"Any Novels About Forgotten Human Colonies?" Topic

Has anyone come across any novels about abandoned space settlements on other planets or moons?

Thanks.

CC

Maybe WE are a forgotten Human Colony…..

oh wait- BSG… we are!

I remember reading one once, by a classic SF author whose name escapes me, about the "mental asylum" planet that had been left to fend for itself when the Empire (or whatever political entity) had collapsed.

Loved it at the time; wonder if I would enjoy it as much again. Can't think of the title…

How about Anne McCaffrey's Dragonrider series? It's low tech, but the series has ties to SF in some of the later books…

"to fend for itself when the Empire (or whatever political entity) had collapsed"

Bill,

That is exactly the kind of books I am looking for for inspiration! Either with settlements on other bodies of our solar system or beyond.

CC

David Weber's 'Mutineer's Moon' and 'Armageddon Inheritance' are about 'forgotten' colonies…well, one, specifically. They're a fun read, for the most part.

I read a very strange story years ago. Can;t remember the title, nor the author.

A ship sank in the ocean, but a couple survived in an air pocket which they were able to renew with breathable gasses, and remove the non. They survived for years, bred and had children…

Like I said, very strange.

Cacique Caribe,

I think that series of books was the "War World" shared universe – based in Pournelle's Co-Dominion universe…

Short form: Under the CoDo – the place was a barely habitable dumping ground for political undesirables – you know – all theose militant "freedom loving" anarchists (as well as honest to goodness Criminals). A very odd mix of settlers gets put there… After that – well – I don't wanna spoil anything – I think the War World series had 5 "shared universe" anthologies and 2(?) stand alone novels.

Pretty much all of Pournelle and Stirling's "Falkenberg's Legion" stories cover the concept of "Worlds being abandoned/were just abandoned by civilization" theme.

Chris Bunch's "Last Legion" series pretty much covers the "fall of empire and aftermath" pretty well too – as the primary military group of the story IS on one of those abandoned worlds.

CJ Cherryh's Alliance/Union universe (Downbelow Station, Merchanter's Luck) etc has that abandonment as a theme as well.

My comment is – that theme is generally hard to get away with for long for most author's due to the fact that after so long "Abandonment" becomes "Building a new identity" and it turns into an empire building story…

My two cents…

Dave Gaidasz

John the OFM, that book was James White's "The Watch Below"

You could also try Cherryth's Foreigner Series of books.

Larry Niven's The integral Trees!! Excellent series!! Here's a description:

"When leaving Earth, the crew of the spaceship Discipline was prepared for a routine assignment. Dispatched by the all-powerful State on a mission of interstellar exploration and colonization, Discipline was aided (and secretly spied upon) by Sharls Davis Kendy, an emotionless computer intelligence programmed to monitor the loyalty and obedience of the crew. But what they weren't prepared for was the smoke ring–an immense gaseous envelope that had formed around a neutron star directly in their path. The Smoke Ring was home to a variety of plant and animal life-forms evolved to thrive in conditions of continual free-fall. When Discipline encountered it, something went wrong. The crew abandoned ship and fled to the unlikely space oasis.

Five hundred years later, the descendants of the Discipline crew living on the Smoke Ring no longer remember their origins. Earth is more myth than memory, and no recollection of the State remains. But Kendy remembers. And just outside the Smoke Ring, Discipline waits patiently to make contact with its wayward children"

I suggest Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Reunion". It deals with the natives of a lost colony discovering that they are, in fact, a colony that was abandoned by its "parent" civilization as the result of a mutagenic plague that infected the colonists and threatened to spread throughout the larger space-faring population.

Its only two pages, if I recall correctly.

Wyatt

PS: Don't spoil it for anyone by giving away the twist.

Well considering the Clans background, a good portion of the Battletech novels would fit into this category. Particularly the trilogy involving the initial Clan invasion by Micheal Stackpole, great read.

Sam Delany's "Ballad of Beta 2" is about a group of "forgotten" generation ships.

There are the Marion Zimmer Bradley Darkover books. Several books sent on the same world through various saages from Landall, through to times they were separate from Earth, and stories of what happened when they recontacted.

