Kea's Flight (Ebook)

By Erika Hammerschmidt, John C. Ricker
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Kea's Flight (Ebook)
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It's the 25th century, and humans have learned how to end unwanted pregnancies by removing and cryogenically freezing the embryos to save for later. But they never planned for how many there would be, or how much control people would want over their offspring's genetic makeup. *** Kea was an exile before she was born. Grown from an embryo that was rejected for having autism-spectrum genes, she has been raised on a starship full of Earth's unwanted children. When a sudden discovery threatens their plan to find a home, Kea must join with other rejects to save the ship from its own insane government. *** For more info about this book, go to: http://erikahammerschmidt.com/kea.php
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Jun. 27, 2011 By Alexei Maxim russell
Kea's Flight is one of those novels that depart from the typical. To
say it is a work of science fiction, set in a distant future where
space travel is the norm, is not to do the novel justice. True, that
is the setting and the general description of the novel, but apart
from that very general description, Kea's flight conforms to none of
the stereotypical conventions of the science fiction genre. It is a
pioneering departure in more ways than one. The atmosphere and the
future it creates is original and previously uncreated. And yet it
is also the first novel, complete, polished and written for the
mainstream, that deals with important social questions, including
mainstream attitude to... More > those with Austism and Asperger's Syndrome.

If you are, like me, a fan of Isaac Asimov and his ability to create
alternate realities--so real that you feel like a tourist on holidays,
every time you pick up one of his books--then you will surely love
Kea's Flight.

Being my first exposure to Hammerschmidt, as a fiction writer, Asimov
is the writer whose style I have seen most resemblance. Much like
Asimov, Hammerschmidt and Ricker demonstrate their power to form
alternate realities with the complexity and attention to detail
necessary to allow the reader to suspend their disbelief. This gives
the novel such a "real" feel, that I find myself attracted, once
again, to the novel, after having read it. The setting and characters
were described so skillfully, and their reality is so tangible, that I
have found myself missing Kea and her friends, and feeling a powerful
urge to re-visit them in the "flying dustbin", which is their ship.

Hammerschmidt takes care to develop her characters, to a level of
breathing realism, and her dialog is strong and believable. Given
this, however, her first few chapters, much like Asimov's tend to be,
are involved with character development and setting the scene. So, if
you are the type of reader who requires immediate action and a great
deal of violence or earth-shattering explosions, to keep your
attention, you may prefer a book written with more violent action and
less character development. Whereas, if you are more a fan of
classical literature, then you will appreciate the author's
attention to detail. The pace of the book is leisurely, to begin
with, but it is more than compensated for, in the later chapters, when
the plot begins to quickly and impressively take form. Most good
dialogists, such as Hammerschmidt, lack skill with plot. But the plot
twists of Kea's Flight, in spite of their slow maturation, are
skillfully woven, to the extreme, and no mystery is left unsolved. At
some points in the novel, the resolution to a given plot point was so
unexpected and so clever that I couldn't help but laugh in wonderment.
This is something few authors have been able to do to me.

Kea's Flight is a pioneering work, in that it creates a new world,
unlike other science fiction worlds so far invented. That is, to my
mind, the clearest definition of "pioneering science fiction." But it
is also a pioneering work in that it is the first science fiction
novel, in my knowledge, to deal with questions of prejudice against
those with Autism, Asperger's Syndrome or any other diagnosis termed a
"disability" by mainstream culture. It puts this question into a
highly entertaining and well-written piece of fiction; it is written
by authors who, themselves, have been diagnosed on the Autism
Spectrum; it offers solutions to these social problems that leave you
wishing, at the end of the book, that you could be on the ship with
Kea and her friends, instead of this world, where these illogical
prejudices still prevail; it is not afraid to broach controversial
social issues, such as birth control and alternative lifestyle
choices.

For the pioneering reasons above, I rank Kea's Flight as one of the
most memorable reads I have had in a long time and I recommend it,
particularly to anyone who likes to explore new vistas of science
fiction writing, anyone interested in autism/asperger rights and
anyone who is a fan of Isaac Asimov, like myself. < Less
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Product Details

ISBN 978-1-257-08690-0
Copyright Erika Hammerschmidt and John C. Ricker (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0)
Published March 21, 2011
Language English
 
File Format EPUB
File Size 882.0 kB

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autism, parrots, starships, Asperger's Syndrome, lesbian, science fiction, Asperger Syndrome, keas, romance, abortion, gay rights, robots, computers, politics