Half Way Home

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews<

Summary
Earth is sending out compact colony ships, designed to raise colonists from blastocysts by machine, and to abort if the colony isn't viable. But one colony is only partially aborted, leaving a handful of the least capable to try to survive - all only in their teens.

Review
Neither the title nor cover of Half Way Home will tell you much about the story, which is perhaps just as well, since they have little to do with it. Published the year before Wool, this is Howey well before fame.

The writing, as craft, doesn't suffer from it. As in later books, Howey creates effective, engaging characters and brings their troubles to life. There's a little too much introspection here, sometimes feeling like Orson Scott Card when he gets too wrapped up in character philosophy, but like Card, the result is an appealing, well written adventure.

There are plenty of scientific elements that get leaped over here, and Howey's not as devoted to realism as in his later books. But, for a quick adventure, it's fun.

Where I had far more trouble was with some of the social roles. For absolutely no reason I could find (there's the very thinnest of rationales offered), all the characters, though raised by carefully programmed machines, fall instantly into traditional gender roles, and homophobia immediately rears its head. My ebook edition was published in 2019, and I was startled to see the treatement of the issue, but even acknowledging the book was first published in 2010, that's far too late for the attitudes and assumptions offered here. I suppose one can put it down to Howey's then lack of polish, but I found the attitudes a major stumbling block for the book. The protagonist also throws out his scruples about treatment of local fauna with so little effort that they feel more like window dressing than actual beliefs.

The other problem is that the book doesn't really finish. Or rather it does, but that ending isn't built up to, so that it feels much more like an arbitrary stopping point than a carefully thought out climax.

If you enjoy Howey (and he's a good writer), you may also enjoy this book, but it's awkward enough that you shouldn't feel you need to include it in your library.