Digital List Price: | $9.99 |
Kindle Price: | $8.99 Save $1.00 (10%) |
Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Acadie (Kindle Single) Kindle Edition
The first humans still hunt their children across the stars. Dave Hutchinson brings far future science fiction on a grand scale in Acadie.
The Colony left Earth to find their utopia--a home on a new planet where their leader could fully explore the colonists’ genetic potential, unfettered by their homeworld's restrictions. They settled a new paradise, and have been evolving and adapting for centuries.
Earth has other plans.
The original humans have been tracking their descendants across the stars, bent on their annihilation. They won't stop until the new humans have been destroyed, their experimentation wiped out of the human gene pool.
Can't anyone let go of a grudge anymore?
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTordotcom
- Publication dateSeptember 5, 2017
- File size1604 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Hutchinson's elegant novella deals with the effects of technology and genetic engineering on politics, lifestyle, and identity." ―Publishers Weekly starred review
"An insouciant love letter to SF itself." ―Locus
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Acadie
By Dave Hutchinson, Lee HarrisTom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2017 Dave HutchinsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9826-0
CHAPTER 1
IT WAS THE MORNING after the morning after my hundred and fiftieth birthday, and a terrible noise was trying to wake me up.
I stayed asleep while my subconscious did all the work and sorted through the menu of possible noises that might have been annoying enough to disturb me. Doorbell? Disconnected it. Kitchen? Been incapable of cooking anything since the day before yesterday. Decompression alarm? Not humanly possible to do anything when you hear a decompression alarm but grab an emergency suit or head for a panic room. Phone? Turned it off and only one person had the codes to turn it back on.
Ah, bollocks.
"What?" I muttered.
"Well, good morning, Mr. President," a voice purred just in front of my face. "And how are we today?"
"Not funny," I said. "Not funny at all."
"We've got a situation," she said.
"You've got a situation," I told her. "I'm still on leave."
"Sorry, this needs command authority."
"You've got command authority, for Christ's sake."
"Not for this. There's been an incursion."
I groaned. "It's a rock. It's always a rock."
"No such luck," she said. "Get over to the office, Duke. This is the real thing." And she added brightly, "And it happened on your watch. How great is that?"
I opened my eyes and my spirit recoiled. "Where?" The voice reeled off a thirty-digit string of numbers which, even after a hundred years, was still mostly meaningless to me. "That's pretty deep downsystem, isn't it?"
"Man gets a cigar," she said.
"How did the dewline miss it?"
"This is just one of the many questions we're asking ourselves at the moment. You see? An actual situation. Come on, Duke, get your game face on. Up and at 'em." And she hung up.
I stayed in my cocoon for a few more moments, looking around the bedroom. It was a nice bedroom, roomy and dark blue and almost completely spherical, its walls covered in recessed handles for cupboards and drawers. Some of my clothes were drifting gently across my field of view. It was a really nice bedroom, but I wasn't going to get to stay in it much longer today. I crossed my eyes and concentrated, and a complex of cells, grown on the surface of my liver without my knowledge or permission during some tweak or other, began to do a magic trick on my hangover. It was a big hangover, and the magic trick was going to take a little while. It was going to need fuelling or I was going to wind up hypoglycaemic, so I split open the seams of the cocoon and drifted across the bedroom until I hit the opposite wall, where I tugged at the door handle.
The moment the door opened the cats barrelled in, squeaking and spitting and twisting in the air, the black one chasing the white one. The black one hard-landed on the far wall on all four feet, bounced off, and caught the white one in midair, and they became a furious ball of black and white fur from which screeching noises erupted.
"Stop fighting," I told them as I made my way out into the main room of the apartment. They ignored me. "Okay," I muttered. "Fine. Carry on fighting." I'd inherited the cats, along with the apartment, from an upsystem miner who had suffered a fatal but ill-defined accident. He had been, by all accounts, a colossal son of a bitch who had abused his pets. I was entirely opposed to animal cruelty, but I drew the line at sharing my bedroom with a pair of freefall cats.
