Chess With a Dragon

 

By David Gerrold

The galaxy is full of intelligent, space faring species. And now humans are one of those species. Being mammals, humans are looked down on by most of the other beings as insectoids and reptilians make up the majority of the intelligent creatures of the galaxy. 

New to the game, the humans start using the InterChange, which is a vast library filled with the combined knowledge of thousands of civilizations, downloading as much as they can, as quickly as they can. But they are brought up short when it is made clear to them that all that information is not free. In fact, humans have run up such a huge debt that it will be impossible to pay. For now the only way the debt can be paid is give all humankind into indentured servitude. Which, it turns out, is SOP among the civilizations of the galaxy. All the newbies are given access to the InterChange but are not informed, until it is too late, that it is not a free service. It is a pyramid of slavery, with the youngest races at the bottom and the oldest races at the top. 

But mammals haven't managed to survive in a galaxy filled with insectoids and reptilians without learning a few things. The humans turn to the Rh/attes, another mammalian species, for help because the Rh/attes work for the guys at the top, the Dragons. The Rh/attes have been part of this galaxy-wide game for a very long time. So with a few hints from the Rh/attes and their own ingenuity, the humans hope to beat the galaxy at its own game. 

This was quite the fun and crazy read. Less than 170 pages long, it was also a fast and easy read, although I was a bit lost in the first few chapters. Really enjoyable though. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Iron Cage

 

By Andre Norton

Jony's mother and father were captured by the Zhalan and carried off their home planet and into space, caged like livestock and powerless to resist the might of the giant captors. The father, Bron, was killed by the Zhalan and Jony's mom, Rutee, was left alone in her cage, where she gave birth to their son, Jony. The Zhalan used mind control to force their captives to do as they wanted them to. But both Rutee and Jony are able to resist the mind control and manage to escape the Zhalan slave ship when it is on a planet, gathering specimens to add to their cages. 

Rutee is heavily pregnant and begins to go into labor once she and Jony are free from the slave ship. The two humans are found by a local person who helps Rutee and cares for the two infants that soon arrive. The local is a large bearlike being who is the member of a small clan who take Rutee and Jony into their homes. 

Many years later, Rutee has since passed on and Jony, with the help of the clan, is taking care of his younger brother and sister, Geogee and Maba. Rutee has been exploring a the ruins of a city that was possibly settled by humans millennia ago. It is full of strange and dangerous tech. When the bear people find out he was in the ruins, they exile him from the clan, much to his distress. But when a space ship lands nearby and his siblings are taken into the ship, along with two of the bear people, it is up to Rutee to rescue them. This space ship is not one of the Zhalan slave ships and its crew is humans just like Rutee and they welcome him and the his two siblings. But Rutee is outraged when he finds his two bear friends, shackled and caged like animals and he turns against his human rescuers. 

This was quite an interesting story. Rutee makes a lot of mistakes, especially in his handling of his young brother and sister. But he tries to make amends for his errors and protect not only his siblings but the bear people to whom he owes everything.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Lord of Thunder

By Andre Norton

The sequel to The Beast Master. 

Hosteen Storm, former Beast Master for the military during the war against the Xik, has started to settle into his new holding on the planet, Arzor, when he is approached by two men wanting to hire him. They need to go into territory held by the indigenous natives, the Norbies. The Norbies are  not human and their technology is at a stone age level. Basically they are analogous to the native American tribes at the time of the European expansion to the Americas. The problem is two-fold, though. First, it is the hottest, driest time of the year, when it is dangerous to travel through the back country. Second, the area they want to enter is forbidden to non-Norbies and will create bad relations between the Norbies and non-Norbies, maybe even leading to war. 

Storm at first refuses to lead the two, explaining that it is just too dangerous. However, the one man is looking for his son, whose space ship has crashed in the forbidden zone and the man will not let anyone stop him from trying to rescue his son. And the other man, who works for the government, wants to gather intelligence on the activities of the Norbies in the forbidden zone, to see if the Norbie tribes are planning to start a war with the non-Norbie colonists.  

Storm agrees to serve as guide for the expedition, helped by his Norbie friends. But as they get closer to the forbidden area, Storm loses control of the expedition when the first man leaves on his own after drugging Storm and the others. Storm sets off after the man but he falls into the hands of a hostile cannibal tribe of Norbies. He manages to escape and he discovers that these Norbies are using some dangerous and unknown alien tech. But the true master of this technology turns out not to be one of the natives. The one the Norbies call the Lord of Thunder, who can call down lightning and fire from the heavens turns out to be a human man who has mastered the technology of the old ones, those mysterious beings whose purpose and origin are hidden in depths of time.

