Silver Ship and the Sea (Silver Ship Series) Book

The colony planet Fremont is joyous, riotous, and very wild. Its grasses can cut your arms and legs to ribbons, the rinds of its precious fruit can skewer your thumbs, and some of the predators are bigger than humans. Meteors fall from the sky and volcanoes erupt. Fremont is verdant, rich, beautiful, and dangerous.

Fremont’s single town, Artistos, perches on a cliff below rugged mountains. Below Artistos lie the Grass Plains, which lead down to the sea. And in the middle of the Grass Plains, a single silver spaceship lies quiet and motionless. The seasons do not dull it, nor do the winds scratch it—-and the fearful citizens of Artistos won't go near it.

Chelo Lee, her brother Joseph, and four other young children have been abandoned on the colony planet. Unfortunate events have left them orphaned in a human colony that abhors genetic engineering—and these six young people are genetically enhanced.

With no one to turn to, Chelo and the others must now learn how to use their distinct skills to make this unwelcome planet home, or find a way off it. They have few tools—an old crazy woman who wonders the edges of town, spouting out cryptic messages; their appreciation and affection for each other; a good dose of curiosity; and that abandoned silver space ship that sits locked and alone in the middle of the vast grass plain …

Publishers Weekly

Cooper's first solo flight into SF (after Building Harlequin's Moon, with Larry Niven) doesn't quite get off the deadly colony planet Fremont, where 12 years earlier war raged between the original pure-human settlers and the "altered" (bioengineered) second wave of colonists. Adolescent heroine Chelo Lee, orphaned by that war and adopted by the leader-couple of the planet's only city, Artistos, leads the other five living altered youths to the silver spaceship New Makingthat had brought their parents to Fremont. With the help of Jenna, the only surviving altered adult, Chelo dreams of freeing herself and the other altereds from the paranoid subjugation of the Fremontians, who both fear and need the youngsters' gifts. The lack of psychological development in this sluggish and predictable growing-up excursion may limit its appeal to preteen readers. (Mar.)