Friday 20 January 2012

20. Outpost by Allan Baille

Outpost by Allan Baille
Published January 2012 Penguin

From the publisher:

Life on the remote moon Ord is dangerous. Random eruptions in the ice, extreme cold, loneliness and loss: it's all Dece knows. Until one day he sees a mysterious object caught in the rings of the nearby gas planet, Cotal. With no choice but to investigate, what he will find is so extraordinary that it is almost beyond understanding.

This book is interesting because it doesn't tell you what year it is set in, we just know that people are living on other planets, although some still live on Home (Earth).  We also don't know how old the characters are.  The beginning sets the scene as to why these people are on the planet Ord, and how there Dreaming Sea (a frozen ocean) is linked to the orbit of Cotal, as the Earth is to our Moon. Only, because the Dreaming Sea is frozen, it doesn't produce tides, but massive and dangerous frozen geysers, that shoot out of the sea and have already taken the life of one of their team.

The real action starts when they see a ship on the rings of Cotal, and go to explore.  It is at this point that you think back to all of the Space/SciFi films you have seen where young hopefuls venture into whatthey assume is an abandoned spaceship!  You just want to say...don't go in there...but they do.  I won't give away too much, but after the build up, what they find on the ship was a bit of an anticlimax to me...there is a funny little twist at the very end though, that I thought was quite good.


Who will like this book: Boys Age 10+
Read it if you like: to think that something is 'Out There'

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