Matthew Hunter

Consequences is a Retrieval Artist novel. The series (with two previous books) is set in a universe where humanity interacts on a regular basis with many alien cultures of varying degrees of strangeness. Many of these alien cultures have strange laws or taboos that humans can be subject to horrible penalties for violating – whether they know that they are violating the alien’s laws or not. This conflict of interest has spawned a small, but significant, industry: making people “disappear” for the purposes of evading the consequences of breaking an unjust (by human standards) alien law.

She was a coolhunter with forty different legal identities. Her job: to drive fads; to find the “next cool thing” five to ten times per week. She was one of the best. Entire corporations rose and fell under her influence. But then some really uncool things started to happen… From the description, this sounds like an adaptation of the idea first pioneered by Connie Willis in Bellwether. Although I haven’t read this adaptation, I have read other works by this author, and most of Connie Willis’ work; between the two, Connie Willis is the better author, but even in good hands it makes for little more than an interesting intellectual exercise.

Imagine a socialist paradise that bankrupts itself to develop a single interstellar spacecraft, the USS Alabama, designed to escape the solar system and colonize a new world, called Coyote. Imagine that the colonists for this new world have been carefully selected by the government, emphasizing political loyalty as much as scientific knowledge. Imagine that in this dystopian society, dissidents who remember the dream of Liberty are regularly rooted out, arrested, and shipped to reeducation camps in cattle cars.

In my earlier review of Coyote, I described it as a fairly normal interstellar colonization story with a hint of politics in the background. Coyote Rising, the sequel, makes those politics somewhat more explicit, but they are still far short of actually driving the story in a manner similar to, for example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That’s not a good thing when the point of the story is supposed to be the politics.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an early attempt to bring foreign films – specifically, the Chinese kung fu fantasy – to an American audience with high production values and more sophisticated plotting than the usual chopsui. It succeeds admirably, and was justly recognized with multiple awards. As a fan of chopsui, I was not disappointed. The kung fu is powerful in this movie. Although much is fast, it is not too fast to follow, and the camerawork does an excellent job of maintaining a smooth visual continuity that showcases even the more complex fighting.

Destroyer is the latest in Cherryh’s Foreigner series, the tale of Bren ameron’s tempestuous relationship with the alien atevi. As the paidhi, Bren is the sole human permitted to enter atevi society, and on his head rests the task of translating not only language and culture, but also the instinctual behaviors that can seem deceptively similar … with sometimes deadly results. As Destroyer opens, Bren returns to his adopted planet following the 2-year space mission to retrieve human colonists from a remote space station.

Dzur is Brust’s long-awaited followup to Issola in the Vlad Taltos series. It’s an interesting mix of new material and old standbys of the Vlad series. In terms of series revelations and introductions, I counted at least five or six events of a similar stature to the Lesser Revelation of Orca. And it’s worth noting that the Greater Revelation of that novel is not directly revealed but gets enough in-jokes that it becomes tiresome.

Having set aside my higher expectations after Earth Unaware, I was anticipating pretty much a simple adventure story this time around. That’s pretty much what I got with Earth Afire. Unexpectedly, though, we were introduced to Mazer Rackham in this book, and he was unfortunately less than impressive as a character. In Ender’s Game, Card writes Ender as a character who is convincingly super-intelligent yet childish. Mazer is supposed to be cut from similar if not quite identical cloth, but he doesn’t carry it convincingly.

I ended up reading Orson Scott Card’s First Formic War series because of a discussion I had with a friend of mine about the central moral question of Ender’s Game: was Ender’s action to end his war moral or not? It would be a spoiler to describe exactly what he did; suffice it to say that it’s a close call based on the available information, and our opinions differed based primarily on whether the books in this series were considered canon or not.

Ursula K Leguin’s EarthSea trilogy broke new ground in the fantasy genre, and has truly earned a place of honor. Unfortunately, as with many television adaptions, the Sci-Fi Channel’s attempt to bring that story to the television screen preserved almost nothing of that. Although the miniseries is less bitter and painful than Tehanu, it lacks the qualities that made the original trilogy such a wonderful creation. It also lacks the special effects to effectively carry out the magic that is such a vital component of EarthSea.