Signs Of Life

Rhomary Land #2

by Cherry Wilder, Nicholas Jainschigg (Illustrator (cover))

Cherry Wilder returns to Rhomary Land, the setting of several of her most notable short stories and of her novel, Second Nature. In Signs of Life, the crew of a ruined starship flees in lifeboats to a nearby hospitable world -- only to be nearly destroyed by their own internal conflicts.

The survivors land, widely dispersed, on Rhomary Land. This is the story of how these people survive and are reunited with each other and with the descendants of the original interstellar crew that was marooned on the planet.

Thousands of light years from Earth, a transport ship starts to break apart as it passes near an uncharted, but amazingly, habitable planet. As it slowly falls into the planet, six tiny emergency capsules are flung out from the ship's bulk, to follow it down through the atmosphere. Only a few of the capsules survive the fiery ride and fall on dry land. Free from any authority, some of the former crew members who make it try to take over their new home by force. But the planet is not uninhabited after all, and those who have lived there for generations, forgotten by the rest of the universe, have their own lives and plans ...

The author was from New Zealand, sadly passing away in 2002.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

281 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 1, 1996

Reviews

[Nathan Shumate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as successful as the first book for me -- owing mainly to the HUGE cast of characters. Unlike the previous book in the series, which focused mostly on a few people in the human civilization which had taken hold in the centuries since a crashlanding had stranded their ancestors, this book spends most of its wordcount with the survivors of a new crashlanding on the same planet -- with characters being divided between normal ship personnel and the more militaristic "Silvos," and then those two camps also being divided between normal humans or "auxiliary personnel" or "oxper" (androids). Given that the character names did little to help identify them within one of those four groups -- heck, names didn't even consistently indicate gender -- I had to get comfortable with the idea of forgetting who everyone except about a half-dozen were every chapter.

This book probably got a harsher assessment from most readers, though -- it's a sequel to a book published a decade before by another publishing house, which was long out of print by the time this was published -- and nothing either on the cover or within the book clues the reader in to the previous book's existence.

That said, I would very dearly have loved to continue to explore the world and the old and new human communities' places in it... but the author died shortly thereafter, leaving only this truncated stub of what could have been an engaging saga.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the things I'm doing to keep myself occupied during the Stay-at-Home orders is to organize my house. Tackling my library is one heck of a challenge. I found this book as I went through a long-forgotten box of books that I've already read.

I enjoyed the book. I needed a book that got me thinking; with the changes in language and new slang to learn, I was definitely thinking. I was a bit confused by all the different changes in names and nicknames. I had a difficult time tracking all the allies and cliques. This kind of thinking is exactly what I've been needing.

I had no idea that this was book #2 in a series. Now I need to hunt down the rest of the series. Is the first book about the first crash?

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is new twist on the 1st contact story. Ships crew lost on what is belived to be a desserted plant, it is not. The conflict among the crew makes this a interesting story.They 1st people to land there are well done. How they handle the 1st contact is more like humans would do it, the people are beliveable. There are people to love and to hate. Worth the time to read. I rated it 3 1/2 stars I do'nt think it is a 4 but more than a 3. My review is of the paperback version.

[Mely]

Companion novel to Second Nature, written fourteen years later, dealing with the same wreck, but focusing on another set of survivors in a distant location. The survivors no sooner land than squabbles break out between the ship's crew (mostly independent scientific researchers and spacers) and their passengers (a family/acting troupe), who see the new world as an environment they need to learn, and another set of passengers, a paramilitary troop, who perceive Rhomary as a war zone full of potential enemies. The humans are, of course, their own worst enemies.

Much less successful than the previous book: the huge cast is hard to differentiate; the spacer slang sounds terribly silly; and the villains are flat and uninteresting, if not entirely implausible.

[Kathy KS · Rating 3 out of 5]

First contact