H.M. Hoover’s cool, competent heroines
Again from the eighties, carried with me through several moves, are the Avon editions of HM Hoover’s The Rains of Eridan, Return to Earth, The Lost Star and Another Heaven, Another Earth.

The Rains of Eridan is my favourite, because of Theodora Leslie and Karen Orlov, the woman-girl team at the center. Theodora is a biologist and explorer, on a solo mission out from her base, trying to find out the reason for an irrational fear that is affecting all three mission bases. She is an independent woman with a reputation for preferring animals to human-beings; some grief in her past is implied, but never explained. She witnesses the murder of the two of the exploration leaders and finds their teenage daughter abandoned. Fear has become murderous insanity in Base 1. Uncertain of what they might face on their return, she and Karen trek on across Eridan, continuing Teo’s exploration of the unspoiled landscape, until the rains begin and they are forced to return to Base 3, where they find the rain has brought great danger, to add to the ever-present fear. The fear, the danger, and the rains are all connected to the life-cycle of Eridan. It’s a fine SF adventure novel, with neat biology, and engaging humans thrown in.

Return to Earth is next: Galen Innes, retiring governor of the MarSat colony, returns to his empty family home on Earth. He is trying to engineer a graceful withdrawal from the political stage so that his unimpressive, but unexceptionable son can establish himself. In the grounds of his home he encounters teenaged Samara Lloyd, heir to one of the great corporations of Earth, and very shortly both of them cross – almost fatally – a powerful cult-leader, the Dolman, and wind up evading and then plotting the Dolman’s downfall together. Another wonderful adult-girl team, with the adult acting as guide and mentor to a very capable teenager.

Another Heaven, Another Earth is set on the fading colony of Xilian, which has almost forgotten its origin as an Earth colony. Earth has not quite forgotten it, but does not believe that Xilian was successfully settled, so when an exploration ship arrives and seventeen-year-old Gareth Michaels encounters a team from the ship in an alien burial ground, the shock is mutual. But the alien burial ground is one of several, each one showing the same mutations the colonists are showing, before they died out; Xilian is toxic to human life. To the explorers, evacuation seems the most humane solution, but to Gareth and her people, a dignified decline is preferable to confinement and dependency on overcrowded Earth. The realization that their own superiors’ agenda is contaminated with greed pushes the wavering survey team to act.

Hoover’s vision of Earth’s future is of great corporations which have become indistinguishable from nations or kingdoms, where the power and wealth are concentrated in old, powerful dynasties. Colonization is an enterprise, in the money-making sense: three of these novels feature exploration missions seeking to discover and earmark territories for exploitation. Her heroines belong to the elite – the most formidable among them, Samara Lloyd ( Return to Earth) is heir and then Director of Continental Lloyd, while Karen Orlov (The Rains of Eridan ), is of “an old and wealthy clan … the result of five hundred years of careful breeding … heir to all they are and were … and a great deal of what they possess.” Lian in The Lost Star, and Gareth in Another Heaven, Another Earth are both members of an intellectual elite (as is Karen): Lian as the daughter of single-minded and accomplished astronomers, and Gareth as the descendent of her colony’s professionals and her settlement’s only doctor.

Yet despite the positioning of her heroines among the elite, which might suggest the author approves or romanticises the future corporation, in the three novels of colonization, the agenda is thwarted. In The Rains of Eridan by the perils of the planet’s unusual biology, explained in the end by the work of Karen and her mentor, Theodora Leslie. In Another Heaven, Another Earth it is by biology and by the would be exploiters’ strained sense of ethics, challenged and awakened by Gareth Michaels and her fellow colonists. And in The Lost Star it is by the discovery made by the young heroine that the supposed animals clustering around the exploration site are intelligent marooned explorers, like themselves.