14 August, 2001: Planet Patrol
Stuck at my parents' for an evening and stricken with insomnia, I pulled some of my old books off the shelves. I have faint recollection of reading Sonya Dorman's Planet Patrol three or four times when I was young (and by "young" I mean nine or ten years old). I'm not entirely sure why -- perhaps it was the novelty of having a science fiction hardback of my very own. This isn't a fabulously interesting book to an adult reader; it's the story of a rookie cop working for the world government in the unstated future, and I can see bits that remind me of the boot camp sequences of Starship Troopers, only nicer. Everything in this book is very nice: the principal antagonist, a Venetian colonist, is an insurgent against said world government, but honorable; scenes break off before things get too ugly; the protagonist dances through some unpleasant situations, but nothing ever really goes too badly for her. My seventh-grade English teacher was right: without conflict, fiction really is dull. (Of more interest, perhaps, is the totally understated assumption that a benevolent and democratic world government could spring up without widespread rebellion on Earth and resultant repression, but I'll chalk that one up to the general mood of the late '70s.)