Rating: 
Summary: Keep watching Wentworth!
Review: It's a joy to watch K.D. Wentworth develop from one book to the next and BLACK ON BLACK, her latest, is no exception. Her characters are beautifully drawn, her world-building thoughtful and provocative. Curl up for a good read with this one!
Rating:
Summary: Keep watching Wentworth!
Review: It's a joy to watch K.D. Wentworth develop from one book to the next and BLACK ON BLACK, her latest, is no exception. Her characters are beautifully drawn, her world-building thoughtful and provocative. Curl up for a good read with this one!
Rating:
Summary: An Auspicious Debut for a Series
Review: One of my favorite subdivisions of the vast sf field is what I call the "culture-dependent" story--one that takes place on an alien world and turns upon the differences between its native race and humanity. It's not an easy type to write convincingly, because a human author naturally tends to think like a human, and up to now there are only two--C. J. Cherryh and Poul Anderson--whom I've found really capable of getting into an alien's skin and viewing the Universe through its eyes (and sometimes other senses). With "Black on Black," new author Wentworth, like Superman clearing a tall building, joins this auspicious company in a single bound.Ranger Sgt. Heyoka Blackeagle, his name to the contrary, is not an Oglala Sioux (though he was reared by one), but a hrinn--a lupine type of nonhuman, seven feet tall, with an all-over coat of black fur, two thumbs on each hand, and retractible claws on every digit. Invalided out of the Service after sustaining a leg wound in the ongoing war against the insectoid flek, he makes up his mind to visit his homeworld, Anktan, for the first time in his conscious memory (his foster father rescued him from a slave pen when he was little more than an infant), and try to find his roots. His human partner, Cpl. Mitsu Jensen, is due a leave and goes with him. His initial contact with other hrinnti is both confusing and dismaying: they take him for an "Outsider" and "one of the Dead" (their name for anyone with an alien smell), yet at least some of them seem to attach great importance to his coloring--solid black outer- and undercoats, with not a speck of other hue (hence the title of the book). Gradually he discovers that he may be the last survivor of the Levv, a Line that was destroyed by an alliance of hrinnti for supposed infractions of the species' social code at about the time of his birth; that his coming has been the subject of prophecy--and that something very peculiar is going on at the local Confederation base. When Mitsu is captured by one of the hrinn Lines, then mysteriously vanishes after supposedly being returned to her own kind, it's up to Heyoka to weld the quarrelsome Lines--dominated by females--and the males' houses into a single force that can somehow prevent the flek from completing the transport grid they've been secretly constructing in the back country for over 30 years. If he fails, his people will be destroyed, their world remade to suit flek ideas of perfection, and the enemy will have a staging area from which to strike at dozens of nearby planets. For all his alienness, Heyoka is a sympathetic character whose feelings of rootlessness in a human culture and struggle to repress "the other who lives inside him" echo the frequent literary theme of alienation. And the hrinnti, though hardly the most sympathetic nonhuman race in sf--with their savage quarrelsomeness and lack of any concept of friendship or family--are fascinating in their gradually revealed history, their fixation on what they call "patterns," and their image of the godhead, which they call "the Voice." Wentworth slips readily from human to hrinnti viewpoint, and when reading chapters written in the latter, it's easy to forget that this is a fictional people invented by a human. What resolves the story is the ability of some hrinnti, Heyoka among them, to "use power"-- somehow storing and channelling a kind of cosmic electricity through their own cells: a concept that is, to the best of my knowlege, completely new to the genre. If you enjoy adventures on distant worlds and like to meet new species, "Black on Black" is your kind of book.
Rating: 
Summary: Human/versus/Other
Review: Rarely are new alien species created with so much "backstory" so clearly delineated. In Black on Black, K. D. Wentworth brings us not one, but two new aliens: the Hrinn, and the Flek. Astutely camoflaged as an action-adventure space opera, Black on Black is really a meditation and a fugue on the concept of "other." Heyoka, who is neither human nor Hrinn, faces a lifetime of otherness. Raised by a consummate human outsider, a Sioux warrior, he tries to camoflage his otherness by joining the military...yet somehow, the fact that he is about 7 feet tall, with fangs and claws, and huge sharp teeth, and very black fur covering his entire body somehow keeps interfering with his desire to be considered fully human. His journey of discovery to find his roots as Hrinn get him into more trouble than it is worth, yet somehow he manages to float through it without getting too involved....until, that is, his human partner, Mitsu, turns up missing and is found to be a brainwashed slave of the Flek...Hrinn versus Flek...two complete opposites as alien species. The Flek, a hive species while the Hrinn are so individualistic they can hardly live with each other, let alone humans and Flek. Heyoka is very well realized, and stops way short of becoming the invincible star-guided hero that most bad space opera provides. He is a seven-foot-tall bag of insecurities and wants/needs/desires just like the rest of the universe. Wentworth craftily disguises this metaphysical tractatus as a rip-roaring space opera, with plenty of action to disguise the thought pill.
