3.0
Hella
ByPublisher Description
A master of science fiction introduces a world where everything is large and the problems of survival even larger in this exciting new novel.
Hella is a planet where everything is oversized—especially the ambitions of the colonists.
The trees are mile-high, the dinosaur herds are huge, and the weather is extreme—so extreme, the colonists have to migrate twice a year to escape the blistering heat of summer and the atmosphere-freezing cold of winter.
Kyle is a neuro-atypical young man, emotionally challenged, but with an implant that gives him real-time access to the colony's computer network, making him a very misunderstood savant. When an overburdened starship arrives, he becomes the link between the established colonists and the refugees from a ravaged Earth.
The Hella colony is barely self-sufficient. Can it stand the strain of a thousand new arrivals, bringing with them the same kinds of problems they thought they were fleeing?
Despite the dangers to himself and his family, Kyle is in the middle of everything—in possession of the most dangerous secret of all. Will he be caught in a growing political conspiracy? Will his reawakened emotions overwhelm his rationality? Or will he be able to use his unique ability to prevent disaster?
Hella is a planet where everything is oversized—especially the ambitions of the colonists.
The trees are mile-high, the dinosaur herds are huge, and the weather is extreme—so extreme, the colonists have to migrate twice a year to escape the blistering heat of summer and the atmosphere-freezing cold of winter.
Kyle is a neuro-atypical young man, emotionally challenged, but with an implant that gives him real-time access to the colony's computer network, making him a very misunderstood savant. When an overburdened starship arrives, he becomes the link between the established colonists and the refugees from a ravaged Earth.
The Hella colony is barely self-sufficient. Can it stand the strain of a thousand new arrivals, bringing with them the same kinds of problems they thought they were fleeing?
Despite the dangers to himself and his family, Kyle is in the middle of everything—in possession of the most dangerous secret of all. Will he be caught in a growing political conspiracy? Will his reawakened emotions overwhelm his rationality? Or will he be able to use his unique ability to prevent disaster?
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesHella Reviews
3.0
“Really neat setting, but narratively pretty dull, nothing of consequence happens until around halfway through, and suffered from a lot of telling and not a lot of showing so it kind of felt like a compendium of worldbuilding ideas rather than a story for most of the book. Relationship between Kyle and Jeremy also felt a little icky given the age difference.”
“Hella is a planet where everything grows “hella” big, and most everything can kill you. Kyle is just about 5 years old - Hella years, which is about 13 and a half Earth years - and is somewhat of an outlier in his colony. He doesn’t think the same way as the others and even had a chip installed when he was younger to help him regulate his unusual thinking to be like everyone else. Despite this - or because of this - he’s been adapt in learning and has just been offered to be an information link between the Hella colonists and the arrival of a new starship with a thousand new residents on board. Tensions rise when the Hella colony recognizes that they are barely self-sufficient as it is and adding in these new arrivals may mean new rules - and the current Hella Commander has agendas of his own that have come to light. All Kyle has been tasked with is to give the new arrivals information about how to survive and coexist on Hella, but how can he give them all the details they need when he is forced to conceal most of it by the Commander?
I didn’t have high expectations for this book because of the ratings and reviews I saw on Goodreads, but I was pleasantly surprised at how cute this book was. While I would’ve loved to learn more about the actual planet and why they left Earth, I still personally adored the main character, the nonchalant ways they talked about gender and relationships, and the messages in the book about it being ok not to be “normal”. As for the science fiction aspect, there was a lot left to be desired, but I still fully enjoyed this as a YA novel. It was fairly slow-going, but the last third amped up the plot and was overall a cute read.”
About David Gerrold
David Gerrold has been writing professionally for half a century. He created the tribbles for "Star Trek" and the Sleestaks for "Land Of The Lost." His most famous novel is "The Man Who Folded Himself." His semi-autobiographical tale of his son's adoption, "The Martian Child" won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, and was the basis for the 2007 movie starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet.
Other books by David Gerrold
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