What do you think?
Rate this book
Pioneers
Blue Genes...Ape-like and with one arm replaced by a claw, the not-quite-human Angelo and his beautiful female partner Ariadne are genetically bred rescuers programmed to travel vast distances through space in suspended animation to bring back Pioneers - explorers sent out from Earth generations ago to settle other planets. The latest mission is to rescue Pioneer Murray from the planet La Plage and to return to Earth where - as usual - decades have passed while they have been travelling between the stars.But Earth itself has gone through a catastrophic collapse from which its burnt-out civilization is trying to recover. And amongst the remnants of a sterile and despairing humanity, there is less room than ever before for such strange creatures as Angelo.Combining rich and weird alien environments with exciting deep-space adventure, Pioneers is a brilliant novel of love and alienation in a strange and poignant future.
- GenresScience Fiction
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
42 people want to read
About the author
Phillip Mann
29 books16 followersPhillip Mann was born in 1942 and studied English and Drama at Manchester University and later in California. He worked in the New China News Agency in Beijing for two years but has lived in New Zealand since 1969, working as a theatre critic, drama teacher and university Reader in Drama.
Series:
* Pawl Paxwax, the Gardener
* A Land Fit for Heroes
Series:
* Pawl Paxwax, the Gardener
* A Land Fit for Heroes
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 8, 2021
I've been reading and enjoying Phillip Mann's work for twenty-five years.
I began as a teenager with his poignant, unique Wulfsyarn, and rediscovered him a few years back with the environmentally-tinged The Disestablishment of Paradise. Pioneers, while different from both of those novels, bears the hallmarks of all Mann's work - an engaging story told with sensitivity and no small amount of pathos.
A common theme across Mann's books (including Master of Paxwax and The Disestablishment of Paradise) is that of humanity's predilection for destructive behavior - towards the environment, towards other life forms, and in Pioneers, towards ourselves.
In Pioneers, Humanity has been on a long, slow decline, with no-one to blame but ourselves. For reasons of pollution, radiation and other man-made influences, human reproduction has faltered. Large swathes of the globe have been rendered uninhabited, and the most viable stock of healthy people has been sequestered on the moon, where experiments are in progress to arrest the extinction of the race.
A technological decline has marched in lockstep with this biological one, and as the novel begins we are journeying with Angelo and Ariadne, two 'Pioneer Rescuers' who have been sent out into the universe to repatriate immortal settlers who were sent out centuries before when both science and hope were more abundant.
These 'pioneers' were fundamentally altered to be able to evolve at a fantastic rate, a trait which would allow them to adapt to and colonize almost any world that they landed on, readying it for future human habitation. This ability has seen some evolve into utterly different life forms, their former humanity almost lost in the changes they have endured (one has basically become a mobile cactus!)
The leaders of the human race have hopes that the protean genes of these Pioneers will invigorate the dying species.
Angelo and Ariadne are themselves products of lost science - tough, slow-aging clones much stronger and faster than standard humans. Ariadne can pass as a (decidedly statuesque) human, but Angelo, with his ape-like fur and massive claw on one arm in place of a hand, is visibly alien. Together they spend vast periods traveling in stasis between the stars, returning each time to a changed world, where the remaining people are becoming less and less technologically able, at the same time as they become more hostile to anyone outside their increasingly primitive norm.
Angelo and Ariadne will be called to travel far from Earth, and what they discover will decide whether humanity lives, or dies.
Pioneers is a fun read, particularly for a New Zealander. It's a genuine thrill to see New Zealand landscapes and locations in an SF story. So much of the genre is Amero/Eurocentric, that you would think the antipodes had ceased to exist in most Science Fiction futures.
Not so in Mann's work. Post-humans lounging in Rotorua hot springs, a spaceport in Masterton (just down the road from my mother's house, and the farm my father took me hunting on as a boy), spacecraft crossing the Rimutaka Ranges - Pioneers is a future trip around New Zealand's North Island.
