The Second Coming: The Second Skidian Chronicle

ISBN-13: 9781492742616 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 394 str.

Keith Fenwick

Opis

Welcome to Skid the most technically sophisticated and powerful civilisation in the known universe. The Second Coming is the second novel in the Skidian Chronicles series and follows on from the first novel where our unlikely protagonists were kidnapped by a desperate food research team from the Planet Skid. The researchers were on a mission to locate expertise to assist them in developing organic food sources to feed their people as their planet's synthetic food production systems had begun to fail for some inexplicable reason. The Skidian team had selected a team of experts at random without really understanding the expertise that they required to achieve their objectives. However, more by good luck than good management, they stumbled on someone who could generate new food production systems in the form of New Zild style grasslands based cattle farm, station or ranch. Despite this stroke of good fortune the planned enterprise ultimately failed simply because not enough Skidians wanted to get their hands dirty in making things grow. The old earthly adage; 'you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink, ' was particularly fitting as a famine of unheard of proportions unfolded on Skid. Since the inception of modern Skid as it was at that point in time - the most sophisticated and powerful civilisation in the known universe - the concept of having to actually do anything remotely connected to work, for most Skidians was unknown and hundreds of millions of them had been governed by a small group of hereditary rulers who didn't brook any change to the status quo for generations. The alternative systems developed by the offworld experts would inevitably lead to the transformation of Skid as it was known and the fracturing of Skidian society. Faced with a choice between maintaining the Skidian Way and perhaps saving a good number of Skidians from certain death, the hereditary rulers chose the former and hoped for a miracle to deliver them from mass starvation and the end of the Skid as they knew it. To make matters worse the artificial intelligence that unknown to those rulers or perhaps unacknowledged by them in many respects monitored and controlled all the systems that kept the population fed, housed, and watered was experiencing its own difficulties. The second novel deals with the aftermath of the breakdown in food supplies. The offworlders have been returned home after undergoing a partially successful memory wipe and Skid is slowly recovering from the disaster that; not for the first time has all but destroyed the most powerful and sophisticated civilisation known in the known universe. But all is not lost and not all is as it seems.