The Green Book, Jill Paton Walsh

The Green Book
Jill Paton Walsh, illustrated by Lloyd Bloom
ISBN: 0374327785
(Printed 1982)  Juv reader b/w illustrated Sci-Fi: chronicles a small band of colonists settling on a new world of crystalline plants, glowing jellyfish, and red-and-grey moth people.
re-read June 11, 2014

This was one of those books where I saw the cover and the flap and I thought I had read it before, but couldn't remember.  As soon as I started reading I was sure, but still couldn't remember the story.  So I read it again.

Pattie is quite young when her family boards a not-so-large, not-so-new starship with her family, hoping for a new life on a new world which Pattie names Shine, far away from the failed human civilization on Earth.  Each colonist has a short list of what they must bring; clothing, boots, tools, one personal item, and one book.  Pattie misunderstands, and selects a blank journal, a commonplace book, which causes her family much amusement until the colony is settled, secured, and mostly assured of surviving - at which time it is revealed that Pattie has been recording the story of the colony itself.

Details are sparse, and the science is either old-fashioned or inconsistently handwaved; databank tapes have enough power to nearly instantly compute that their colony is devoid of life, but doesn't have enough room for a few text files of Shakespeare.  Stringent weight limits for the colonists, but the ship carries concrete and multiple types of heavy machinery that is intended to only work a single time (why even?).  No room for livestock or pets, but live rabbits and chickens are brought and not treated as pets or even carefully preserved.  Likewise, the logic of the colonists in several instances is a little shaky, and the world, while carefully different in some ways - less gravity, no wind, no rain, no clouds - has treeish trees and grassy grass and lakes of temperate water and a species that is confidently and immediately associated with moths, even up to having fuzzy wings.  

Still, the story is sweet, quick, and at a great level for a serial bedtime read for younger children, or for a first chapter book for a precocious reader.

Other than the handwaving and logic mishaps, the only quibble I have is an odd interlude where the Father essentially bitches about science and technology, and intimates that as soon as we moved to "technology" instead of "tools" we lost something fundamental, and that he was planning to be the most important person in the colony by becoming the "Maker" of these old-fashioned tools.  As a professional, an educator, and someone very much in favor of what science and technology can do for improving life, this left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth - a seed drill is every bit as much "technology" as an MRI machine, and to denounce the latter simply because it relies on a larger and more advanced infrastructure to support it is both short-sighted and very dangerous.  The real confusion here is that the father's job description is not really vital to the story, and neither is the conversation where he espouses these views - it's essentially an aside, but in a short book of 74 pages (with quite a few full-page illustrations) it's an aside that takes up valuable real-estate.  Like the concrete on the spaceship, I'm not quite sure why that made it in.