A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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| Expendable | The Apocalypse Door | The Gathering Flame |
Expendable, James Allen Gardner (1997), 337 pp (pb).
I was alerted to Gardner by a positive review he got from Mike Kozlowski, so one day I finally got around to grabbing his first novel and giving it a whirl. Alas, I don't think I was quite as impressed by it as Mike was. Expendable was decent enough to read, but more in a "lightly amusing but soon forgotten" sort of way rather than a "golly gee, that was fun, gimme more of that!" sort of way.
The plot is fairly simple: humanity's Space Force has an Explorers' corps, which gets staffed with all the misfits and not-quite-desireables. Troublemakers and other "problems" get sent to a certain planet which is known as a dumping ground from which no one has ever returned. Our protagonist gets sent there and has to traipse around figuring out what's going on.
One thing that bugged me was the book's use of the hoary "benevolent advanced aliens give humans technological leg up, but set strict conditions in return" trope. Here, the aliens are entirely off screen, but the conditions they've set are pretty important to the plot as it proceeds. I know, things like this are only meant to establish the framework in which the story can function, and we're supposed to just swallow it and get with the story. But here, it bugged me enough that every time it got brought up as a crucial influence on another character's decision-making process, I found myself arguing with not only the character, but the book/author. Yeah, like that's productive.
Anyway, Gardner does have a genuinely humorous voice, which caught me pleasantly off guard in a few spots. So like I said, it was a decent little sci-fi discovery/exploration number, but not something that seriously impressed me.
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The Apocalypse Door, James D. Macdonald (2002), 224 pp (hb).
This is a short little noirish adventure tale with a science fictional/religious twist (whether the threat that drives the plot is science fictional or religious is an interpretation that's explicitly left open near the end). You know the Knights Templar that got supressed by the French powers-that-be way, way back when? Turns out that only some of them got it in the neck; the rest went underground, and have been tooling around carrying out their mission--protecting holy sites, and travellers to and from same--ever since.
Peter Crossman is an operative for the Temple, one of the inner circle, in fact. A UN peacekeeping mission has recently been kidnapped from Jerusalem, and based on an obscure tip, Crossman and his new partner are sent to stake out a warehouse on the Jersey shore. Things get wild from there. High powered quippage is supplied when they make common cause with Sister Mary Magdalene, of the Special Action Executive Branch of the Poor Clares:
"Authenticate or no authenticate, I'm not sure I trust you, Mags." [...]
"After I saved your life last night? C'mon."
I didn't consider "refrained from killing" to be the same thing as "saving," but there didn't seem to be much point in saying so. I looked at Maggie, sitting there with her fingers laced under her chin, a little smile on her lips, and a big black automatic on the table next to her elbow.
"The woman tempted me and I did eat," I muttered.
Fun stuff. Definitely worth a look.
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The Gathering Flame, Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald (1994), 407 pp (pb).
This book is the fourth in Doyle and Macdonald's Mageworlds series, and represents one venerable solution to the puzzle of what to do when a natural story arc set in a fictional milieu has concluded, but the author(s) still want to write in that world: step back in time and do a prequel to the just-concluded story arc. If it's a well-realized setting, and you've dropped in enough tantalizing back-story references in your first set of stories to stimulate interest without sating appetite, then it can even work pretty well. In the first Mageworlds stories, many references are made to the "first Mage war," in which the parents and acquaintances of the main characters played central roles. The Gathering Flame tells the story of that war, and how those parents met.
The story opens with raiding Mage fleets making major incursions on the commercial space routes among the "civilized" planets (there's not an actual Republic formed, yet). Jos Metadi is a privateer captain who in turn raids the Mage raiders; what's more, he's really the only privateer captain who's demonstrated that he can attract and command a fleet of independent privateers to act in concert. Perada Rosselin, through the workings of capricious circumstance, is the newly-created Domina of Entibor, hereditary ruler of that planet and its colonies. Entibor's colonies are really getting hit by Mage raids, and she has ambitious plans to carry the attack to them, plans that require as lynchpin a proven captain and fleet commander....
I tend to plow through these fairly quickly, in two or three sittings. Although I wasn't particularly drawn to the central relationship in this story, the various characters are engaging enough, and the story itself clips along, just as its predecessors have.
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