Audible’s members section has blown up recently – or I’ve just recently discovered what others have long enjoyed. There’s a virtually endless supply of books, novellas, and short stories available for download – beyond the normal one credit per month system. Currently, I have 65 books on my phone – almost all of them downloaded in the last two weeks. I should stop looking – I may have a problem.
I’ve read quite a few books by Dennis Taylor, and virtually all of them have been mildly disappointing. They’re perfectly fine, I guess. They explore some pretty interesting ideas (time travel, AI, the end of the world), but the characters are all kind of the same, and there’s a lot of overlap in theme. The main one seems to be: let scientists do their thing, and everything will be okay.
While I generally think scientists should be listened to – history has definitely shown that scientists are people just like everyone else. And, being people, they are just as susceptible to racism, closed-mindedness, and confirmation bias. So science with moderation should probably be preferred.
Anyway.
In A Change of Plans, the earth is dying and humanity has taken to the stars to set up colonies. The Ouroboros has arrived at paradise, only to discover that the planet was recently hit by a planet killing asteroid. The ship’s crew decides to drop the colonists off anyway, and leave them to their fate. There are a lot of people back on Earth waiting for their shot at a new home, and there aren’t enough ships to save everyone. Thems the breaks, I guess.
The colonists, however, have other plans, and decide to take over the ship.
That’s all I’ll say about the plot. It’s a pretty short story, and I don’t want to give everything away.
It ended up being a mostly enjoyable story. I liked it more than Feedback, the last story of his I read. There’s nothing ground-breaking, here, and I feel like this could’ve been turned into a somewhat deeper story – but it gets the job done. And it’s not super long, so it served as a nice filler story in between books.
