Customer Reviews

The Dragons of Heorot (signed),

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This book was released under a different title in the United States. If you are looking for the title in print, look under "Beowulf's Children."

For those of you who like me enjoyed The Legacy Of Heorot, Dragons is a worthwhile sequel.
Set twenty years after the events of Legacy, we see the inhabitants of the planet Avalon, living their lives on the island they secured for themselves, following the events of the previous book.
However, the children of the survivors of the fight against the grendels wish to branch out onto the mainland. Despite the reluctance of their elders, they set about how to do this. Led by the headstrong and ruthless Aaron Tragon, they then go ahead and set up an outpost which they call Shangri La. However, this outpost turns out to be anything but the perfection that the name implies, and they discover to their cost that human nature remains as traitorous as ever. Additionally, they also find out that there is a life form on the mainland that is even more lethal than the grendels themselves.....

The book explores the interaction of its human characters well, and is particularly strong with the scenes involving Old Grendel, an intelligent grendel no less. It also explores the impact of mankind on a new planet and its indigenous life forms. Indeed, Niven makes a strong case as to whether that most ugly creature - human nature, is the most dangerous thing of all on this new planet...
The story line is good and has its shares of shocks and surprises, and leads up to a powerful ending.
Overall this book is a very good read and I can recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the first.

I found this a fun read that kept my attention page after page. Not the most technically accurate premis, but not so far off that I couldn't overlook the stretches of imagination. The characterizations were well done, the individual characters fully fleshed and the plot(s) devious and interesting. With so many science fiction stories out there, it's hard to come up with something novel, but this story does it very nicely. This is a familiar Earth-colonizes-a-living-world story, but the world is very cleverly constructed like non-other I've read before. A whole eco-system is described that fits together to present the characters with mortal challenges on a stage of the author's imagination. Well done and very entertaining!

This is also called Beowulf's Children, and deals with what happens to a future generation on the planet Heorot. They have some knowledge of what goes on around the planet now, of course, but they still have to deal with it, and keep trying to forge ahead and create a civilisation. Not as interesting as the first book.