Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
There were a lot of touches that seemed very realistic to me, like the dietary problems of the Deski’s, the few untasteful troublemakers, the threat of abuse towards women when there were only few of them. I did think that the settling seemed to go almost too easy, and that the few troubles they had didn’t seem all that unsettling. But then the fact that they are dropped with materials is part of the Catteni plot, and the fact that they aren’t the first settlers is part of the Botany plot, so at least the easiness of it all is explained. Plot holes you could drive one of those big spaceships through. Like the idea a master race would survey an entirely terraformed farming planet with geometrically regular fields, enormous supply and harvesting operations and never notice.
I can't say that this one grabbed my attention as much as the first ever Dragon book. Don't get me wrong - I liked it and enjoyed reading it, but somehow the story just never seemed to get going. Oh, Botany has it's dangers and its mysteries, but everything just seems a tad too easy. I'm sure if an actual group of humans and aliens were dropped onto another planet, it would take a bit longer to get everything sorted. How handy is it to find everything they need - from clay to be made into pots by their handy potter, to scrunchy plants that can be sued from towels to bandages to bedding! And how come it's only the Deski who suffer from nutritional difficulties? I think everyone else would have taken longer to adapt to the new microbes too. I've spent a while trying to figure out why I care so little for the books, and so little for the characters these books. From my point of view, Anne skips over all the interesting bits, instead focusing on the uninteresting bits. Our lead character, Kris, is so forgettable that I had to look up her name. She does little worth talking about, is often left behind, and only later hears about all the interesting missions and development. We don't follow the story as it happens, we follow the story as it gets reported to Kris. This breaks any reader engagement.I question every move the protagonist makes in the opening chapter. It's tough to be invested after that. Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. This is a survivalist story, about a group of humans and aliens working together to establish civilization. They fight natives, not in the form of primitive aliens, but in the form of mechanized robots that seem to farm the planet on autopilot. Who owns these machines? They don't know, but they'd love to find out.
Her best cat friend is Zainal, who I never built an affinity with. I don't care about him any more than Kris. So if I don't care about her, or him, or their relationship, then there isn't really very much to talk about with these books. To me, it would have made a LOT more sense to start the story earlier, say with her abduction from Earth, struggle to survive as a slave, struggle to survive as an escaped slave, maybe give me some reason to sort of like the rapey love interest. Boom. There you go. Novel. Not very Anne McCaffrey but why does anyone, even Anne McCaffrey, have to write like ANNE MCMFINGCAFFREY EV-ER-Y time? I like planet settling stories, and I’m definitely planning on reading more. There’s something about surviving under harsh circumstances that’s really interesting and intriguing. I really liked that we got to see the settling and organizing through the eyes of Kris, who isn’t a leader. She’s very capable and definitely an important member of the original droppers, but she doesn’t have a position of power.One bit about Anne's writing that drives me crazy is her childhood development gaffs. Perhaps her children were extraordinary, but most likely, she no longer has any idea of what children under 5 years old are like. These children have no relationship to reality. Don't base any of your ideas on childcare on anything that Anne has to say. There are references here to classic Dr. Who (that are laughed at by the majority), The Cosby Show (yikes?), and Short Circuit. And E.T. There is even a walkman. When we are first introduced to Kris she is wearing a loud sixties miniskirt, and, I have to assume, sweatbands. (Sidenote: this was published in 1995. Oh my god.) Those stranded on the planet easily set up a community and improve their situation drastically in a short time. They handle the situations with ease and aren't terribly challenged. You can argue that the world was set up to produce food and would be easy to survive on, based on how it was engineered. Yet, even the personal relationships aren't terribly challenging. There are creepy dudes and another band of aggressive people, there are people who - understandably - don't like the non-humans, but none of these challenges really threatens in this first book. I have not read the following ones. Just wished for more conflict and hardship. Yes, but not in a good way. I thought this book would be easy reading. It’s not hard reading, but it’s not easy reading either. It’s more… “easy going”, where there’s not much actual conflict and the story is very episodic and not much is at stake, or very important. This makes it easy to put down and harder to stay invested. The nail in the coffin for me is that, as part of a series, almost nothing is resolved. The only one answered is the “Will they or won’t they?” question about Kristin and her love interest, Zainal (the alien guy she rescued and got recaptured for). We don’t know why they got dumped on this planet, who developed this planet originally, or even who in the group of unwilling colonists is going to finally be the bad guy McCaffrey set them up to be and actually do something evil.
