A review of SPACE FLEET ACADEMY: YEAR 1 understands the core question being asked by the books:
Space Fleet Academy: Year 1 forces the reader to ask an uncomfortable question: at what point does ensuring humanity’s survival mean we stop being human? The book may be the hardest sci fi I’ve ever read. It is definitely the hardest sci fi I’ve read in a while. Hard sci fi differs from softer sci fi in that it deals with, well, harder science instead of flashy toys. Let me explain the difference in the two.
Soft/Light sci fi asks “what if we had this cool technology?” Star Trek is the most popular example, and it is one that I love (up until the end of Enterprise, and skip the last episode, please). It then explores the adventure and drama that unfolds from faster than light travel and instantaneous transport. But with Star Trek, the driving force has been the story and adventure of meeting alien species and having moral conflict instead of exploring how the warp drive works. Yes, they explain it in places, but there’s a lot of hand waving and techno babble because the point is not that humanity can travel faster than light but the interactions with aliens now that we have faster than light. I write light sci fi along with the fantasy works. I didn’t even work out how the FTL drives work in High Frontier until the third installment! But Year 1 doesn’t hand wave the science. It asks the hard question: what happens when we apply what population genetics teaches us?
Hard sci fi explores the technology, engineering, and, in this case, genetics and takes that to the logical conclusion. Andy Weir, Larry Niven, and Arthur C. Clarke are good examples. Year 1 works with population genetics and says, “Okay. This is how populations evolve. This is how genetic drift works. What happens to a society when it stops drifting? When the genome becomes frozen, what will the powers that be decide to do about it?” Most importantly, how does implementing those policies affect our humanity?
That’s where Year 1 takes us. The cascade drive has given humanity the stars. Dozens of colonies have spread the genome across light years. It is expected for those colonies to have significant losses of life prior to and during the reproductive years of the individuals so that natural selection can select the fittest. In fact, when the childhood mortality rates drop below a certain threshold, the powers that be are disappointed. Read that again.
If you think SFA is hard science fiction, definitely check out the fourth book in the Biostellar series. The Cruel Equations of the book’s title are downright merciless, and they are not only enforced by the
The science is real. The math is remorseless. The choices are impossible.
When Federation inspectors walk through a children’s hospital on the colony world of Verlaine and frown at the survival rates, Deputy Health Minister Jean-Marc Bergeron knows what’s coming. The numbers are too positive. Too many children are surviving to adulthood. And the Human Genome Mandate, the iron law that has governed humanity’s expansion across the stars for four centuries, demands change.
The Federation’s demand: raise Verlaine’s mortality rate from 2 percent to 15 percent. Let two and a half million people die every year. Dismantle the advanced medical system that three generations of colonists bled to build. All of this must be done to satisfy a statistical coefficient on a spreadsheet in an office on Earth.
The reason is non-negotiable: the human genome is degenerating. Natural selection stopped operating over five hundred years ago, and every generation since has accumulated mutations that cannot be purged. The math is not speculation. It is not a theory. It is a measured, validated, ticking time bomb of extinction, and the only proven solution demands that someone’s children pay the price.
The people of Verlaine say no.