Fiction

I love this novel, mainly because of the fascinating premise. I am reading it for the fifth time. The premise is that we here on Earth responded to a global crisis that threatened the existence of our species and civilization by sending out seed ships to nearby stars. The seed ships contained not living persons but frozen embryos. Robots, artificial intelligences, on the ships decided on arriving at nearby star systems whether a world in that system was capable of supporting humans, and when arriving at a suitable world, unfroze the embryos, gestated them and raised the children who resulted. All of this happens centuries in our future, and the novel begins 10 or 12 generations in the future of one of the settled worlds. It is called Thalassa, a mostly water world with only one small continent-sized land mass that humans can live on. As I said, it's a fascinating premise. I think that interstellar distances are so imposing that if we humans ever do start colonizing other star systems, it'll probably be something like this.

-- Ron