It's a fun read, and most of the novel has dated well - Mann avoids many of the temporal markers that can date SF (like physical newspapers in the year 3000, etc.) and the story is still engaging and vivid decades after it was written. Some of the gender relations in the story feel a touch odd, and perhaps a little dated, but they didn't derail the narrative for me.
If you're an SF reader - particularly if you're an antipodean one - this is well worth a look, for both the story and to get a feel for the work of one of Australasian science fiction's most interesting and important authors.
Four weirdly evolved post-humans out of five.
P.S: Mann very kindly sent me a copy of this book, with no expectation of a review, after a conversation about his work. He thought I might like it, and he was right. On a personal note, it's a damn fine thing to find out that one of your favorite writers is an all around nice guy too.
I began as a teenager with his poignant, unique Wulfsyarn, and rediscovered him a few years back with the environmentally-tinged The Disestablishment of Paradise. Pioneers, while different from both of those novels, bears the hallmarks of all Mann's work - an engaging story told with sensitivity and no small amount of pathos.
A common theme across Mann's books (including Master of Paxwax and The Disestablishment of Paradise) is that of humanity's predilection for destructive behavior - towards the environment, towards other life forms, and in Pioneers, towards ourselves.
In Pioneers, Humanity has been on a long, slow decline, with no-one to blame but ourselves. For reasons of pollution, radiation and other man-made influences, human reproduction has faltered. Large swathes of the globe have been rendered uninhabited, and the most viable stock of healthy people has been sequestered on the moon, where experiments are in progress to arrest the extinction of the race.
A technological decline has marched in lockstep with this biological one, and as the novel begins we are journeying with Angelo and Ariadne, two 'Pioneer Rescuers' who have been sent out into the universe to repatriate immortal settlers who were sent out centuries before when both science and hope were more abundant.
These 'pioneers' were fundamentally altered to be able to evolve at a fantastic rate, a trait which would allow them to adapt to and colonize almost any world that they landed on, readying it for future human habitation. This ability has seen some evolve into utterly different life forms, their former humanity almost lost in the changes they have endured (one has basically become a mobile cactus!)
The leaders of the human race have hopes that the protean genes of these Pioneers will invigorate the dying species.
Angelo and Ariadne are themselves products of lost science - tough, slow-aging clones much stronger and faster than standard humans. Ariadne can pass as a (decidedly statuesque) human, but Angelo, with his ape-like fur and massive claw on one arm in place of a hand, is visibly alien. Together they spend vast periods traveling in stasis between the stars, returning each time to a changed world, where the remaining people are becoming less and less technologically able, at the same time as they become more hostile to anyone outside their increasingly primitive norm.
Angelo and Ariadne will be called to travel far from Earth, and what they discover will decide whether humanity lives, or dies.
Pioneers is a fun read, particularly for a New Zealander. It's a genuine thrill to see New Zealand landscapes and locations in an SF story. So much of the genre is Amero/Eurocentric, that you would think the antipodes had ceased to exist in most Science Fiction futures.
Not so in Mann's work. Post-humans lounging in Rotorua hot springs, a spaceport in Masterton (just down the road from my mother's house, and the farm my father took me hunting on as a boy), spacecraft crossing the Rimutaka Ranges - Pioneers is a future trip around New Zealand's North Island.
It's a fun read, and most of the novel has dated well - Mann avoids many of the temporal markers that can date SF (like physical newspapers in the year 3000, etc.) and the story is still engaging and vivid decades after it was written. Some of the gender relations in the story feel a touch odd, and perhaps a little dated, but they didn't derail the narrative for me.
If you're an SF reader - particularly if you're an antipodean one - this is well worth a look, for both the story and to get a feel for the work of one of Australasian science fiction's most interesting and important authors.
Four weirdly evolved post-humans out of five.
P.S: Mann very kindly sent me a copy of this book, with no expectation of a review, after a conversation about his work. He thought I might like it, and he was right. On a personal note, it's a damn fine thing to find out that one of your favorite writers is an all around nice guy too.
