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Acorna: The Unicorn Girl

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Overview

Three space miners, Gill, Calu, & Rafik, find a survival pod drifting in space: inside sleeps Acorna, a furry, unicorn-like humanoid infant. Young Acorna soon manifests special powers such as the ability to purify water & air, to make plants grow & to heal injuries. When Acorna is almost snatched by scientists who want to study her as an anomaly, the miners must flee & whisk Acorna away to the planet Kezdet, a planet known to deal in child slave labor, & the last place they wanted to go.

Editorial Reviews

The vein of invention McCaffrey worked so effectively in her Pern series seems to have been exhausted. Collaborating again with Ball (after Partnership), McCaffrey opens promisingly in the far future with charming doomed unicorn beings who seal their infant into a survival pod, hoping someone will save her after they choose to die in space rather than in a grisly Khlevii torture cell. After three grungy Terran bachelor asteroid miners find the silver-curled, long-faced baby and name her "Acorna" for the strange protuberance growing from her forehead, the story gallops into a gulch of sentimentality. Acorna's horn can detect poisons and nuzzle sick and wounded humans back to health, so she becomes the savior of Kezdet, a Dickensian planet full of abused children slaving in mines, match factories and brothels. The authors stall in getting their major theme of exploited children under way, and they unconvincingly muddle it with precious goings-on among Acorna's three adopted miner dads, sentimentalized little victims, shady planetside entrepreneurs and a stock villain. Cut the "a"s from the title and what's left sums up this novel perfectly. (July) -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Margaret Ball

Margaret Ball lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, two children, three cats, two ferrets, a hedgehog, and a large black dog. She has a B.A. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas. After graduation, she taught at UCLA, then spent several years honing her science fiction and fantasy skills by designing computer software and making inflated promises about its capabilities. Her most recent book publications are Lost in Translation and Mathemagics. When not writing, she plays the flute, makes quilts, and feeds the pets.

Bio of Anne McCaffrey

Anne McCaffrey, the Hugo Award--winning author of the bestselling Dragonriders of Pern novels, is one of science fiction's most popular authors. She lives in a house of her own design, Dragonhold-Underhill, in County Wicklow, Ireland.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

1010.22 KB

Number of Pages

416

eBook ISBN

9780061160745

Excerpt from: Acorna by Margaret Ball

Chapter One
At first Gill assumed it was just another bit of space debris, winking as it turned around its own axis and sending bright flashes of reflected light down where they were placing the cable around AS-64-B1.3. But something about it seemed wrong to him, and he raised the question when they were back inside the Khedive.

"It is too bright to have been in space very long," Rafik pointed out. His slender brown fingers danced over the console before him; he read half a dozen screens at once and translated their glowing, multicolored lines into voice commands to the external sensor system.

"What d' you mean, too bright?" Gill demanded. "Stars are bright, and most of them have been around a good while."

Rafik's black brows lifted and he nodded at Calum.

"But the sensors tell us this is metal, and too smooth," Calum said. "As usual, you're thinking with the Viking-ancestor part of what we laughingly refer to as your brain, Declan Giloglie the Third. Would it not be pitted from minor collisions if it had been in this asteroid belt more than a matter of hours? And if it has not been in this part of space for more than a few hours, where did it come from?"