Hella

By: David Gerrold

Narrated by: Travis Baldree

Hella is a planet where everything is oversized - especially the ambitions of the colonists.

The trees are mile-high, the dinosaur herds are huge, and the weather is extreme - so extreme, the colonists have to migrate twice a year to escape the blistering heat of summer and the atmosphere-freezing cold of winter.

Kyle is a neuro-atypical young man, emotionally challenged, but with an implant that gives him real-time access to the colony's computer network, making him a very misunderstood savant. When an overburdened starship arrives, he becomes the link between the established colonists and the refugees from a ravaged Earth.

The Hella colony is barely self-sufficient. Can it stand the strain of a thousand new arrivals, bringing with them the same kinds of problems they thought they were fleeing?

Despite the dangers to himself and his family, Kyle is in the middle of everything - in possession of the most dangerous secret of all. Will he be caught in a growing political conspiracy? Will his reawakened emotions overwhelm his rationality? Or will he be able to use his unique ability to prevent disaster?

©2020 David Gerrold (P)2020 Tantor

Hella Good Story

This YA novel, with the protagonist growing into himself on his hero’s journey, was reminiscent of early Heinlein. The world building was interesting and creative. The politics of the colony showed that humans hadn’t changed much from today. I’m curious to go back to the earlier novels in this series and see what Earth was like before they left.

Fascinating world!

Interesting story, fascinating planet! I hope he writes sequels - there's so much more to see here!

fun but with important social questions

Great YA novel that is both science fiction and social commentary. Not distopian and offers hope for a future. Great LGBTQ content.

Half the book was excellent

It felt like this was two books. The first half depicted the challenges of settlers trying to survive on an incredible world full of exotic & strange plants & animals. The descriptions were vivid & the pacing was perfect. But, somewhere past the midpoint the story changed into a good guy/bad guy political battle and got bogged down in the workings of the main character’s mind. I would have loved to hear more about Hella & less about the bad guy conspiracies. All in all, still a very good read.

A socialists Dreamland and a neat scifi, wordy.

It's like Jurassic park meets avatar without anyone actually traveling through the world. The "real world" story wise is a couple of big facilities in two locations, the outside is shown through a moniter so to speak. The main character can't go 5 minutes in a conversation without someone coddling him but they live in a small science community so I can kinda see it, still too much saying "he's special." Yes, he is and that's evident in his ability to explain in a "rational" robotic way, that means we don't need to be told he's special and unique every conversation, it's nice like a child's cartoon. The politics is annoying for the right reasons but the ideology is heavily left sided, this is okay since the community is small comparable to an earth city or even town if I remember correctly, socialism works really well on a small scale(sometimes) with what some would call rational people; in this case people who have been a community for several generations now that have an established government and an apparently normalized living situation, they have festivals for god sake so their culture is developing really well which means people are relatively happy/content. Anyway it's kinda hard to finish but Travis Baldree helped push me through, this is a very wordy and fast paced book with tons of not quite unnecessary information and lots of political and personal belief tied in from the author.