I drifted into the kitchen and switched on the coffee maker, then I went into the bathroom, strapped on the breathing mask, and hung in the centre of the room while jets of very hot water beat me up. When the cycle finished, I switched it on again. Then once more for luck. Then I let the pumps drain the room and the hot-air blowers dry me off and went back into the kitchen to root around for something to eat. There wasn't much, but the coffee maker provided a large bulb of a hot caffeine-containing fluid, which was important because the complex of magic cells on the surface of my liver metabolised caffeine in order to do their thing. If they didn't have caffeine, they metabolised blood sugar, but that wasn't recommended. It was not coffee as I remembered it, though, because the Writers had still not managed to get coffee to grow in zero-gee. You'd think that would be a simple thing for smart people, particularly smart people whose previous lives had pretty much been fuelled by coffee and complex carbohydrates, but no. I drank the large bulb and refilled it and dug out some clothes that didn't smell too much, then I put a wingsuit on over them, opened the front door, and stood on the porch.
The view from my porch was pretty special, even in an age of wonders. I looked out through a scene that was like a wraparound rain forest, the mutant kudzu that half-filled the hab and gave it its structural strength as well as taking care of certain aspects of life support. It was green and misty and cool and hundreds of little specks were unhurriedly winging through it, swooping gracefully around bracing roots almost a metre thick.
A couple of the specks flapped by, Kids with great angel wings. They waved as they passed and made a couple of incomprehensible jokes and I waved back and told them to go fuck themselves, and in this way the hab became aware that its President was up and about and pretty much as grumpy as usual and all was right with the world.
Which it wasn't.
I made sure the door behind me was locked, then I flung open my arms and jumped out into the yawning green cavern of my home.
* * *
I hated freefall. It had taken me at least ten years and some careful tweaking by the Writers to get over the constant nausea and terror of crashing to the ground, but I had never grown to like it. I also hated flying. The Kids made it look easy and graceful, but it was fucking hard work and I never had got the hang of it. One of my first actions as President had been to table Bills to build a monorail system in some of the larger habs and to make personal jet-packs legal in all of them, but the Council had vetoed them. I might have been President, but the Council paid no attention to me at all until something went wrong.
City Hall was near the centre of the hab, nestled in the heart of a huge clump of kudzu. I managed an untidy landing on the verandah, stripped off my wingsuit, and went inside.
Like pretty much every other building in the Colony, City Hall was a sphere of construction polyp, but it was the biggest and oldest structure here, a gnarled pearlescent ball the size of an ocean liner. It was big enough, in the event of a very, very large disaster, to act as a panic room for the whole population of the hab, but most of the time it was all but empty, occupied by skeleton staffs of administrators and engineers and techs.
It also housed my office, which was nothing much to boast about. I hadn't spent more than fifty minutes there since my term began eight months ago, and I couldn't in all honesty have directed anyone through City Hall's winding tunnels to find it.
Fortunately, I wasn't going to my office. I was going to The Office, which was easier to find because it was much bigger and located right at the heart of the structure. It was also, when I finally emerged from the tunnel, full of worried-looking people having hushed conversations over monitors and tapboards and in front of infosheets.
"Happy birthday," Connie said as I drifted over.
"Hm," I said. "So, what have we got?"
"We've got a bogey," she said, and she pointed to a big infosheet on the other side of the room. The infosheet showed a depthless field of black, and right in the middle of it floated a probe. It was about fifteen metres long and five wide, an off-white cylinder with the letters BoC stencilled on the side. At one end was a big fat conical meteorite shield of spun ice, and at the other was the skinny bell-shape of a high-yield fission engine exhaust. In between was a lumpy, cluttered landscape of hyperdrive motor radomes and sensor pods and squeeze-fusion microquads. It was a fairly simple design, cheap to manufacture; the Bureau of Colonisation built hundreds of them every year and sent them off on fast-flyby missions to unmapped solar systems. My heart sank.
"Not a rock, then," Connie said.
"Not a rock," I agreed. I swore. "Where's this picture coming from?" She told me, and I swore some more. A lot more.
* * *
The Colony didn't have a government, as such. Each hab elected an annual representative to a sort of loose advisory body that kind of kept things bumping along. On the principle that anyone seeking political power wasn't to be trusted with it, the only people who were allowed on the advisory body were those who absolutely did not want to be on it. This included pretty much everyone, so the two or three months leading up to elections saw a flurry of pantomime campaigning enthusiastic enough to disqualify each candidate from office. I'd done some good campaigning myself in the past and managed to dodge the bullet, but last time the elections came round I'd been outsystem, giving someone a lift to Nova California. This had been taken as a sign that I couldn't be bothered with politics, and when I got back I found that not only had I been elected but the sneaky bastards had decided my absence proved I truly didn't give a shit and had made me President.
