When a drifter calling himself Kiel Martin stumbles across tiny bugs, he’s more interested in getting warm, getting dry, and having a good meal than investigating the crablets. After falling in with a Midwestern farm family, including Cam, a clever science fiction-reading young boy, he goes back for further investigation. These tiny, robotic bugs are unlike any lifeforms he’s seen, able to form into larger and more threatening creatures. They can also learn from their failures, adapting quickly to challenges and defenses, until the crablets are less of a puzzling mediation on the nature of life and replicating machines, and more of a threat to all human life.
The concept behind the colony of crablets was fascinating, especially as Cam and Kiel investigate their abilities. There’s a fair amount of technical explanation in order to create such an original antagonist and then to make this concept understandable and believable, but it’s all very accessible. Readler makes even the hard science explanations quite readable.
That said, The Colony’s characters are somewhat lacking in nuance or growth. Anyone introduced as a self-interested jerk continues to be a self-interested jerk, and anyone introduced as a good person is good, without wavering in either direction. (It’s possible that annoying Peggy’s death was a moment of self-sacrificing redemption, but more likely just another example of her typical thoughtless behavior. Either way, no one mourns her or is changed as a result of the tragedy.) Most of the humans in the The Colony were one-note stock characters like Slimy Politician, Love Interest, Cute Child and Old Farmer, although, there are delightful shades of sci-fi great Robert Heinlein’s themes in the self-sufficient farm matriarch.
The wild creativity and thoughtful application of the colony, against a collection of stock characters behaving predictably, makes this feel like the sci-fi novel version of a summer action movie. Still, the clever premise, the frighteningly and plausible adversary, and the hard science grounding make it well worth a read.
Reviewed by Meg Stivison for IndieReader