May 30, 2018
The second novel I've read by Phillip Mann, and definitely the first time I've encountered the Rimutaka Ranges in a novel. Although, the idea of New Zealand being the bastion of civilization doesn't seem so crazy with Libertarian billionaires building apocalypse shelters in Aotearoa.
This introduction of NZ is wonderfully understated - typical of Mann's writing in general, and refreshing compared to all the Netflix ready stories choking the genre. Almost - dare I say it - reminiscent of one of my favourite authors, Iain Banks.
Mann's love of nature is obvious throughout. However, compared to his Disestablishment of Paradise, Pioneers emphasizes human introversion rather than world building - a shame given this is such a strength of the former.
Pioneers reads a bit dated - particularly the male/female relationships, but there are far worse (and more recent) offenders in science fiction.
In the future, I'll look for his more recent novels in the hope they play to his strengths.
This introduction of NZ is wonderfully understated - typical of Mann's writing in general, and refreshing compared to all the Netflix ready stories choking the genre. Almost - dare I say it - reminiscent of one of my favourite authors, Iain Banks.
Mann's love of nature is obvious throughout. However, compared to his Disestablishment of Paradise, Pioneers emphasizes human introversion rather than world building - a shame given this is such a strength of the former.
Pioneers reads a bit dated - particularly the male/female relationships, but there are far worse (and more recent) offenders in science fiction.
In the future, I'll look for his more recent novels in the hope they play to his strengths.
August 31, 2020
I unashamedly love this book. It's been a favourite since a friend lent it to me in my teens. A space centre in Masterton (Masterton!!), and genetically altered humans hanging out at the hot pools in Rotorua. What's not to love? Marvellous! Some of the concepts around gender ideals are a bit dated, but nothing that made me gnash my teeth too much.
October 15, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in January 2001.
In the future envisaged in this novel, humans have attempted to colonise the universe in a rather strange manner (probably suggested to Mann by short stories by Brian Aldiss). They sent out the Pioneers, who have been genetically altered to make them able to adapt themselves to an extremely wide range of possible environments. (They evolve in a non-reproductive manner, changing their own genome and bodily structure in an unspecified and frankly rather unlikely manner.) But as the Pioneers have prospered, Earth has begun to decline, as the human reproductive powers have declined. So the Pioneer Rescuers are sent out to bring back the Pioneers for the sake of the ancient genes only they now contain. (The Pioneer programme is made more unlikely as each planet has just one Pioneer, not a colony.) The novel is the story of a couple of the Rescuers.
The scenario of the novel is patchy, and so is the writing. Parts are excruciatingly poor (the account of the rescue of Pioneer Rip is like one of those cliched Star Trek episodes in which advanced aliens play psychological tricks on Captain Kirk), while other sections are much better. Judging by A Land Fit for Heroes, which I read part of before giving up, the poor parts are more typical of Mann's writing. Not recommended.
In the future envisaged in this novel, humans have attempted to colonise the universe in a rather strange manner (probably suggested to Mann by short stories by Brian Aldiss). They sent out the Pioneers, who have been genetically altered to make them able to adapt themselves to an extremely wide range of possible environments. (They evolve in a non-reproductive manner, changing their own genome and bodily structure in an unspecified and frankly rather unlikely manner.) But as the Pioneers have prospered, Earth has begun to decline, as the human reproductive powers have declined. So the Pioneer Rescuers are sent out to bring back the Pioneers for the sake of the ancient genes only they now contain. (The Pioneer programme is made more unlikely as each planet has just one Pioneer, not a colony.) The novel is the story of a couple of the Rescuers.
The scenario of the novel is patchy, and so is the writing. Parts are excruciatingly poor (the account of the rescue of Pioneer Rip is like one of those cliched Star Trek episodes in which advanced aliens play psychological tricks on Captain Kirk), while other sections are much better. Judging by A Land Fit for Heroes, which I read part of before giving up, the poor parts are more typical of Mann's writing. Not recommended.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews