review:
Fantastic story about going to a new world and the alien life there. Initially the premise really threw me off - there is alien life, possibly the first that mankind has come across, and some prisoners have been sent to colonise with a really expensive spaceship instead of a team of scientist who can really explore? Weird. Nonsense. The in-world explanation of this never made sense to me. Once I ignored that, the rest of the story was quite enjoyable. Lots of sparse situations and a good focus on the sci-fi aspects and the aliens. Not everything was answered - there's a sequel to this.,