Sunwaifs

by Sydney van Scyoc

This is a really bizarre sci-fi novel. It's set on a strange world where interplanetary colonists struggled to overcome local plant life. Wild creeping grass strangled their crops, proliferate moss spores struck the people and livestock with a form of intoxication that drove them into madness. Then a sunstorm affected pregnant women with its rays, and thousands of the resulting newborns died of birth defects. The six that survived had some strange mutations- one had healing powers, one could see the future, one could commune with birds, another with the plants, etc. They were shunned by the community, and grew up wild and solitary, tended by a few nurses. At the point where I left off (about fifty pages in), they had started sneaking out of their cottage to run wild through the fields and forest, to spy on the "pilgrims" and frolic under the influence of the moss dust. I like the way Scyoc writes, and I picked up this book because Daughters of the Sunstone intrigued me and I wanted to read more by her. But Sunwaifs was just getting a little too crazy for me, and I didn't want to continue.

Abandoned                       214 pages, 1981