Synopsis
The Skid Chronicles Part 2 follows on from the
first novel in the series where our unlikely protagonists were kidnapped by a
team from the Planet Skid on a mission to locate expertise to assist them in developing
alternative food sources to feed their people as the planet’s synthetic food
production systems began to fail.
The Skidian team selected a team of experts at random without really understanding the expertise that they required to achieve their objectives. More by good luck than good management they had found in their random and unscientific search someone who could generate new food production systems in the form of Kiwi style grasslands based farm, station or ranch. Unfortunately for the Skidians as the old earthly adage goes; ‘you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink,’ the enterprise eventually failed because not enough Skidians wanted to get their hands dirty.
Since the inception of modern Skid as it was at that point in time; the most sophisticated and powerful civilisation in the known universe, the concept of having to actually do anything remotely connected to work for most Skidians was unknown and hundreds of millions of Skidians had been governed by a small group of hereditary rulers who didn’t brook any change to the status quo.
The alternative systems developed by the offworld experts would inevitably lead to the transformation of Skid as it was known and the fracturing of Skidian society. Faced with a choice between maintaining the Skidian Way and perhaps saving a good number of Skidians from certain death, the hereditary rulers chose the former and hoped for a miracle to deliver them from mass starvation and the end of the Skid as they knew it.
To make matters worse the artificial intelligence that monitored all the systems that kept the population fed, housed, and watered was experiencing its own difficulties.
This second novel deals with the aftermath of the breakdown in food supplies. The offworlders have been returned home after undergoing a partially successful memory wipe and Skid is slowly recovering from the disaster that all but destroyed the most powerful and sophisticated civilisation known in the known universe.
