted one for my collection.