The office of President actually had very little real power. What it did have was a lot of responsibility, of the kind when something is such a hot potato that everyone looks around for someone else to offload it onto. That was me, for the next three and a half years or so. President of the Colony, doer of things nobody else wanted or could be bothered to do, taker of decisions so shitty nobody else wanted to be responsible for them.
* * *
If you live all your life on a planet, one of the fundamental things you never really appreciate about space is that, mostly, it all looks the same.
Obviously, there are some caveats to this. Close in to stars or orbiting planets or skirting the edge of a nebula, the scenery can be pretty spectacular. But everywhere else is just stars and emptiness.
That's pretty much all you'll see, even inside a solar system. The movies will kid you that starships zip in and out of hyperspace and pop into systems and see all the planets and asteroids and stuff, but even a solar system with dozens of planets is mostly empty space; if you're unfortunate or even just mildly inattentive it's perfectly possible to fly entirely through one and not see anything but the tiny bright point of the system's sun. At a distance of forty-five AUs, which was where we were, it's not all that hard to miss noticing the sun at all, if it's crappy enough.
At this distance, there was almost as much illumination from the stars as there was from the sun, so we had to use searchlights and image amps to see the probe. The light reflected from the thing's hull washed out the stars. It had come a long way; the conical ice shield looked pitted and eroded.
"And you shot it down," I said.
"Well, not down, as such," said Karl.
I ignored him and raised an eyebrow at Ernie, who just sighed and puffed out her cheeks.
"That thing's radioactive as a bastard," Karl noted. "Are we safe this close to it?"
"Cheap fucking fission drive," Ernie muttered. "Dropping it into my system." She was heavily modded — four arms, hands where her feet should have been, face rewritten into a gargoyle's leer that had no practical purpose, as far as I could see, aside from being off-putting.
"And you shot it down," I said again in an attempt to regain control of the situation.
"Aw, come on, Duke," she complained, gesturing with all four hands at once. "What was I supposed to do?"
"You know what you were supposed to do," I told her. "You were supposed to run silent and watch the damn thing go away."
"Dewline didn't pick it up," she said.
"And much brighter people than you or me are thinking about that right now," I said. "Your job was to call in the sighting and let the thing go, not fire on it."
The three of us were crammed into the control bubble of Ernie's ship, which wasn't a whole lot bigger than the probe. She spent months on her own out here in the system's halo, towing a couple of small hab modules fitted out with centrifuge equipment and smelters and chondrite refineries, mining dead comets for rare-earth metals. When she spotted the probe, she'd dropped the habs and set off in pursuit, and when she was within range she'd cooked it with a mining maser, fired a tether at it, spent almost a fortnight braking it down below solar escape velocity, and towed it back upsystem. Then she'd called us. Not a single one of these actions was in the standard operating procedure.
"You think it got a message out?" Karl said.
I looked at the screen in front of me, the probe floating innocently at the end of its tether.
"Let's hope not," I said. "Otherwise we're all going to be looking for somewhere else to live."
* * *
"No offence," said Shaker, "but for a bunch of supposedly bright people, you guys do some stupid things sometimes."
"Leaving aside the fact that I don't belong to the subset 'you guys,' I agree," I said morosely.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to have another drink," I said, waving to attract the bartender's attention. "How about you?"
"Hell, yes."
We were in The Penultimate Bar in Radetzky's Hab, and through the skin of the bubble, I could see the mellow salmon-banded curve of Big Bird. Little Bird, its gigantic moon, was rising above the edge of the planet, all cratered and battered and rocky. It was quite a sight, but I wasn't in the mood.
"But that's not what I meant," Shaker continued.
"No," I said. "I know."
I'd left Ernie to keep an eye on the probe, and Karl to keep an eye on Ernie, and I'd come back downsystem to try to formulate a plan of action, but all possible scenarios kept dropping away. The more I thought about it, the more it became obvious that there really was only one option left.
"Any word on the dewline?" I asked.
"We're running diagnostics as fast as we can. But you're talking about more than a billion satellites, at last count. It's going to take a while."
"No downtime? Blackouts? Cometary perturbations?" I'd learned that last phrase a few years ago. I still had no clear idea what it meant, but it seemed to make the dewline techs think I knew what I was talking about.
"We're working back eighteen months in the records." Shaker sat back and rubbed his eyes. "So far, nothing."
"Go back further."
