Exiled from Earth
by Ben Bova
Despite the cool premise, this story blows.
The premise in question is the idea that, at some future time, biotechnology is advanced far enough that humanity is only a few years away from practical genetic engineering (and, of course, the first choice is to make superhumans with the technology). Since this was written in 1971, this part actually was science fiction at the time.
The trouble is that the world's population has continued to grow quickly, and the world government only managed to put a cap on it at 20 billion. Food production, etc, can just barely keep up with this population, and only as long as no major disruptions occur. The computers the government keeps working on these things determine that the successful working of genetic engineering will cause just this kind of disruption. Therefore, around 2000 scientists and their families are exiled to a space station so that they cannot continue the work.
Given that awesome start, the story mostly descends into boring and asinine adventure with almost no worldbuilding at all. What sorts of technologies do they have? I don't know. The only interesting ones are the computers (which are a lot better at language than real ones have gotten so far) and the cars, which for some reason all run on turbines. How our characters get to the space station, what technologies are used to keep it running, etc. are completely ignored and portrayed as irrelevant. That is why I put this in the field of soft sci-fi. I didn't even find it very compelling storytelling.
I give this book a 2/10
(I tried to read the other two books in the series, Flight of the Exiles and End of Exile, but I just couldn't. At least I finished this one.)
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