Freedom's Challenge: (The Catteni sequence: 3): sensational storytelling and worldbuilding from one of the most influential SFF writers of all time…

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I enjoyed the Dragonriders of Pern series (until her son took over) when I was a young adult, but I haven't read Anne McCaffrey since then. I don't know if this is dated or my tastes have changed or what, but this seemed a little .... off. Those stranded on the planet easily set up a community and improve their situation drastically in a short time. They handle the situations with ease and aren't terribly challenged. You can argue that the world was set up to produce food and would be easy to survive on, based on how it was engineered. Yet, even the personal relationships aren't terribly challenging. There are creepy dudes and another band of aggressive people, there are people who - understandably - don't like the non-humans, but none of these challenges really threatens in this first book. I have not read the following ones. Just wished for more conflict and hardship.

I liked how the romance was really slow - seriously, being stranded on a foreign planet means there's WAY more important things to worry about than sex. And that dynamic is well reflected in the pacing and discreetly developed romance(s).Anyway, that's not what this book is about. This book is about getting snatched (again?) and dumped on a "vacant" planet that the master race has somehow failed to notice is covered in perfectly symmetrical farms. (There's even a scene toward the end where this is pointed out to Zainal the Catteni and "everyone needs to use their breath for climbing" so no real answer. LOL.) The story is slower than most science fiction adventure stories. This story is all about the journey and survival, not the action, even though there's a lot of stuff going on day-to-day.

And, okay, in the book at least the Catteni isn't a furry. I somehow remember him being a furry because he has "Cat" in his name and yellow cat eyes, but it's been literal decades since I read this so bite me for remembering wrong. And the Botanists had received mysterious and unexpected help from the great beings they knew only as 'Farmers' - for the Farmers had thrown a huge impervious space bubble round Botany. Even as the Eosi ships tried to pulverise the rebellious planet, the bubble held firm. Her best cat friend is Zainal, who I never built an affinity with. I don't care about him any more than Kris. So if I don't care about her, or him, or their relationship, then there isn't really very much to talk about with these books. This is a survivalist story, about a group of humans and aliens working together to establish civilization. They fight natives, not in the form of primitive aliens, but in the form of mechanized robots that seem to farm the planet on autopilot. Who owns these machines? They don't know, but they'd love to find out.A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. But, safe though they were behind the protective device, Kris Bjornsen, Zainal and all of the Council knew they had to go out and destroy the Eosi on their own ground. It fell to Zainal to risk his life in a desperate and daring mission to vanquish the monster life forms forever... Read more Details Artificial insemination? It was mentioned in an earlier book but for some reason was dismissed as an option. The protagonist, Kris, is incredibly likable and capable. She has strength, a sharp wit, an unironic and unannoying optimism, and a practicality that makes her incredibly enjoyable to read. McCaffrey has done a fantastic job writing a relatable and capable character, treating her with the respect I have for my strong female friends. So often authors write strong women to be bitter or hostile- or worse, write female protagonists who constantly run to their better and more developed male counterparts. But Kris is neither and I appreciate that. I think they were way too successful with understanding and reusing a completely alien technology / machine with few tools. This assumes similar technology to our own - chips, power, interfaces, etc- that they could easily understand and re-use. I wish this were more challenging and "alien".

Now standard in the middle of a corrective planet, dumped along with hundreds of other aliens and human prisoners, Kris decides she’d better keep an eye for the Catteni named Zainal for he’s likely to get killed by the human and alien alike who disliked his Catteni guts. Her working career included Liberty Music Shops and Helena Rubinstein (1947-1952). She married in 1950 and had three children: Alec Anthony, b. 1952, Todd, b.1956, and Georgeanne, b.1959. I've spent a while trying to figure out why I care so little for the books, and so little for the characters these books. From my point of view, Anne skips over all the interesting bits, instead focusing on the uninteresting bits. Our lead character, Kris, is so forgettable that I had to look up her name. She does little worth talking about, is often left behind, and only later hears about all the interesting missions and development. We don't follow the story as it happens, we follow the story as it gets reported to Kris. This breaks any reader engagement. Not wanting to help those who were hunting the one laying in front of her, she decided to help him. Using water and some slaps to his face she got him up and running as the other ones in the flyers continued to shoot at the downed flyer until it exploded.Anne was educated at Stuart Hall in Staunton Virginia, Montclair High School in Montclair, New Jersey, and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College, majoring in Slavonic Languages and Literatures. McCaffrey's ludicrous obsession w/ the size of Catman's member. A male author spending equal time on the size of the female love interest's chest would get (rightfully) shouted down. Overall the romance had all the sophistication of a cheap bodice-ripper. What aggravates me most is that there's a story in there, but she's not brave enough to tell that story. I see so much of what could be done with the setting merely by showing us the episodes that she tells us about. Show us the story, Anne. Show us. That's the interesting bit. I love it when writers do that, though, become their own inspiration and teacher, evolving a story that doesn't work so well into something better. The short story morphed into a series of novels that I am finding unputdownable. As the survivors unite together, they soon learn that the planet that their masters once thought was empty is full of dangers, including mechanical farmers that harvest planets for an alien species technically advanced than any other species in the galaxy.