The novel “Homecoming” by Jude Austin was published for the first time in 2020. It’s the second book in the Projects series and follows “Project Tau“.
Kalin Taylor, now known as Kata, managed to escape from the GenTech laboratory where he was used as a guinea pig for a biological experiment and trained to be sold as a slave. He brought with him Tau, one of the Projects created using advanced biotechnology.
Kalin/Kata just wants to return to his home planet Trandellia but the journey is long and complex. The welcome is not the best because his planet’s rulers want to exploit his new abilities: officially, he’s dead and if he wants his citizenship to be restored and Tau is allowed to live on Trandellia, he must go to the wild planet Atthiras and find the missing daughter of an ambassador.
The sequel to “Project Tau” explores the aftermath of the first novel’s events. The protagonist Kalin Taylor, transformed by GenTech into Project Kata, was physically and also mentally marked by the terrible period in which he was being trained by the laboratory staff. “Homecoming” contains many references to those events but to fully understand them you need to read the first novel.
A constant of this sequel is the post-traumatic stress disorder Kalin/Kata suffers from and which greatly affects his thoughts and actions. The difficulty in trusting someone is made even greater because everyone seems to see him as a weapon and try to exploit him. When he meets Captain Alan Morgan, who runs a military hospital on the planet Atthiras, he struggles not to consider him an enemy even when he shows he genuinely cares for Kalin’s health.
“Homecoming” is also used by Jude Austin to expand the fictional universe created in this series by offering some insight into the future history of humanity and the societies that have developed on the various planets. Humanity expanded to many planets, but humans seem to have remained the same, even on their worst sides. In the novel, it’s explained that in that future, the use of sophisticated robots and artificial intelligences was banned because it had led to a period of decadence for humanity but it seems that a case of a remedy worse than the disease. In fact, the development of the Projects is only one of the consequences of that decision.
“Project Tau” explored a very dark side of humanity with the creation of slaves through biotechnology. “Homecoming” is less brutal but remains emotionally intense as other forms of abuse are explored, some of which are more subtle and insidious. These are problems that exist today and obviously haven’t been solved in that future.
The choice to explore different faces of future humanity is developed with a series of events and interactions that lead to a complexity that’s greater than the first novel. The protagonists are faced with various choices that have consequences that are far from trivial.
Jude Austin announced a third novel in the Projects series, but “Homecoming” has an ending, so the first two novels can be read now without problems. The second novel ends with a doubt, which is expressed by Tau, which could be at the center of the new sequel. In some ways, “Homecoming” offers even more food for thought than the first novel, given the variety of political and social elements contained, so I think they’re worth reading, keeping in mind that the themes could be a problem if you’re triggered by one or more of them. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
