Sirat: Into the Fires of Hell

by Tamara Wilhite

Review by Rusty McCain

      I want to say, “If you've read one colonization story, you've read them all,” and to an extent I still believe that's true. The colonists in Tamara White's Sirat: Through the Fires of Hell suffer the standard maladies. Decompression, suffocation, disease, thirst and hunger, cabin fever, and more. What sets this novel apart from most other colonization stories is its focus on generations of characters rather than a select few of main characters.

      Sirat is the story of an interstellar colonization ship sent out into the great cold unknown in an attempt to find a habitable planet. They find Sirat, but it needs another few million years before humans can survive for more than a few minutes. An orbiting asteroid storm forces their ship to crash land on the planet anyway, and thus the adventures begin. The novel mainly focuses on a single family, and the main characters tend to be loners that are always clashing with the rest of the colony. The main characters tend to be scientists who figure out some problem that no one else seems to even know exists.

      Therein lies one of the problems for me. The main characters (quite often named Jeran, as grandparents and grandchildren share names) find these problems and solve them, and no one seems to care very much, despite all the ramifications. Without spoiling anything, one Jeran discovers a way to make life so much simpler, yet after he does this, people still doubt him and his ideas and theories. If you like brooding loner types against the world stories, then this book is for you. The other major problem I had with this story is that the first 10% or so promises a story with cyborgs, nanites and the fight against a harsh world, and then in the space of a chapter, it will jump a generation or even two, and the cyborgs are forgotten. The nanites are put on the backburner. The fight against the harsh world is set aside to go into detail about the social structure of the colonies.

      In a way, this novel has more social science fiction than hard science fiction, but it doesn't skimp on the biology, chemistry and genetics. If you're looking for a novel that explores alternate marriage arrangements (to most Americans, anyway), pits brilliant scientists against the odds, and features a dozen main characters, this is the novel for you. If you want an intense, action-packed narrative, though, this might not keep your interest.

Sirat can be purchased through Amazon here.