Items related to Brute Orbits
Synopsis
High Crimes Call for High Punishment. It is the twenty-first century. Convicts are sentenced to asteroids that move in ever-widening solar orbits, timed to return when their terms run out. But a few ambitious administrators discover that small "errors" in velocity can rid them of selected groups altogether: the hardcore violent, the mentally defective, and especially the political dissidents. Enduring the black vise of interstellar space-time, these human rejects--men and women mixed together--create their own Darwinian societies, struggling to survive. Back on Earth, a handful of sympathetic and curious scientists have not forgotten these lost citizens. When a technological breakthrough makes it possible to overtake these scattered asteroids, a courageous team sets out to go where none has willingly gone before. What they discover in these "brute orbits" is both provocative and moving--a startling vision of humanity you will never forget.
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From the Publisher
offers some excerpts from review from SF trade periodicals.
"Zebrowski's latest is an impressive... look at the penal system of the future. The author explores this... through a number of credible characters, and demonstrates once again our ability to commit heinous crimes in the name of the 'common good.' Brute Orbits is highly recommended, but not if you're already depressed." --Don D'Ammassa, _Science Fiction Chronicle_ "SF has long had an interest in how future societies would punish their malefactors and malcontents. From Heinlein's Coventry to Cordwainer Smith's Shayol, from Sheckley's Omega to Dick's Alphane Moon, many fine writers have envisioned a variety of schemes whereby the marriage of technology and law would open up new penal possibilities. Now one of SF's most visionary authors, George Zebrowski, gives us _Brute Orbits_, the latest novel in this lineage, and it proves to be a worthy sucessor and innovator... By focusing on the criminals and their... living conditions, Zebrowski succeeds in rubbing our noses in the harsh actions any society under assault by sociopaths must undertake in order to survive. Zebrowski has always by temperament been inclined to follow the transcendentalism of Clarke and Stapleton and Blish, and this new book is no exception. His language and his perspective are elegaically lofty... Zebrowski never ceases to invest his individual characters with three-dimensional roundness... Startling and sobering, Zebrowski's provocative novel should prick the consciences of all readers, as he slices open the veins of prisoners and wardens alike, revealing the identical blood that flows on either side of the bars." -- Paul DiFilippo, _Asimov's_
"Zebrowski's latest evokes the pioneering SF of social philosopher Olaf Stapledon... boldly speculative" --_Publishers Weekly_
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