Acadie

Acadie by Dave Hutchinson

I was initially turned off by the facile “hippies paradise” start to this book, where everyone is cool, laidback, doing their own thing, but everything is running just great. It is the vibe you get from your ganja smoking friends before the arguments start about who has to replenish the refrigerator.

The focal character is “Duke” Faraday. Duke had been working for the Bureau of Colonization before he realized how it was the home of corrupt, narrow-minded hypocrites. He was shanghaied into a secret colony of “Writers,” who can rewrite the genetic code. It seems that 500 years ago, the Writers had stolen a Colonization ship to flee a theocratic right-wing government that wouldn't allow them to promote human flourishing through science. Since that time, the Colony has remained on the fringes of human space inventing scientific miracles, but always ready to pick up and leave if the Bureau stumbles onto them.

Finally, the Bureau has with a lone probe.

Then, a larger and stranger probe arrives and Duke has been left behind to deal with it.

Or has he?

I thought this story was a very fine science fiction story with just the right twist at the end.