Review - Alien Earth

It's always interesting to read Robin Hobb's work as Megan Lindholm. Alien Earth is especially interesting because I haven't read any other sci-fi by her, and this is an interesting way about approaching the issue of how we treat the earth. I tend to think about her work as Megan Lindholm related to how it contributed to her growth as a writer and the good things about the Farseers trilogy (or the bad -- in my opinion -- things about the Liveships trilogy).

Compared to the Ki and Vandien quartet, the writing style in this book has definitely matured. Hobb is good with original ideas, even in Ki and Vandien, but the ideas for me are really the strong point of Alien Earth -- not the characters, so much, which I usually cite as Hobb's strength. I can't recognise any of the characters as being like ones she wrote later, really -- that could be down to experimenting with characters, but I didn't really find the characters in this book that memorable.

In terms of the book on its own, if I didn't know the author's other work already... it's an interesting enough little sci-fi thing, perhaps not that different to everything else on the market already. It's definitely interesting to read a sci-fi fan and a fan of Robin Hobb, but... in both cases, there's better stuff around. It's certainly not "hard" SF, if that's what you're looking for.