This was an OK read. To me, the Norbies are just too derivative of First Nations peoples of the Americas. It felt like the author couldn't be bothered to create a really different alien species with a stone age technology and so just basically made Native Americans with a couple of biological differences. Similar tribal structure, similar hunter/gatherer lifestyle, even similar religious beliefs and the use of drums in ceremonies, it was all just too familiar. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Whispers

 

By Lisa Jackson

Three sisters, born into wealth and privilege, come together one terrible night and concoct a story to cover up what really happened to the man one of them was engaged to marry, pleading ignorance of the events that led to his death.

All three sisters were emotionally scarred by the events of that night, so much so that the trauma still lingered many years later. Summoned home by their autocratic father after years away, they are informed by him that he has hired an investigator to discover the truth of what happened the night Harley Taggert was killed. The father has been contemplating a run for governor and he doesn't want any hidden scandals coming up to taint his run. He has long suspected that his three daughters were somehow connected to Harley's death. 

Confronted with this news brings back all the old memories of that night. Harley's fiancée was the middle daughter, Claire, and she was with Harley on his boat the night he died. She broke up with him that night when she realized that she was attracted to another boy. When Claire left Harley, he was alive and well. How he ended up dead came as a complete surprise to Claire. Her two sisters know more about the happenings of that night than they are willing to say. Claire agrees to go along with the story they have cooked up for her sisters' sakes. Claire was never told what really happened between Miranda and Paige, her sisters, and Harley, her ex-fiancé. Now, though, thanks to their father, all three sisters have to face up to what happened that tragic night. 

This was an OK read. However, if the sisters had just been honest with each other, Harley's killer might have been revealed a lot sooner. It didn't make a lot of sense that Miranda decided that Claire had to remain in the dark about the true events of that night. 

Also, the book is really long, a lot longer than it needed to be. I wish editors would cut a lot of the verbiage out of these novels that are much longer than needed to tell their story. Over 400 pages for what is basically a rather generic mystery story is too much. Do authors get paid by the word? Is that why novels have gotten longer and longer and longer?

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

The Smoke Ring

 

By Larry Niven

Sequel to The Integral Trees

First, a note about the "world" of the Smoke Ring. This is from Wikipedia, since it explains it much better than I could ever hope to. 

"The story occurs around the fictional neutron star Levoy's Star (abbreviated "Voy"). The gas giant Goldblatt's World (abbreviated "Gold") orbits this star just outside its Roche limit and therefore its gravity is insufficient to keep its atmosphere, which is pulled loose into an independent orbit around Voy and forms a ring that is known as a gas torus. The gas torus is huge—one million kilometers thick—but most of it is too thin to be habitable. The central part of the Gas Torus, where the air is thicker, is known as the Smoke Ring. The Smoke Ring supports a wide variety of life. No "ground" exists in the Smoke Ring; it consists entirely of sky. Furthermore, the Smoke Ring is in orbit and therefore in free fall: there is no "up" or "down"."

The settlers of Citizen Tree are unexpectedly introduced to tree logging when a logger vessel approaches their tree. The logging vessel is on fire and the settlers rush  to help the loggers battle the flames. Four people are rescued but one doesn't make it, too badly hurt in the explosion that caused the fire. 

The newcomers are welcomed and it is assumed they will become part of Citizen Tree's small community. But the settlers didn't know about the logging and the propulsion system used to pilot the logging vessel. Most of which is centered around equipment brought to the Smoke Ring five hundred years ago by their ancestors from Earth. As the newcomers tell of their life of harvesting the integral trees and of bringing the wood to be sold at the market at the Admiralty, the settlers are intrigued. The Admiralty uses technology that came from Earth and it has quite a large population of several thousand humans compared to most of the communities surviving in the Smoke Ring. 

But Citizen Tree has technology too. It has a Silver Suit and a CARM vehicle which stands for Cargo And Repair Module. The Silver Suit is an armored space suit. 

Due to their five hundred plus years inhabiting the Smoke Ring, which is a weightless environment, most human have become much taller and much thinner. So the average person cannot fit into one of the Silver Suits. But occasionally a throwback is born which they call dwarfs. The dwarf humans are of a size to comfortably wear the space suit. 

Sailing above the Smoke Ring is the Discipline, the ship that brought humans to the Smoke Ring. It is being piloted by a computer that goes by the name of Kendy and Kendy is in contact with a few of the people of Citizen's Tree. Kendy wants to help humans survive more successfully and so it encourages a small group of settlers to take the CARM and travel to the Admiralty. They will be accompanied by two of the tree loggers who are familiar with the life and customs of those who run the Admiralty. 

They will have adventures and learn many things and meet many people and as Kendy monitors from above, it comes to realize that they don't really need its help or guidance and are quite capable of figuring things out on their own.

This was a more enjoyable read than the first book, The Integral Trees, simply because it concentrates less on the science and more on the story. It's really an adventure story and a bit lighter in tone than the first book was. It's a strange weird place for humans to be living, the Smoke Ring. And it does strange weird things to human bodies as they gradually adapt to life in a weightless environment. Certainly well worth reading.

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.