Frontier, the first novella featuring Amalie and her life on the frontier colony world Miranda, is now available as an ebook in a variety of formats.
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FRONTIER is the first novella in the Epsilon Sector Novella sequence featuring Amalie.
June 2788. Amalie’s the last unmarried girl in Jain’s Ford settlement.
Life on a frontier farming planet in the twenty-eighth century has a few complications. The imported Earth animals and plants don’t always interact well with the local ecology, and there’s a shortage of doctors and teachers. The biggest problem though is the fact there are always more male than female colonists arriving from other worlds. Single men outnumber single women by ten to one, and girls are expected to marry at seventeen.
Amalie turned seventeen six months ago, and she’s had nineteen perfectly respectable offers of marriage. Everyone is pressuring her to choose a husband, or possibly two of them. When Amalie’s given an unexpected chance of a totally different future, she’s tempted to take it, but then she gets her twentieth offer of marriage and it’s one she can’t possibly refuse.
Note that most of the first two chapters of FRONTIER have appeared as the story Epsilon Sector 2788 in the EARTH 2788 short story collection. The other eighteen chapters are entirely new.
Cover art (C) Janet Edwards 2015, Cover Design by The Cover Collection.
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Read it and will very likely reread it later this year. But starting to reread the main series made a question pop up and I don’t think I’ve seen this one so far in the comments.
In Frontier it is mentioned how people aren’t allowed/supposed to have children during the first 2 years of Colony Ten. What happens to the Handicapped Babies that are born after those 2 years? They get portalled to Earth, that much is clear. But what about the rule with living on Earth to keep your child? IIRC, people can only leave the Colony Ten planet if something massively goes wrong. Do the Colony Ten parents get to leave to keep their child (if they happen to want it) or is it an “abandon by default”? Can’t see something like completing the Colony Ten phase and the child not being a ward of Hospital Earth happening.
Hopefully I was able to even explain my question. Already looking forward to the next release, whoever that may be about. 🙂
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Ah, that’s an interesting question. Only a very few Handicapped babies are born on Colony Ten worlds each year, but of course Colony Ten Command has a system for dealing with the situation.
You are quite correct that people can only leave a Colony Ten planet if something goes massively wrong, but (providing the planetary situation is reasonably under control) there is an exception for life threatening conditions that cannot be treated adequately on the planet. In the case of something like massive injury, the patient is portalled to a secure medical quarantine facility in Kappa sector for treatment. In the case of Handicapped babies, they are portalled to an isolated quarantine facility on Earth. The existence of that facility isn’t publicised because the Military don’t want people to start screaming about the risk of another Thetis.
The babies stay in the quarantine facility for a minimum of six months, and often longer depending on the current status of their world of origin. The facility is totally under the authority of Colony Ten, and covered by its safeguarding humanity powers which override Hospital Earth’s laws. Therefore the babies do not become wards of Hospital Earth until they leave the facility. The parents could appeal to Colony Ten to join their child at any point during that time. Depending on the state of the Colony Ten world, that request could be granted, obviously subject to the parents going through quarantine. However it’s extremely rare for that to happen. 92 per cent of ordinary parents abandon their Handicapped baby, and members of a Colony Ten group are extremely committed to their chosen lifestyle.
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First, thank your for answering.
However, now I am quite curious about some of the points you mentioned I didn’t know before.
The first one might be a problem of me understanding this not correctly (due to not being a native english speaker), but should’t the Handicapped babies be portalled to Earth no matter how the planetary situation is? It sounds to me like those exceptions aren’t available while the situations isn’t under control, which would be..quite brutal, one might say. (Also shouldn’t the Colonists be portalled into quarantine if the situation is out of control anyways?)
Thought it unlikely for Colony Ten parents to join their child, but it was interesting to ask if they even have the choice. How long can the children stay in that facility maximum? Assuming that it wasn’t just Jarra’s group that stayed together during Nursery, Home and Next Step, I’d guess around 2 years max. Also, is this partly dependent on whether or not the parents already said they might want to join their child? And if they do want it, but the completion of Colony Ten is like 1 year away and they want to stay for that long, would that even be possible (even though it sounds kind of heartless to do that)?
Pretty sure I can ask a lot more questions about this, if I this longer about it, but I’ll stop now I think.
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Your understanding is quite correct. The current rules for Colony Ten were written after Thetis and cover the case where a planetary situation gets out of control. In that case, no one would be allowed to portal to an inhabited world. The colonists would be portalled directly to a quarantine base on an uninhabited world. Sadly, a Handicapped baby could not be portalled to Earth because that could endanger the lives of the whole population of Earth.
However the good news is that sort of situation is extremely unlikely to happen after the first year of Colony Ten, and by the end of the trilogy other options would be being organized.
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