Vigilant

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable.
Review: James Alan Gardner is one of the few male authors I've read who does a good job when it comes to telling a story from a woman's point-of-view. I loved his first novel "Expendable", and was pleased to see the protagonist, Festina Ramos, show up in "Vigilant". Festina is more of a supporting character here; the first-person narrative is told by Faye Smallwood, a 40-something woman living on the planet Demoth in the 25th century. Faye becomes a member of "The Vigil", a watchdog organization that ferrets out government corruption, and the story takes off when Faye becomes a target of assassins who are killing off members of The Vigil.

I had a few minor problems with "Vigilant". Faye's first person narrative annoyed me in a few places. I found it odd that a 40ish-year-old woman living in the 25th century kept using 20th century slang. In several places, I felt the story was underdeveloped, particularly when it came to Faye's relationships with her family. It was interesting that Gardner didn't take the easy way out here and have Faye's "group marriage/commune" life-style fade away as she got older, but Faye's spouses were barely mentioned and when they were, I could never remember which one was which. I would have liked to have gotten to know them better.

I also would have liked more background on the how the human/alien Oolom relationship developed on Demoth. The Oolom settled on Demoth first and far outnumbered humans, and yet the Oolom had adapted many human mannerisms instead of the other way around.

Overall though, "Vigilant" was a fun read and quite a page-turner. I enjoyed it.

Rating:
Summary: A great sci-fi mystery
Review: On the planet Demoth, a deadly plague decimates the Oolom race, while leaving their human neighbors unaffected, at least physically. Faye helps care for the patients, and is a witness when her father finds a cure. After her father's mysterious death a few days later, Faye drifts through life, enters into a group marriage (her culture is bisexual), and eventually becomes a member of the Vigil, a watchdog group who fiercely monitor the government. On her first assignment, her partner is killed and Faye finds herself fleeing not only the assassins, but also a couple of government agents who feels she is hiding something. With the help of her new Oolom partner and of Festina Ramos (from Gardner's first book "Expendable"), Faye sifts through the mystery of this multilayered conspiracy which is connected not only to Demoth's past before the Ooloms arrived, but also to Faye's father. Now if Faye could only stop being distracted by the enigmatic Festina, so she could concentrate on surviving... "Vigilant" starts slow, but after the arrival of Festina, the story flares to life and the reader can hardly read quickly enough. James Alan Gardner is a gifted writer whose stories capture the imagination and entertain readers for all their worth.

Rating:
Summary: Good Not Great
Review: The title pretty much says it all. A good book, but not really great. It didn't really grab me by the nose and make me want to keep reading, but it wans't hard on the eyes either.

A major flaw with the book is that our narrator, Faye Smallwood, has this peculiar accent that really becomes distracting. She has this way of linking words with hyphens or slashes, or just making up words, it really gets irritating after 372 pages. It seems like a small thing, but it got under my skin after a while.

Another flaw is that there is really no big payoff at the end. There's action throughout the book, but for an action book, the "final confrontation" was pretty lame. A couple of shots of acid, a melting bridge, and we're done. Maybe I'm being picky, but I thought there should be more there to make it worth putting up with the narrator's annoying voice.

Like all of Gardner's books there is little of hard substance, but the books are all fun reads. So if you want a good SF adventure, I'd recommend all of Gardner's books, except maybe Commitment Hour, they'll keep you occupied without stupefying you.

So, to sum it up, if you have nothing to read, check out Vigilant, it's worth the money you pay (especially if you buy it used).

Rating:
Summary: Good Not Great
Review: The title pretty much says it all. A good book, but not really great. It didn't really grab me by the nose and make me want to keep reading, but it wans't hard on the eyes either.

A major flaw with the book is that our narrator, Faye Smallwood, has this peculiar accent that really becomes distracting. She has this way of linking words with hyphens or slashes, or just making up words, it really gets irritating after 372 pages. It seems like a small thing, but it got under my skin after a while.

Another flaw is that there is really no big payoff at the end. There's action throughout the book, but for an action book, the "final confrontation" was pretty lame. A couple of shots of acid, a melting bridge, and we're done. Maybe I'm being picky, but I thought there should be more there to make it worth putting up with the narrator's annoying voice.

