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Kennerin Saga #1
Journey
ONE WORLD DIES...
ANOTHER ONE IS BORN
Somewhere in the cosmic darkness lies the unsettled Aerie. It is nothing now. Only a vast muddy rock. But it brings to Jason and Mish Kenner in the hope of a new beginning as their own planet crashes down around them.
It is their home now. A shelter against the universe. A bastion of their love.
When others join them, their influence grows. With a careful move and brash gambles, they forge a mighty empire - a dynasty whose name will thunder across generations to the farthest reaches of time and space.
ANOTHER ONE IS BORN
Somewhere in the cosmic darkness lies the unsettled Aerie. It is nothing now. Only a vast muddy rock. But it brings to Jason and Mish Kenner in the hope of a new beginning as their own planet crashes down around them.
It is their home now. A shelter against the universe. A bastion of their love.
When others join them, their influence grows. With a careful move and brash gambles, they forge a mighty empire - a dynasty whose name will thunder across generations to the farthest reaches of time and space.
367 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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159 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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November 15, 2022Another one from a very full list from Jo Walton this month, https://www.tor.com/2022/04/07/jo-wal...
"This is the book I’ve been looking for, the mythical book that is like The Crow Road on another planet. Why didn’t anyone tell me? This is the story of a family, parents, siblings, love, romance, children—but on another planet and with aliens, humans rescued from another failing colony planet, spaceships, economics, threats of war, all the things you have in science fiction but focused on the Kennerin family and their planet Aerie.
This is a terrific book, if a little oddly structured, and I don’t understand why it didn’t get more attention. Was it before its time? Am I the only person who wants there to be books like this? Buy this as fast as you can and read it so we can have the conversation about whether this is a thing we can do in genre. There’s a sequel called Dangerous Games which I’m reading right now and which will therefore appear in next month’s post."
"This is the book I’ve been looking for, the mythical book that is like The Crow Road on another planet. Why didn’t anyone tell me? This is the story of a family, parents, siblings, love, romance, children—but on another planet and with aliens, humans rescued from another failing colony planet, spaceships, economics, threats of war, all the things you have in science fiction but focused on the Kennerin family and their planet Aerie.
This is a terrific book, if a little oddly structured, and I don’t understand why it didn’t get more attention. Was it before its time? Am I the only person who wants there to be books like this? Buy this as fast as you can and read it so we can have the conversation about whether this is a thing we can do in genre. There’s a sequel called Dangerous Games which I’m reading right now and which will therefore appear in next month’s post."
May 28, 2022
I truly enjoyed this science fiction story of a family through a couple of decades of their lives. It all starts when they take in a group of refugees to the planet they were living on just by their own family. It deals with their family relationships as well as with economics and trade and spaceships and what it takes for these people to all live on this planet. I was totally there for their journey.
November 4, 2013
Though described as a family epic on the cover, it doesn't have the depth of detail or drama that I've come to expect for stories like that. Instead, this book feels like 5 short novellas interconnected through a single family's relations, describing different aspects and personalities in the family and world. The drama and difficulties are interesting and generally quickly conquered, but the family dynamics and the world make this an enjoyable read. A book I'd gladly pass on to someone else, but not one I will save to reread again and again.
February 21, 2017
For a book with the title "Journey", the plot sure goes nowhere.
Overall, disappointing, and not very interesting.
Overall, disappointing, and not very interesting.
February 13, 2019
Mmm not an epic like others before it... More a soap opera with drama and intrigue... If there are other books in the series I wouldn't go out of my way to read them...
August 18, 2025
[warning, spoilers]
Like most sci-fi novels about space colonization, “Journey” owes a debt to earlier books about colonization on Earth. Throw out the sci-fi trappings and shift the setting to the American frontier, or maybe Africa (Kenya, say) or Australia, and very little else about the book would have to change. The novel would open with the Kennerin family, who have claimed a large farm in a place where there are no white people. The natives of this place are peaceful and recognize the Kennerins’ superiority without the need for violence, so relations between them are friendly, though there is no doubt about who’s in charge. The book follows the family as their farm becomes the center of a thriving small town, which they more or less run since they own a big chunk of it. One plotline follows friction between the non-Kennerin whites who move there and the natives, who remain loyal to the Kennerins. There’s also an attack by bandits, in cahoots with an unscrupulous fellow landowner, repelled in Boy’s Own Adventure style by the eldest Kennerin son. The youngest boy is not so heroic: as a teenager, he commits a terrible crime against one of the natives and is quickly bundled off to university in Europe, but his experiences with the aristocracy there teach him the importance of being nice to his inferiors and he returns home a changed man. The only subplot that probably wouldn’t have been included had this book been written in 1878 rather than 1978 is the incest one, but it’s not essential, I don’t think: instead, that daughter’s marriage to a doctor can be not entirely successful because he doesn’t want to settle down, while the other daughter has to fight family disapproval to marry an impoverished young man (but from a good family) who shows up on the farm looking for work.
