Book Review - This Alien Shore

I get so caught up in the fantasy realm of reading that I tend to forget about SciFi, until a book comes along and slaps me in the face with its goodness. My brother brought a very large container of books to my moms a few weeks back so I could look through them. I found 3 of the 1st of a series that I was looking for as well as a few others. This Alien Shore looked really interesting. There is a girl in danger Jamisia and who has knowledge that could change several worlds. This book has a bit of everything; death, destruction, torture, lots of interesting characters who may or may not be what they seem; an interesting view of “madness”; hackers; real aliens that find humans tasty and forbidden love…well lust at least.

Jamisia wakes up with the voices in her head screaming at her to run, she has been betrayed. Her tutor finds her rushes her to a pod, tells her it was his job to kill her to prevent her capture, but he instead frees her.

Everyone seems to have brainware that helps keep them in touch with anyone and anything they need in the universe, think of the world wide web in your head. It will even track what’s going on with your body and offer up medication if anything delves from the norm.

Earth has been a rat fink bastard again and done some pretty shitty things to Earth’s space colonists. Unfortunately it wasn’t all unwarranted. Apparently the process that allowed the colonists to leave the over populated and under resourced Earth turned the colonists into mutant alien freaks….who still considered themselves human. There were planet wide riots on Earth when they found out and the Earth cut off all contact with the colonists causing hundreds of thousands to die.

The plot is good, the story is fast paced and the ending isn’t exactly what you were expecting. All in all a really good read. I just may have to re-read Friedman’s other books.