Like all of Gardner's books there is little of hard substance, but the books are all fun reads. So if you want a good SF adventure, I'd recommend all of Gardner's books, except maybe Commitment Hour, they'll keep you occupied without stupefying you.

So, to sum it up, if you have nothing to read, check out Vigilant, it's worth the money you pay (especially if you buy it used).

Rating:
Summary: A Story That Was Told More Than Shown
Review: There were so many good ideas in this book that weren't expressed fully. The writing style was entertaining while still thick with meaning, but somehow the plot didn't support its own premises. While the main character Faye claims to have been reckless and led a dangerous life, there is not enough about it in the book to support it. Instead, she comes off as more self-absorbed than -critical. Maybe if the book had spent more time on her early life to build up the character transformation, I could have found it as touching as it was supposed to be. I found Our Faye to be more rare-annoying than rare-precious. Also, the spelunking and action scenes were way too drawn out and just not very enthralling. There were plenty of loose threads left hanging regarding the jurisdictions and legalities of the clashing law enforcement groups, which made no sense when you kept reading about how supposedly swarming with bureaucracy the planet was. And what of the romance that was supposed to be blooming between Faye and an Explorer Corps woman from Gardner's first book? You wait til the end to find out what happens and then get disappointing nothing! I'm not sure if this book is too long or too short, but it doesn't fit right in its current format. Still, for some light and somewhat intriguing reading, it's worth checking out.

Rating:
Summary: Another superb novel. Comparable to "Expendable"
Review: This is Mr. Gardner's third novel. Like the previous two, it's set in a world that he himself had created - very realistic future for mankind, very logical and interesting. It's the 25th century and mankind had long since achieved interstellar travel and came in contact with other races throughout the Galaxy. The life in the world is good with the "League Of Peoples" (a league of races so far advanced, that to call them Gods would be belittling) supervising over the world's order. They have only 1 rule: No race or person that is non-sentient (meaning that the person/race have intentions to wage murder/war onto others) can leave their home planet.

The action of the novel takes place on a provincial planet, populated by 2 friendly races: Humans and Ooloms. All is great until a plague strucks and kills most of the Ooloms before a cure is found. Humans were left untouched by the disease. The main character, a woman named Faye Smallowood is the daughter of the doctor that discovers the cure. She is full of guilt for not being able to save all the Ooloms that she saw die, and it takes her 20 years to recover. Finally, she pursues her dream of joining the Vigil - a government agency that supervises all the government actions on the planet and weeds out corruption... Her acceptance to the force coincides with some mysterious murders, and suddenly she finds herself in the middle of a very important investigation that brings back her hard past...

The book has a very long exposition, with the main heroine telling the reader, who she is and how she got there, and only then the story and the action begin. I must say that the long intro is just as interesting and intriguing as the rest of the book. I found myself unable to put the book down, my heart pounding, can't wait to see what happens...

"Vigilant" definitely compares to Mr. Gardner's first novel, "Expendable", both of which are now in my top-10 favorites.

I recommend the book to everyone, especially to fans of such genres as mystery, suspense, sci-fi and psychology.

Rating:
Summary: Fast-moving, enjoyable, off-Earth adventure
Review: Vigilant is James Alan Gardner's third novel. This story is narrated by Faye Smallwood, a human woman living on Demoth, a colony planet which the humans of the Technocracy share with a genetically-engineered variant variant of the alien Divians: Ooloms, in this case, sort of large, humanoid, flying squirrels. The harrowing opening tells of a plague in which 93% of the Oolom population was killed, until Faye's father found a cure. But after his death, Faye spirals downward into a self-destructive way of life. She emerges in her mid-30s, after such bad experiences as lots of drugs, casual sex, and self-mutilation; and such good experiences as her group marriage; to become a proctor for the Vigil, a sort of group of political ombudsmen for the joint Oolom/Human government of Demoth.

