Revisitng The Softwire With BDT

We haven't heard from our young elementary school teacher, BDT, for a while, so I thought I'd do a post on what he had to say about Cybils' nominee, The Softwire: Virus on Orbis 1.

Some Cybils folks were just talking this past week about how few true science fiction nominations we received in the Fantasy/SciFi category. I think it's fair to say that The Softwire by P.J. Haarsma was the most hardcore nomination we saw. It had aliens. It had space travel. It had computers. It had humans interfacing with computers. Many of the traditional scifi bases were covered.

And covered pretty well.

BDT agreed for the most part:

"The story was good, but I found myself skimming through parts to get to the climax. The idea of human slavery in space was interesting; I also think that would be what would happen if we encountered "aliens". It seems they must be smarter than us, especially if they're already in space.

The book overall was quite good. It took me away from TV and videogames, which is saying something on my days off. I hope there will be a sequel."

BDT's prediction that we'll be enslaved if we encounter aliens reminded me of his uncle. Said uncle has always believed that if aliens come to Earth it would only be for one reason--to eat us. I guess his feeling is that the only reason to travel any distance is to go out to eat.

You can check out an article on author, P. J. Haarsma at Booklad. According to Booklad, new Softwire books will be coming out in August over the next three years, which should make BDT happy.

It's a long piece, but there's a lot of interesting material in it.