Colonization (novel)
|
|
Colonization is a trilogy of books written by Harry Turtledove. It is a continuation of the situation set up in the Worldwar four-book series, projecting the situation between humanity and the Race (the bipedal lizardlike invaders and settlers from Worldwar) nearly twenty years forward into the mid-1960s.
The Race has settled and plans to colonize nearly half the surface of the Earth. This half includes Africa, Australia, China, southern Asia, Central America, and South America. The United States, the Soviet Union, the Greater German Reich (Germany and the territories it occupied during World War II), Britain, and Japan are the other major powers when the Race's colonization fleet of eighty to one hundred million settlers arrives. Humanity and the Race still jockey for advantages over each other.
Books of the Colonization trilogy are:
- Colonization: Second Contact (1999)
- Colonization: Down to Earth (2000)
- Colonization: Aftershocks (2001)
A follow-up novel to this series, Homeward Bound, was released in 2004.
In analysis, this trilogy develops the setting in several ways. It becomes somewhat more apparent just how different the Race is from humans. With a civilisation that first united a planet (50000 years ago) and then conquered two others in different systems (beginning about 16000 years ago), their technology is shown to be little better than what actually existed when Turtledove was writing, due to their extreme conservatism regarding innovation. They use laser discs, an internet, and hydrogen-burning cars. They travel between the stars in 'cold sleep' because it takes nearly twenty years to reach Earth. Overall it is shown that while the invasion was catastrophic for humans (Little Rock ending up as the US capital, for example), the experience was the Race's version of the Vietnam War. This is borne out in the relations between the males of the Conquest Fleet, and the Colonisation Fleet arriving twenty years later expecting a pacified planet.