"Duke, mate," he said seriously, "if that thing's been insystem for a year and a half, we're toast anyway."
"We need to know how it got through," I told him. "We need to know if there were more of them. Ernie really fucked up when she fired on it; if it had some kind of newfangled stealth coating or something, it'll have boiled away."
"Oh dear," he said.
I collected two bulbs of whiskey sour from the bartender. "'Oh dear' about covers it, yes."
"No," he said. "The boss is here."
I looked over at the doorway. "I'm your boss," I told him.
"Not while she's here, you're not."
"You're fired."
We both watched Connie somersault languidly through the doorway, looking around the bar. She saw us, kicked off a support column, and landed neatly in the seat next to us. It was beautiful to watch; I'd have injured half a dozen people and crashed into most of the decor if I'd tried that.
"I was just in your office," she said, snapping her fingers at the bartender. "Lovely office. Really great furniture and fittings. Lacking something, though. I wonder what it could be? Hm ..." She made a show of thinking. "Oh yes," she said finally. "That's what it's lacking. You."
"I've been rousted from bed and I've been dragged upsystem and back again and I'm not in the mood, Connie," I told her.
She looked at Shaker. "Now I know you have work to do."
Shaker nodded. "Yup." He undid his seat restraints, pushed off gently, and rose unsteadily into the air. Shaker hadn't been in the Colony very long, and one of the reasons I liked him was that he was no more adept at freefall than I was. He bumped into a couple of people and drifted off towards the exit.
"We were having a meeting," I said when he had gone.
"You were having a drink," she said, taking her own bulb from the bartender. "And I don't like you hanging around with him."
"Shaker's okay."
"He's mundane."
"So am I."
She snorted. "No you're not."
"Yes I am," I said. "And I don't like being told who I can drink with, actually."
Normally, the tone of my voice just bounced right off Connie, but this time she looked at me and shrugged. "You shouldn't drink with subordinates," she mused.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Acadie by Dave Hutchinson, Lee Harris. Copyright © 2017 Dave Hutchinson. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B06XZRLZ94
- Publisher : Tordotcom (September 5, 2017)
- Publication date : September 5, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 1604 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 110 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,061,295 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #123 in Kindle Singles: Science Fiction & Fantasy
- #2,390 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #3,696 in Genetic Engineering Science Fiction eBooks
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
A short story with a surprising twist.
This is a fun, quick read. The pace is quick, and the characters are fun. But don't let that fool you, it brings to bear some very cogent ideas. Yes, you want to read it!
There is a strong liberal heat beat thrumming through "Arcadie", the 'leave me alone, I don't need your handout' vibe that builds frontiers and challenges convention. The Colony certainly challenges convention, and it is up to Duke to save the day when the bureaucrats come looking with interesting new tech and challenges of their own.
I really enjoyed this. The characters were interesting, the dialogue natural, and the twist was unexpected. But it's too short. And especially for the price, which I obviously paid, but still felt that the ending was abrupt and rushed and left too much unresolved. Don't get me wrong, there is an ending and it has an inevitable logic so is not a cheat, but having made the investment in the story, it was unsatisfactory. And it's a measure of the authors skill that even with that, it rates 5-stars.
So, 5-stars but not actually recommended. Go read Hutchinson's Fractured Europe Sequence and get his excellent writing in a full-sized novel for only a small extra cost.
The puzzle is only the publisher. I think it is 'worth' the 3.99 in some senses, but for most persons 1.99 would be a fairer ebook price, at 1/4 the length of a novel, if we must assign weiging scales.
I think they do him no favors at all to price the paper version at 7.99. -- and that's the problem. In either version, they are doing a very estimable author no favors that a publisher should, to theirs as well as his benefit.
And yes -- read as it comes, and don't peek for the ending...a suitable whirl in those words!
Note:Be warned that with Amazon's book description estimated read time of one hour and 15 minutes Acadie is just a short story. If one assumes the average full length novel has a read time of slightly over five hours this prices Acadie the same as the highest priced fiction of the major publishers. Solaris,a small British publisher, handled the three novels of Hutchinson's Fractured Europe series pricing them near $5.00 for full novels, quite reasonable considering the quality of the writing. For his latest work, this book,Hutchinson switched to Tor Books,a middle rank U.S. publisher,which has(had?) a reputation as a reader/writer friendly company,to quote Wikipedia," Tor won the Locus Magazine poll for best science fiction publisher in 29 consecutive years from 1988 to 2016 inclusive." The release price of Hutchinson's next full length novel should establish whether or not that is still true. All of Hutchinson's four works mentioned here feature an altruistic hero that cares little about money, perhaps Tor should read their own books and reconsider their position.
