Acadie

Starred review from July 31, 2017
Hutchinson’s elegant novella deals with the effects of technology and genetic engineering on politics, lifestyle, and identity. Duke Faraday is president of a renegade Earth colony governed at a distance by the Writers, a group of genetic engineers who have been on the run from Earth authorities for 500 years, and populated primarily by the Kids, the descendants of those they genomically manipulated. When a radioactive probe, presumably sent by Earth’s Bureau of Colonization, unexpectedly infiltrates the colony’s defense grid, Duke and his team must quickly organize an evacuation of the two million inhabitants without putting the colony at further risk of discovery. With a light touch on the science and society, Hutchinson (Europe in Winter) creates a world that is not terribly far from our own, with the benefits and drawbacks of genome sequencing affecting perception and reality. The fluidity of the flashbacks ensures that the revelations throughout enhance the larger conversation without distracting from it.

September 15, 2017

That he happens to be in charge of the colony on the day the crisis dawns is just Duke Faraday's luck. His presidency mostly consists of getting free drinks at the bar, but when the colony's long-term detection system, known as the dewline, catches a probe from Earth's Bureau of Colonization, it is up to Duke to mobilize a response. He is part of a breakaway community of humans that has been hiding from the bureau for centuries. The colony's founder, Isabel Potter, is a genius geneticist whose experiments were outlawed on Earth. She escaped with a ship and has been on the run ever since. Now Duke confronts a bureau agent who has found them and threatens their newly built world. VERDICT This novella from the author of Europe in Autumn packs in an impressive amount of story about the effects of technology and genetics in a slim package, including one remarkable twist.--MM

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