Take Back Plenty

Author: Colin Greenland

By the late 1980s, British science fiction was ready for the kick-start that would become the British renaissance. And that kick start came from two unexpected writers. One was Iain M. Banks, who had a reputation as an anarchic talent in mainstream fiction, but now burst out with a rip-roaring space opera. The other was Colin Greenland, who had written a handful of elegant if rather anaemic fantasies, but suddenly produced the wild, colourful space adventure of Take Back Plenty.This was a novel that brought together some of the oldest, hoariest ideas in science fiction, and made them fresh. It was a planetary adventure that wasn't afraid of presenting Mars or Venus as frontier territory, rough and dangerous; there are tough spaceship captains forever in danger of losing their precious ship; and there are competing alien races who happen to control the solar system. All this feels like clichÃƒÂ©, but it is written with an exuberance that emphasises the devil-may-care fun of space opera.And Greenland undermines enough of the clichÃƒÂ©s to make us sit up and take notice. Most notably, his rough, tough spaceship captain is a woman, Tabitha Jute, who is a lot less responsible than her intelligent ship, the Alice Liddell (named after the model for Alice in Wonderland, which illustrates something of what lies behind this story). She accepts a seemingly innocuous job, transporting a wheeler-dealer and his band from Mars to the alien space station of Plenty. But things rapidly become more complex, and once started the action barely lets up. Take Back Plenty won the BSFA and the Arthur C. Clarke Awards. It's a knowing rehash of old sf tropes that makes space opera fun again, which is why this is one of the founding texts of both the British Renaissance and the New Space Opera.

Similar Recommendations

Greenland took the story of Tabitha Jute on through two more novels, Seasons of Plenty and Mother of Plenty plus a collection of stories, The Plenty Principle. They are fun to read and very entertaining, though they don't quite match the flair of the original.

Other authors whose work was essential in stimulating the New Space Opera include Paul McAuley, especially his early trilogy of Four Hundred Billion Stars, Secret Harmonies and Eternal Light, which, as the title of the first volume might suggest, take the entire galaxy as the backdrop for stories of interstellar warfare, genetic engineering, immortality, and a dramatic journey to the very core of the galaxy. The novels marked McAuley out as one of the major new writers of hard sf, and are still wonderful reading today.