Reviewed by Jo Rogers, MyShelf.Com
Buy a Copy

Aboard the colony ship Outward Bound, a gang of teenagers sold drugs to the other colonists. On a ship with ten million people, no one seemed to care. No one, that is, but a teenager named Jim Endicott. The drug they sold, called Heat, was killing human beings. And it was being sold to them by an alien race.

Endicott went to the leader of the Stone Cowboys, Kerry Korrigan. Together they decided to hijack the Kolumban ship and use it to stop the drug trade. But things didn't go according to plan. Endicott and his band of forty crusaders had to fight their way off their own colony ship after they had killed all the Kolumbans but one.

Now there are forty kids on an alien ship they don't know how to run, with no familiar food. How will they ever get the Kolumbans to listen to them? After all, the Kolumbans are a race of gorilla-like beings who make the human teens look like infants. And they have alien friends, called the Communers, who could, and did, destroy the Outward Bound with little or no effort.

SHADOW PLANET is the fifth entry in Mr. Shatner's series, QUEST FOR TOMORROW. The story itself is compelling, as are the insights into the reasons kids will join a gang and the interesting science used here. This is a book any science fiction fan should enjoy, and one I will definitely read again.