Customer Reviews

EarthChild

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Sharon Webb's trilogy was something I experienced years ago as a YA. I loved the idea of living forever and the way the futuristic society was portrayed. However, a recent reunion with these books has brought out some of the flaws in her writing. While the characters are still as real to me as they were, the plot suffers from lack of action and from a couple of spots where she loses my suspension of disbelief. I would recommend these books to YA's who are just getting into science fiction reading but not to anyone with more sophisticated tastes.

I read this book for the first time in 1984, just before I turned 13. Revisiting it in 2010 at the age of 39 provided an interesting contrast between the two readings. The memory of this short novel has haunted me for years, and I have often considered the dilemma that it presents: whether to choose an immortality of one's body or of one's art.

A pleasant surprise of rereading this book was that it wasn't "dated" by a firm anchoring in a specific year. I remembered that this book seemed to be set in the 21st century, but the exact year wasn't clear to me; it still isn't. The novel's political overtones were not as clear to me in 1984 as they were in 2010: one-world government, unilateral decisions about public health (the Mouat-Gari Process implementation specifically).

What I found refreshing was that technology was not depicted as a panacea. In fact, technological progress evoked a lingering sadness for what humanity lost in the bargain for physical immortality.