all right, well, I've now done further reading of reviews for the Beckett books and I'm tentatively willing to give them a try, so thank you! (though with a population with a genetic bottleneck as severe as these Eden folks, all descended from one man and one woman, I'm having trouble believing that the population would be able to expand as much as it does over many generations and hundreds of years, even if the books do acknowledge a high degree of birth defects. a bottleneck with 20 times the size of the founding population can be too severe for a species to survive!)