Well you need to read it.
Almost plausible science, quite plausible politics and highly entertaining.
Top reviews from other countries
500 ans avant le début du livre, le docteur Isabel Potter, professeur de biologie moléculaire à l’université de Stanford, a réalisé d’importantes avancées en thérapigénie avant que ne soit mis un terme à ses recherches par un gouvernement américain conservateur et théocratique. Réfugiée en Chine, où ce type de recherche est nettement moins encadré par des lois éthiques, elle poursuit ses recherches pendant une dizaine d’années avant d’être rattrapée par le gouvernement américain. Elle parvient à s’enfuir avec un groupe d’étudiants et met les voiles en dérobant un vaisseau de colonisation spatiale contenant 40,000 colons en sommeil cryogénique.
500 ans plus tard, les scientifiques renégats ont formé une colonie planquée quelque part dans la galaxie, et composée de près de deux millions d’âmes hautement modifiées génétiquement. Les Kids sont transhumains, modifient à loisir leur apparence, leurs capacités physiques, certains peuvent même survivre au vide, ont pu prolonger leur espérance de vie à plusieurs centaines d’années (Potter est toujours vivante), et surtout possèdent une intelligence très supérieure à celle des humains de base. Cela leur a permis de développer une technologie bien plus avancée que celle des terriens, notamment en ce qui concerne l’hyperdrive. La colonie ressemble à une société utopiste, égalitaire, démocratique, autonome et intelligente. Pourtant, ils doivent vivre cachés des terriens car ceux-ci, même après tout ce temps, n’ont pas pardonné et recherchent la colonie à travers la galaxie dans le but de les éliminer purement et simplement.
Un matin, alors qu’il traîne une bonne gueule de bois, Duke Faraday, président élu de la colonie, est réveillé par une bien mauvaise nouvelle. Une sonde automatique terrienne est passée au travers du système de défense de la colonie. Ce système hautement perfectionné est constitué de million de microsatellites, machines de Von Neumann autoréplicatives, qui forment une gigantesque sphère s’étendant jusqu’à plusieurs années lumière autour de la colonie. La sonde n’aurait pas dû passer. Avec l’accord du conseil, le président Faraday va enclencher l’option 1 : l’évacuation. Ils n’ont que 8 mois devant eux.
L’histoire est contée à la première personne, par Duke, et entrecoupée de quelques flashback qui permettent au lecteur d’en apprendre sur la constitution et le développement de la colonie. En peu de pages Dave Hutchinson arrive à construire un personnage engageant et un univers attrayant et complexe. Ces pages sont denses, contiennent de nombreuses idées, mais jamais l’auteur ne tombe dans l’info-dumping lourdingue. Le récit est bien mené et contient une bonne part de sense of wonder. La seule chose qui m’a au départ posé problème est le ton humoristique employé par l’auteur. Si de nombreuses fois j’ai beaucoup ri des certaines blagues ou aux nombreuses références SFFF (la réunion du conseil ressemble pour raison de transhumanisme un peu trop poussé au conseil d’Elron avec même des klingons), j’ai trouvé que cet humour interférait un peu trop avec l’histoire.
SAUF QUE..
…cela trouve justification dans le final. Au-delà de la réussite en terme de worldbuilding dans la description de la colonie et de cette société transhumaniste, ce qui fait la qualité de ce roman, et la joie ressentie à sa lecture, c’est l’incroyable twist final. Les deux tiers du livre, bien que passionnant, ne servent en fait qu’à créer les conditions pour arriver dans le dernier tiers qui est magistral. Et là, on n’a plus envie de rire. C’est du David Fincher dans l’espace. Ce twist on ne le voit pas arriver, mais lorsqu’on a fini le roman, inévitablement on retourne en arrière pour y chercher les indices que l’auteur aurait pu y cacher. C’est énorme, et ce twist à lui seul mérite amplement les 5 étoiles.
This would be very easily spoiled so I suggest being careful how many reviews you do read. There's a bit of an exposition dump in the middle but it doesn't outstay its welcome and the novella has a great ending so there's a definite payoff. It's also a very quick read - the pages pretty much fly by. Very highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the genre.