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Even though she’s so stubborn and selfish that you want to knock
some sense into her, Tabitha Jute is the modern Alice. Beneath the hard bitten space captain is the eternal innocent, struggling to keep a grip on her crumbling wonderland. She kept her head above water in
the Arthur C. Clarke Award winning Take Back Plenty, stealing the colossal starship Plenty out from under the noses of mankind’s alien masters.
It is a different story in Seasons. Tabitha is in control of everything at last, taking Plenty on mankind’s first trip to the stars, a pleasant 18 month jaunt through hyperspace to Proxima Centauri. But Plenty is an alien ship, a place where nothing is what it seems. People start disappearing into its mysterious caverns, no one really knows where the ship is going, and a mysterious woman has stolen Tabitha’s best friend, the artificial intelligence that was her tramp freighter. Tabitha can’t cope anymore, and as she loses almost everything Greenland charts the disintegration of Plenty’s loose gathering of misfits and adventurers, from initial euphoria, through disillusionment, to final outright war.
This is space opera updated, full of complex themes and light touches brought together by the deft hand of a modern master. It’s the science fiction equivalent of a rave, and Greenland is the DJ, mixing and scratching images and ideas from old fifties novels, and adding his nineties beat. Unfathomable aliens and comic humans share the limelight with cyberpunk posthuman constructs and holographic Cheshire cats, while a poet, a doctor and a judge discuss the meaning of life in a starship that might just be a space-travelling brain. In a climax full of fire and light Plenty arrives at a destination, somewhere. Tabitha’s story doesn’t end here and her final tale remains to be told.
Seasons is a powerful and extremely readable novel that will only add to Colin Greenland’s reputation as one of Britain’s best science fiction writers. If you’re after science fiction that still gives you that old sense of wonder that you thought had died with E E ‘Doc’ Smith, then this is the book for you.
Originally published in SFX
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