Not a book but I liked the storyline to Star Control 2. It was about a group of humans who crash landed on a planet and several generations pass and they rebuild their ship and take to the stars again to find out that Earth and all the other planets were conquered by an evil race and they fight to reunite all the old races to battle these baddies.

Quite a fun and funny game, too.

"mental asylum" planet that

Clans of the Alphane Moons?

In a similar vein to "The Integral Trees," try "Raft" by Stephen Baxter. It's about a human colony in another universe(!) where the force of gravity is so strong that stars are just a mile or so across and even humans have strong gravitational fields.

The mental asylum book is written by Philip K Dick. I liked how each clan was made up of people with the same type of insanity.

The Cobra Trilogy by Timothy Zahn deals with several colonies that get cut off from the main human government.

There's a fairly recent release from Baen, collecting some of the works of Tom Godwin, most noted for writing "The Cold Equations". There's a novel in that collection called "The Survivors." It's not precisely about an abandoned colony, but rather a group of humans abandoned on a barely habitable planet by conquering aliens, who are forced to survive and adapt to life there. It's actually pretty good, reminiscent of Verne's "Mysterious Island" in the ways in which the colonists use knowledge of real science to survive.

I read them a long time ago, but I suspect Harry Harrison's Deathworld series may match your requirement. I think the protagonist was shipwrecked onto the lost human colony planet. Two in one!

A couple of older possibles are
"Orphans of the Sky" Robert Heinlein
"Hothouse" Brian Aldiss.

Try the Circus World series by Barry B. Longyear – City of Baraboo (the best of the trilogy), Elephant Song, and Circus World. A space-faring circus crash-lands on a planet and creates an entire society based on performing, circuses, carnivals, etc. Very enjoyable, and finally back in print after a long absence.

Don't overlook the classic "The Seedling Stars" by James Blish. This is a collection of short stories about humans deliberated adapted to survive as colonies on a variety of different planets. It includes "Surface Tension", one of the greatest SF short stories ever written,

Dave

There is a series by David Drake about such a colony. The plot line is based on the real history of Belisarius' Byzantine campaigns. I think it's the "General" series. The recasting of B's battles into 19th century technology was interesting.

The Darkover books were pretty good, but have a very high Fantasy aspect to them. The later books add in SCi-fi, but the main Ages of Darkover are closer to Sword & Sorcery than Sci-fi.

One of my novels: "Across the Great Rift" features something like that. Unfortunately, the manuscript has been sitting with DAW for nearly a year now. If they buy it I'll let you know :)

These should be pretty common, actually. Depending how thightly you want to toe to the line of rather obscurely put initial post, obviously (the title of the thread doesn't gel with the OP, really).

Just by lookin' at my currently quite unorganised bookshelf and listing titles that are partial matches at least… Peter F. Hamilton's "Fallen Dragon", Jack L. Chalker's "Four Lord of the Diamond" and "Rings of the Master" quartets and "Priam's Lens", Rovert Silverberg's Majipoor stories, C.J.Cherryh's "Hammerfall", Karl Schroeder's "Ventus", Jack Vance's "Durdane Trilogy" and "The Dragon Masters", Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light", Ian Watson's "Yaleen Trilogy", Sheri S. Tepper's "True Game" books, "Rising the Stones", "Shadow's End" and "Sideshow", Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Denner's Wreck", Ken McLeod's "Newton's Wake" and Walter Jon Williams' "Aristoi".

Depending on how forgotten you want 'em of course, and how central a theme you want this abandonment to be.

A Betram Chandler had some amazing Lost Colony stories in his Rim World novels; Positing three waves of colonisation for Earth ( STL, an unpredictable FTL, and a regular FTL phase ), large numbers of wolrds were colonised and then forgotten. Their rediscovery was part of the Navy's survey job and was the prime means of conflict for his stories.

Back from Amazon- The John Grimes of the Survey Service stories are available in a recent collected volume, and some of the other Chandler books are around as secondhands.

Just an aside, but it looks as though after the Australian Bicentennial Committee commissioned "Kelly Country" ( A rather clever AltHist novel), the good Captain seems to have fallen out of favour with publishers.

"The Spectre General" is a great short story on this theme by Theodore Cogswell. It seems that the people who did some of the early work on 40k must have read it.