The main action, then, begins with Faye's first job as a proctor, which happens to correspond with an eruption of killer androids, who murder several other proctors. Faye is saved only by a mysterious entity which seems to be a movable wormhole. In quick succession, Faye is kidnapped by members of the Technocracy's Admiralty, who are interested in the "wormhole", rescued by Festina Ramos of Expendable, and investigating the police investigation into the killer android episode. This finally leads to an interlaced series of confrontations with the past: Faye's past (an understanding of her Father's secrets, and a rapprochement of sorts with her mother), the planet's near past (the Oolom plague), and its much farther past (its mysterious previous alien occupants).

The book is very action-filled. The early pages seem to promise a story to do with the fairly interesting political concept of the Vigil, tied in with, perhaps, Human/Oolom relations, and with Faye's personal growth. While these features aren't precisely forgotten, they tend to be submerged under the fast-moving plot, which soon involves a different Divian species, trade negotiations, ancient alien archaeological sites, new plague outbreaks, and some very old crimes. Gardner piles quite a few concepts on top of each other, and for some time I was keeping a list of outrageous coincidences on which he was supporting his plot structure, as well as some unfairly mystical technology: but I was unfair. Most of his coincidences turn out to be not so coincidental after all, the tech is quite well explained, and all is resolved in a fairly tightly constructed denouement.

This is definitely a fun read, and an interesting book with plenty of clever ideas, as well as pretty much nonstop action. On the negative side, even though the coincidences, as I said, are generally well explained, the complex structure of motivations and plots tends to give the book an artificial feel, and tends to make Faye, the central character, seem to be a pawn in a story really involving much different, non-human, entities. Thus the final unfolding of the plot, even if reasonably logical, isn't quite as personally involving as one might have hoped. And the high tech mysteries, while once again well explained, also come off to an extent as dei ex machinae, at least at the Human/Oolom level. Furthermore, the main human villains (including the Admiralty thugs who kidnap Faye), really act in very stupid and dangerous ways. Some of this is explained away, some seems to be necessary mainly to propel the book's plot.

Thus on the whole I can recommend Vigilant as an enjoyable, fast-moving, off-planet adventure, with the caveat that character development and general plausibility sometimes take a back seat to plot requirements. At the same time, Gardner clearly can do characters well, and Faye in particular is a well-depicted, less than perfect but still likable, viewpoint character. Gardner's Technocracy seems an interesting universe in which to set stories, with an intriguing if basically implausible central law: no killer of another "sentient" can ever engage in interstellar travel.

Rating:
Summary: Bravo!
Review: When our story begins, fifteen-year-old Faye Smallwood lives in Sallysweet River on the planet of Demoth. She is human, the daughter of a doctor. A species called the Ooloms (think flying squirrels whose skin changes color like a chamaeleon) peacefully coexist with the humans. A new and deadly plague is wiping out millions of the Ooloms. Humans are somehow immune. Faye's father, Dr. Henry Smallwood finds the cure. The last Oolom to die is Proctor Zillif, a member of the Vigil, who Faye has become close to. Her father dies in a mining accident shortly thereafter.

Once an adult, Faye joins the Vigil, a band of fiercely independent monitors charged with rooting out government corruption. To help in this struggle, her mind is linked to the powerful datasphere that regulates the planet, Xé (pronounced Chay). While on her first assignment a couple of robots try to assassinate her. It is one of multiple attacks on proctors around the globe.

Ooloms and humans were not the first species to inhabit Demoth. The planet is riddled with long-abandoned mines and settlements. Somewhere deep among them is something that had been left behind: an alien technology of unimaginable potential to build or destroy. Enemy agents want desperately to find it. Even some of Faye's own people would kill to find it and unravel its mysteries. Proctor Faye Smallwood teams up with Admiral Festina Ramos (from the books "Expendable" and "Radiant") to discover who or what is behind a sinister conspiracy. During it all, new plagues are forming.

***** Author James Alan Gardner won me as a fan from the book "Expendable". From then on, I have been scrambling to get my hands on each of his previously published novels. I worried that none of his other books would equal the wonder I felt upon reading the first. Fortunately, the author has yet to let me down. As it stands, this is the third book by the author I have finished reading and I could not choose upon which I have enjoyed best. Therefore, I will plainly state that if you come across a book written by James Alan Gardner, do not bother reading the back to learn what it is about. Simply purchase the book. It is more than worth the money! *****

Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.