James Alan Gardner wrote A Host of Leeches about Alyssa who wakes up alone on a hospital space station. She has only robots and her damaged symbiont to talk to, and discovers that she is quarantined as a plague sufferer and the robots are all war machines. Devoid of enemies and dumped here, the robots have started pitting wits against one another, causing peril for Alyssa as she tries to find a way to cure the plague and get home.

A Strand in the Web by Anne Bishop is the longest tale, a lovely story of a team of student restorers aboard a dying city ship. The restorers travel around spreading life back onto ravaged planets, building up ecologies and food webs with painstaking work from stored genetic stock. But their ship systems are breaking down and cannot be fixed. Willow, responsible for trees, is fed up with the childish fellow students who unleash a plague of deer and locusts on her saplings, and requests an island of her own to work on - never expecting her wish to be granted. When it is, she and a boy who creates bees are determined to get the biodiversity right, even as their own survival is threatened.

Stranded by Anthony Francis tells of a squad of boys who battle a squad of girls for control of their spaceship after the adults have died. The alien invaders booted humans off planet and into spaceships and now their ship needs serious repairs. Sirius is a boy who tries to get them to a safe dock. An alien girl, Serendipity, happens to be on the planet he picks. She looks like a centaur and when a spaceship crashlands her first thought is to lend aid, but her arrival is misinterpreted and the boys and girls assume she is an enemy. Stranded together, they have to learn to get along.

STRANDED is a good read for anyone from young adult to adult.

Book Summary