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A review by tani
Acadie by Dave Hutchinson
4.0
It's the morning after the morning after Duke's 150th birthday, and he wakes to a terrible noise. He's the current President of Acadie, a space colony filled with radicals and deep thinkers. Their founder ran from Earth hundreds of years ago. She pioneered genetic research that allowed the creation of ultra-smart humans, at the expense of longevity, a huge ethical violation, and so the Earth still hunts her to this day. Which is why the most important task of the President of Acadie is to monitor the dewline and make sure that the colony isn't found. Duke, through an inconveniently timed absence during election time, currently has that honor. And when a probe from Earth is found well within the dewline, he has to face a devastating choice: risk discovery or uproot the entire colony.
The first thing that pulled me into this novella was the voice. It's written in an extremely engaging voice, and even though I wasn't sure what exactly was going on for a bit, the voice was more than enough to keep me interested. Duke is a lot of fun as a character, sarcastic and smart, and he's surrounded by other characters with similar features. It made the first half of the novella absolutely breeze by.
The second half slowed down for me, partially because I was getting distracted, but also because the story most definitely does slow down. Once the immediate crisis is past, I started to notice gaps, places where I would have liked the story to go a little deeper and explain a little more. However, when things pick back up, they do so with a bang. There are a lot of revelations at the end of this story, ones that I completely did not expect, to be honest. I think the unexpectedness actually made it more enjoyable. I was basically in the same place as Duke, just trying to puzzle through things and understand what's going on, so we got to take that journey together. And then that ending! I can't say much, but the last sentence of this novella puts the whole story into a new light, and I loved it.
Looking back, I actually like this story even better than I did while reading it. In retrospect, there are a lot of things that become clear, and I think I'll be thinking about it for a while yet. It's actually an extremely well-crafted story, but as a reader, you can't pick up on it as much as you should until you hit the very end. That's not actually something I say often, to be honest. It's rare that an ending makes me reflect back on the entire story and find that it works better that way. So kudos to Dave Hutchinson. I'll definitely have to read more of his work in the future.
The first thing that pulled me into this novella was the voice. It's written in an extremely engaging voice, and even though I wasn't sure what exactly was going on for a bit, the voice was more than enough to keep me interested. Duke is a lot of fun as a character, sarcastic and smart, and he's surrounded by other characters with similar features. It made the first half of the novella absolutely breeze by.
The second half slowed down for me, partially because I was getting distracted, but also because the story most definitely does slow down. Once the immediate crisis is past, I started to notice gaps, places where I would have liked the story to go a little deeper and explain a little more. However, when things pick back up, they do so with a bang. There are a lot of revelations at the end of this story, ones that I completely did not expect, to be honest. I think the unexpectedness actually made it more enjoyable. I was basically in the same place as Duke, just trying to puzzle through things and understand what's going on, so we got to take that journey together. And then that ending! I can't say much, but the last sentence of this novella puts the whole story into a new light, and I loved it.
Looking back, I actually like this story even better than I did while reading it. In retrospect, there are a lot of things that become clear, and I think I'll be thinking about it for a while yet. It's actually an extremely well-crafted story, but as a reader, you can't pick up on it as much as you should until you hit the very end. That's not actually something I say often, to be honest. It's rare that an ending makes me reflect back on the entire story and find that it works better that way. So kudos to Dave Hutchinson. I'll definitely have to read more of his work in the future.