A Son of the Rock

The Kon-Tiki Quartet Part Two, PS Publishing, 2018, 79 p.

At the start of this second part of the authors’ quartet the cloned would-be colonists on the starship Kon-Tiki are waking up from their hundred-year suspended animation in preparation for landing on their destination planet Newhaven. A shock awaits them. A city on the planet. A human city. Psychologist Kat Manning now has more on her plate than she had imagined when the voyage began.

In that one hundred years technology has moved on, faster ships have been developed – along with fabrication abilities. Everything humans have created down on the planet has been manufactured from data sent along with the fast ship. That includes the colonists, printed into being once the infrastructure had been built. Two of them, Travis Denholme and Daniel DeVries, are characters familiar from Book One of the quartet. Travis has reason to be excited and apprehensive about meeting Kat again. In the time between the two ships’ departures from Earth the originals of Travis and Kat back home had got married, living well enough together until one day she had been murdered in the bolt-hole she kept in East Anglia. But the data he was printed from is for a Travis in his fifties, balding, and paunchier than in his younger days. The Kat on the ship is still in her subjective thirties and will have no memory of their marriage. The two’s first meeting on Newhaven is profoundly awkward.

The plot revolves around a native Newhaven creature something like a marmoset, which Travis has been studying and which has an unusual ability – hence Parasites being the title of this instalment. It also concerns the triangle between Kat, Travis and Daniel, the latter of whom has too high an opinion of himself and not high enough of the other two. Through this trio we see some of the vagaries of human relationships, their awkwardnesses, jealousies and resentments.

However, the novella’s conclusion seemed like a natural end and I was left wondering how Brooke and Brown would develop their scenario in the next two books.

Pedant’s corner:- “Time interval” later count: five. Otherwise; “None of them were” (None of them was,) “Daniel’s DeVries’ mind-set” (Daniel DeVries’s mind-set.)