Earthseed (The Seed Trilogy, #1)

Earthseed
Pamela Sargent
271 pages
Released: 1983, February 12, 2012
Publisher: Tor Teen
Source: Goodreads First Reads win
★★★☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Earth has been all but abandoned, so Zoheret and her peers have been raised by Ship, a spacecraft trying to find an uninhabited planet for them.  Ship trains them the best it can for the future wilderness they face by making the youth go through a test.  Wall-E meets Hunger Games, Earthseed shows what really could happen when/if humans are forced to find and settle a new home.

I have no idea how to pronounce Zoheret.  Can anyone tell me?  But regardless of how you pronounce her name, the heroine in this story was very level-headed and compassionate.  Once the teens were in the dog-eat-dog world of the Hollow, Zoheret was one of the very few who were willing to put the group above self and help those who were struggling.  She was a very admirable character.  Even as the book wore on and things got real tough, she always held out hope they could work together as a group.

Earthseed was extremely fast paced, although not quite as action-packed as more modern YA.  I was able to read the book in a mere two hours and I was interested enough to turn the pages, though I wouldn't exactly say I was at the edge of my seat.  Not much time is wasted on useless details, though in some place more detail would have been beneficial.

The hardest part of Earthseed for me was getting a grip on "Ship's" character.  Ship is literally a spaceship, but it has a personality.  In my head, its voice was very calm and bland.  One minute it seemed pretty non-partisan and liked to stay out of things, but at other times it got really involved in Zoheret's time management.  I kept waiting for it to become one of those futuristic artificial intellegences that got power hungry.  Sometimes Ship seemed to have emotions and sometimes it didn't.  Even now, after having finished the book, I can't really get a grip on it.  OK, but I will admit every time the ship referred to its "seed," I giggled a little in my head.

Three stars!  Fans of sci-fi will love this book much more than I did and I would recommend it to any sci-fi fan, young or old.  Earthseed is the first book in a trilogy, though I haven't decided if I'll continue on or not.