McCaffrey's ludicrous obsession w/ the size of Catman's member. A male author spending equal time on the size of the female love interest's chest would get (rightfully) shouted down. Overall the romance had all the sophistication of a cheap bodice-ripper. Q: HOW is it possible for the late great Anne McCaffery's early foray into furry rape porn be translated into a book salable to her mostly YA-friendly, dragon-loving audience, familiar with her collection of female coming-of-age stories in fantasy settings with low-heat romance sub-plots? I liked how the romance was really slow - seriously, being stranded on a foreign planet means there's WAY more important things to worry about than sex. And that dynamic is well reflected in the pacing and discreetly developed romance(s). The two previous books in this series had huge casts. Freedom's Challenge adds several more characters making it hard to remember everyone. The inhabitants of Botany - a mixture of humans and extra-terrestrials - had managed to build a thriving and productive world out of what had originally been intended as a slave planet. And now they had plans to try and overthrow the terrible Eosi, who for centuries had existed by subsuming members of the Catteni race, living in their bodies and ruling space through them.A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. Second-string Anne McCaffrey novels suffer from a lot of this-- whenever she runs out of steam she starts filling in with introductions. By the second or third time the entire cast of NPCs gets entirely ditched in favor of more introductions, the whole thing starts to feel video-gamey. (How IS that arrow to the knee doing, Generic Racial Stereotype #4?) I don't really care about any of the nobodies, whose problems are all resolved off-screen anyway. I don't really care about the relationship between Kris and Zainal, either, because there is a male lead who is not Zainal, and-- while there is no love triangle-- this secondary male lead gets positioned as the logical choice for Kris. (Who, for some reason, wants babies here on Planet Stranded?) Now standard in the middle of a corrective planet, dumped along with hundreds of other aliens and human prisoners, Kris decides she’d better keep an eye for the Catteni named Zainal for he’s likely to get killed by the human and alien alike who disliked his Catteni guts.
However, since he’s refused to return to his duties, his brother is forced to take his place. The raging hatred that Lenvec feels for Zainal interest an Eosi named Ix and soon IX curiosity make him want to know more about planet Botany and find Zanal. The Catteni are actually mercenaries under command of the parasitical Eosi, and Zainal was chosen to be next in his family to be taken over. But, having been dropped, he chose to stay, and his brother Lenvec has to take his place. The Eosi Ix, who subsumed Lenvec, follows his host's hatred for the Chosen who refused and for the now impenetrable planet he inhabits. Anyway, that's not what this book is about. This book is about getting snatched (again?) and dumped on a "vacant" planet that the master race has somehow failed to notice is covered in perfectly symmetrical farms. (There's even a scene toward the end where this is pointed out to Zainal the Catteni and "everyone needs to use their breath for climbing" so no real answer. LOL.)
Success!
The story is slower than most science fiction adventure stories. This story is all about the journey and survival, not the action, even though there's a lot of stuff going on day-to-day. I think they were way too successful with understanding and reusing a completely alien technology / machine with few tools. This assumes similar technology to our own - chips, power, interfaces, etc- that they could easily understand and re-use. I wish this were more challenging and "alien". I know that there are plenty of books out there that exist for their moment, and really aren't as great if you're late to the party. But this one-- it felt like it went out of its way to date itself. If you sat down and TRIED to write something that was going to feel 80s AF what would you do? Name drop defunct bands? TV shows? Put Walkmans front and center? Well, this book has you beat.
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