Eclipse – George Phillies

At the start of this book Amanda is an orphan who lives on a world highly resistant to change. She has inherited a small fishing boat. By the end of the book, she owns a fleet - and has set out to change the world.

I enjoyed Amanda’s story. Indeed, this article was motivated by the realization that I was about to reread it for the third time. The true star of the book is Goddard, the world on which Amanda lives.

Society on Goddard is resistant to change because it was engineered to be resistant, by people who knew what they were doing. The planet itself was well-chosen or -modified: Metal is scarce, so fundamental technologies have a hard time being developed. Land is spread over islands, rather than continents, so it is difficult for large polities to develop. Originally-bioengineered plant life contributes to a comfortable standard of living. Available technologies were designed to be locally optimal. (E.g., there are good clipper-like ships, designed so that any minor design changes will make them slower or less stable.)

There is a library with a hundred thousand books (including fiction, as well as drier subjects), so the fact that new knowledge is hard to create, and that there is no mechanism for distributing it, is hidden in plain sight. But Amanda meets some of the rare visitors to Goddard - and she wants the stars. Is there a way to get a 100,001st book titled “How to Build a Starship”?