Rating:
Summary: Human/versus/Other
Review: Rarely are new alien species created with so much "backstory" so clearly delineated. In Black on Black, K. D. Wentworth brings us not one, but two new aliens: the Hrinn, and the Flek. Astutely camoflaged as an action-adventure space opera, Black on Black is really a meditation and a fugue on the concept of "other." Heyoka, who is neither human nor Hrinn, faces a lifetime of otherness. Raised by a consummate human outsider, a Sioux warrior, he tries to camoflage his otherness by joining the military...yet somehow, the fact that he is about 7 feet tall, with fangs and claws, and huge sharp teeth, and very black fur covering his entire body somehow keeps interfering with his desire to be considered fully human. His journey of discovery to find his roots as Hrinn get him into more trouble than it is worth, yet somehow he manages to float through it without getting too involved....until, that is, his human partner, Mitsu, turns up missing and is found to be a brainwashed slave of the Flek...Hrinn versus Flek...two complete opposites as alien species. The Flek, a hive species while the Hrinn are so individualistic they can hardly live with each other, let alone humans and Flek. Heyoka is very well realized, and stops way short of becoming the invincible star-guided hero that most bad space opera provides. He is a seven-foot-tall bag of insecurities and wants/needs/desires just like the rest of the universe. Wentworth craftily disguises this metaphysical tractatus as a rip-roaring space opera, with plenty of action to disguise the thought pill.
Rating:
Summary: Human/versus/Other
Review: Rarely are new alien species created with so much "backstory" so clearly delineated. In Black on Black, K. D. Wentworth brings us not one, but two new aliens: the Hrinn, and the Flek. Astutely camoflaged as an action-adventure space opera, Black on Black is really a meditation and a fugue on the concept of "other." Heyoka, who is neither human nor Hrinn, faces a lifetime of otherness. Raised by a consummate human outsider, a Sioux warrior, he tries to camoflage his otherness by joining the military...yet somehow, the fact that he is about 7 feet tall, with fangs and claws, and huge sharp teeth, and very black fur covering his entire body somehow keeps interfering with his desire to be considered fully human. His journey of discovery to find his roots as Hrinn get him into more trouble than it is worth, yet somehow he manages to float through it without getting too involved....until, that is, his human partner, Mitsu, turns up missing and is found to be a brainwashed slave of the Flek...Hrinn versus Flek...two complete opposites as alien species. The Flek, a hive species while the Hrinn are so individualistic they can hardly live with each other, let alone humans and Flek. Heyoka is very well realized, and stops way short of becoming the invincible star-guided hero that most bad space opera provides. He is a seven-foot-tall bag of insecurities and wants/needs/desires just like the rest of the universe. Wentworth craftily disguises this metaphysical tractatus as a rip-roaring space opera, with plenty of action to disguise the thought pill.
Rating:
Summary: Frankly, he preferred humans...
Review: Rescued from slavers, raised among humans, the alien Heyoka must return to his birthworld and regain his place in Hrinnti society. Nebula nominee K. D. Wentworth does a masterful job in giving readers a multi-faceted view of an alien society, its strengths and beauties, warts and foibles. Indeed, Wentworth's particular genius is a wholeness of vision: even the darkest character is shown to have a glimmering of light, whether it is the tenderness in the vicious priest Rakshal's instruction of the cublings or the beauty in the songs of the nihilistic Flek invaders. Such touches, however, never stand in the way of Wentworth's killer plot, full of devious twists and stunning action scenes. Like the young hero of STAR WARS, Heyoka learns that the fate of countless worlds rests on his search for self.
Rating:
Summary: An intriguing world with a dark edge
Review: This novel stands as an excellent example of world building. Unlike many that don't stand up to more than a surface analysis, this world, for all its differences from our human world, is consistent even in depth. The plot and the numerous characters were interesting. But first and foremost it is about the main character Heyoka, who seeks to find out more about his world, his kind, and himself. The changes in him through his experiences and adventures make for some enjoyable and exciting reading.
Rating:
Summary: An intriguing world with a dark edge
Review: This novel stands as an excellent example of world building. Unlike many that don't stand up to more than a surface analysis, this world, for all its differences from our human world, is consistent even in depth. The plot and the numerous characters were interesting. But first and foremost it is about the main character Heyoka, who seeks to find out more about his world, his kind, and himself. The changes in him through his experiences and adventures make for some enjoyable and exciting reading.
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