This version of “Journey” has some obvious problems: racism and class bias mean that none of the non-Kennerin characters are can really be interesting. And the novel’s presentation of the Kennerins as heroic pioneers also renders them incomplete, by, for instance, refusing to recognize what it means that they place such little value on the lives of Hart’s victims. But if the book was from 1878, you might be willing to overlook these issues, on the grounds that the attitudes they reflected were pretty widespread at the time, and focus more on the quality of the writing and the interesting female (Kennerin) characters. Alas, it’s much harder to ignore these deficiencies in a book that’s written in 1978. It’s possible that Randall thought that she had avoided them by moving everything off-world and making the natives be aliens (the kasirene, who resemble sentient kangaroos), but I really don’t think that she has. The kasirene are fully sentient beings: what gives the Kennerins the right to take over their world and ignore crimes committed against them? In some ways, in fact, “Journey” is even worse than its hypothetical 19th-century forebear. Those Kennerins would be American or English, and their goal would be to become prosperous and influential landholders within the USA or the British Empire. A book in which they were trying to establish their own petty kingdom would be a different book, one that would present them in a far less heroic light. But that’s exactly what the Kennerins are doing here: they are turning the planet Aerie into their personal fief, and as the book goes on it gets harder and harder to root for them to succeed at that. I wouldn’t necessarily not recommend “Journey”, because it is fairly well-written, but you might be better off going back to somebody like Haggard or Kipling rather than this sci-fi updating of them.
Like most sci-fi novels about space colonization, “Journey” owes a debt to earlier books about colonization on Earth. Throw out the sci-fi trappings and shift the setting to the American frontier, or maybe Africa (Kenya, say) or Australia, and very little else about the book would have to change. The novel would open with the Kennerin family, who have claimed a large farm in a place where there are no white people. The natives of this place are peaceful and recognize the Kennerins’ superiority without the need for violence, so relations between them are friendly, though there is no doubt about who’s in charge. The book follows the family as their farm becomes the center of a thriving small town, which they more or less run since they own a big chunk of it. One plotline follows friction between the non-Kennerin whites who move there and the natives, who remain loyal to the Kennerins. There’s also an attack by bandits, in cahoots with an unscrupulous fellow landowner, repelled in Boy’s Own Adventure style by the eldest Kennerin son. The youngest boy is not so heroic: as a teenager, he commits a terrible crime against one of the natives and is quickly bundled off to university in Europe, but his experiences with the aristocracy there teach him the importance of being nice to his inferiors and he returns home a changed man. The only subplot that probably wouldn’t have been included had this book been written in 1878 rather than 1978 is the incest one, but it’s not essential, I don’t think: instead, that daughter’s marriage to a doctor can be not entirely successful because he doesn’t want to settle down, while the other daughter has to fight family disapproval to marry an impoverished young man (but from a good family) who shows up on the farm looking for work.
This version of “Journey” has some obvious problems: racism and class bias mean that none of the non-Kennerin characters are can really be interesting. And the novel’s presentation of the Kennerins as heroic pioneers also renders them incomplete, by, for instance, refusing to recognize what it means that they place such little value on the lives of Hart’s victims. But if the book was from 1878, you might be willing to overlook these issues, on the grounds that the attitudes they reflected were pretty widespread at the time, and focus more on the quality of the writing and the interesting female (Kennerin) characters. Alas, it’s much harder to ignore these deficiencies in a book that’s written in 1978. It’s possible that Randall thought that she had avoided them by moving everything off-world and making the natives be aliens (the kasirene, who resemble sentient kangaroos), but I really don’t think that she has. The kasirene are fully sentient beings: what gives the Kennerins the right to take over their world and ignore crimes committed against them? In some ways, in fact, “Journey” is even worse than its hypothetical 19th-century forebear. Those Kennerins would be American or English, and their goal would be to become prosperous and influential landholders within the USA or the British Empire. A book in which they were trying to establish their own petty kingdom would be a different book, one that would present them in a far less heroic light. But that’s exactly what the Kennerins are doing here: they are turning the planet Aerie into their personal fief, and as the book goes on it gets harder and harder to root for them to succeed at that. I wouldn’t necessarily not recommend “Journey”, because it is fairly well-written, but you might be better off going back to somebody like Haggard or Kipling rather than this sci-fi updating of them.
December 24, 2023
Very focused on efforts to start new societies that don't repeat the patterns of old ones, and then totally repeating those patterns anyway. Some really interesting stuff with gender and family roles; I was so crushed toward the end with who got to go off planet and why.
It is a pretty dense family epic and I tried to read it like light reading, so that was silly of me; I'll have to revisit it more intentionally once I have the sequel available.
It is a pretty dense family epic and I tried to read it like light reading, so that was silly of me; I'll have to revisit it more intentionally once I have the sequel available.
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October 23, 2025A new empire rises out of the enigmatic cosmic planet of Aerie, while in the shadows, Jason and Mish Kennerin’s destroyed world leaves them with only their love and the uncertain future of this new planet. As Jason and Mish find their sphere of love in the midst of an evolution, Aerie promises to shelter them. But it does more than that, for in time, a dynasty starts to emerge from the chaos of their ruined past.
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May 7, 2019I have two different german editions.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews