1 out of 4 stars
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What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke, a colony of settlers who disappeared from what is now North Carolina? “Juno” is a book which imagines an interesting answer to that question; they were saved from a slow lingering death by aliens. The story follows what happens after the colony is picked up by the alien rescuers and then returned, almost 430 years later. The book covers the reaction of both the returning settlers and the planet that discovers humanity isn't alone in the universe, as well as some of the ensuing politics a situation like that would cause.
Juno is the name of the central character who is one of the returning colonists and has the most interaction with Earth. He is one of the leaders of the colony, it is through him that the modern world finds out just how much their world has to change. He is one of the heroes of the book, and a lot of the action flows through him. He helps with the diplomacy, he helps defend human lives, and he provides a calm approach to some of the intense problems humanity faces in the story. By the end of book the course of human history has been altered.
The disappointing thing about this book is that there are some interesting ideas that just aren't given the treatment they deserve. This starts with technical problems that just shouldn't be present in a book. There are too many commas faults, paragraphs that are cut up for no reason, punctuation errors, and a few sentences that are just difficult to understand. It's difficult at times, due to the way the paragraphs are structured, to tell who is talking in some conversations.
This is a science fiction novel, and the science doesn't have to be perfect. You can have faster-than-light ships if you want, even if we have no idea how something like that would work. What you can't do is write about things in a way that makes it seem like you don't know what you're talking about. A ship that is 22 miles long is huge, but it's a very, very small interstellar object. Sixty-eight million miles is an almost unimaginable distance on a human scale, but it's closer to Earth than Mars, which makes it right on top of us in space. Don't say that an alien fleet is passing Pluto, slowing to sub-light speed, and that it will arrive in 12 minutes when Pluto is over five light-hours away. There are technical issues like that which pull the reader from the story.
Some of the actions by people in the story as well. I'm a little skeptical that the leaders of Russia or China would use a missile to try and destroy a ship that helped save the planet, especially since it showed it had much higher technology than the Earth had developed. There are reactions that just don't make sense.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the book though is that there isn't enough description, or enough depth to the characters. I don't even know what two of the main characters, Marion Seagraves and Mike Brandon, look like. Their motivations are mostly unknown. All the characters, even Juno, seem strangely flat. Scenes that should really grip you, just don't. I wanted to like this story, but just didn't. I rate “Juno” one out of four stars. While some of the ideas are interesting, it's not well-written and there are simply too many flaws.
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Juno
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