Hunted

Rating:
Summary: Mystery and adventure in distant time and space
Review: In the world of the sentient and non-sentient there exists a world of treachery and deceit by those who try to bend the rules. With a multitude of plot twists and turns you will accompany a band of misfit expendables and alien life forms, such as intelligent moss called Balrog and elephant sized Mandassar's (or lobsters as the humans see it), as they try to save their people and themselves from the would-be rulers greedy for more power. Throughout the book the question arises: "Just who is our hero?" as even he himself does not know. Take a ride with some of your favourite expendables as they turn to liquid in "Sperm Tails", battle laughing larries, and try to fight a battle of the pheremones as war rages in the universe.

Rating:
Summary: Humourous, quirky, wonderful
Review: More emotional struggle than with Vigilant, less than with Commitment Hour. Hunted is classic James Alan Gardner: his flowing half-sarcastic, half dead-on sincere way of speech; his delightfully & consistently unique characters; set in his easily pictured reality. For veteran Gardner readers - he doesn't really explain the laws of the reality very well in this book (which is useful because vetarans don't want to read that re-hash ... anyway). I recommend reading Hunted after Expendable.

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Summary: Who's hunted?
Review: Mr. Gardner, James for his intimate readers *grin*, writes about being human. About how it feels to be rejected, how you deal with it when people put you in places where they expect you to die. When you're only option is to find out just what expendable means. And he does so in a very nice way. A very pleasurable way. A very enjoyable way. One that's different, not just another sci-fi.

And I really thought I'd had him figured out and knew he couldn't come up with new tricks... *grin* Well, he got me totally hooked to his latest story and gave me now way out. So at least he had me hunted. Who else? We have a hero, hunted by his own self-perception and some other unidentifiable something or rather... A not so nice father, an initially brilliant but later not so nice sister... A whole species hunted by money making devious little humans for all the wrong reasons... Actually, who isn't being hunted? (We even find previous very human superhero Ramos hunted by an instinct to be even more human... On a judo mat!)

Mr. Gardner had me outwitted. For sure. And it was extremely enjoyable. Like all of his previous books were. Expendable, simply unforgettable. Commitment hour, shockingly different. But, oh so precious. Vigilant, so familiar yet expanded from its source. And now Hunted. Perhaps the very, very ironic self-depreciative stance of our not-your-basic-human hero also reflects Mr. Garnder's opinion of his audience. *grin* The fear of being hunted. He better come up with another high quality novel soon... Or...!

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Summary: A Tale of Two Clones
Review: Narrator and protagonist Edward York is a nice guy, handsome, strong as an ox, but dumb as an ox, too. Or at least he thinks he is. He's a failed clone. His "sister," Samantha, has all the brains. At age 20, she's ambassador to Troyen.

Troyen is a hive, with castes evolved to respond to pheromones. But while Samantha is ambassador, it collapses into a messy civil war. Samantha and the Queen are killed, and Edward spends the next 20 years on one of Troyen's moons, watching the only place he ever called home devolve into chaos. When a ship finally picks him up to take him home, disaster ensues when the League kills everyone aboard the spacecraft but Edward under its unfailing rule: nonsentients - persons who kill or assist in killing - are forbidden from interstellar space.

Edward is plunged into an interstellar consiparacy involving half a dozen races. With the help of Festina Ramos, he tries to grope through the cloud of conspiracies around him. In the process, he learns that everything he thought he knew is a lie, and that the biggest lies he has been told were about himself.

Once again, Gardner paints Earth's government as utterly corrupt. It's the least plausible part of the story, worse even than the idea of human pheromones. But despite that ongoing flaw, this is a very good book. It's hard to make a dumb protagonist credible, but Gardner brings it off. The plot twists are as good as "Vigilant." Gardner continues to improve as a writer.

Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Gardner's best yet
Review: No surprises here, James Alan Gardner turns out another fine novel. It's a mystery to me why this author hasn't been published in hardcover yet. His novels are consistently head and shoulders above the majority of the SF drek that's published, yet his books continue to languish as first-run paperbacks.

'Hunted' is an excellent addition to Gardner's Future Earth storyline. The story is crisp and exciting from page 1 to the back cover. I have not yet been disappointed by a Gardner book. If you haven't read this (relatively) new author yet, don't waste another minute. It's difficult to judge an author based on four books, but for my money James Alan Gardner is one of the most consistently entertaining authors in SF today.

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Summary: Recycled
Review: Pretty much a recycled Expendable, and quite a disappointment in that sense. James Alan Gardner captivated me with that first novel. Vigilant was a bit more twisted but still very original. Then The Commitment Hour was absolutely brilliant. And now this, what, a struggling attempt to produce another volume? The writing is up to the Gardner's level, but the plot is just Expendable with repainted decorations. Not fair. Maybe it's time to abandon the poor Explorers and come up with new ideas?

Rating:
Summary: Not bad
Review: Readable, but shows how one missing ingredient can detract from the entire dish. It has an interesting universe, a race-threatening problem, mysterious machinations, and a "regular guy" protagonist. Should have been great! But, in the end it's unremarkable, perhaps for want of a contrasting low point in the middle.

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Summary: Brisk and Imaginative Adventure SF
Review: Sometimes I think contemporary SF is missing a sense of freedom of imagination. Reading old 50s books I am struck by the insouciance with which authors threw in concepts like easy FTL, psi powers, weird alien species, super technology, and so on. It's not that you can't find these anymore, but often there is a sense of constraint. We are much stricter about scientific plausibility. But there are still writers who let their imaginations go, while sticking to traditional SF ground. And when a good writer does this, the results can be enormously fun.

James Alan Gardner's new novel, Hunted, is a very fun novel to read. It's set in the same future as his other novels, and a major character is again Festina Ramos of the Explorers, who appeared in Expendable and in Vigilant. Recurrent elements of this future are the League of Peoples, an association of extremely advanced races who enforce just one rule on the many lesser races of the Galaxy (including humans). That rule is that anyone who kills (or intends to kill) another sentient being is killed if they travel out of any solar system. The idea is that wars will thus be restricted to single planets. It's hard to believe in the absolute enforcement of this rule (by mystical means) that we are shown, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief. (The crimes involved in this rule seem to me to be a bit of a moving target, as well.) Perhaps the neatest thing about this setup is that it allows Gardner to play with a whole array of alien races of roughly human intelligence and tech level, while still allowing for races of much greater advancement. Humans themselves are ruled by the Technocracy, controlled by a High Council of Admirals. There are a number of human-colonized planets.

This book deals with Edward York, the son of a member of the High Council. Edward and his sister Samantha were illegally modified genetically, in an attempt to boost their intelligence and strength. Edward's mods failed, so he has spent his life as a dumb bodyguard for his brilliant sister. But 20 years before the action of the book, war broke out on the planet Troyen, where Edward and Samantha were part of the diplomatic corps.

Edward has finally been rescued and taken to Celestia, a human colony which has accepted a great many refugees from Troyen. These refugees were Mandasar children (the Mandasar being the non-human race native to Troyen). The Mandasar are intriguing aliens: they have several "castes", like ants, and they have a Queen, like ants. Once on Celestia, Edward realizes something bad is going on with the refugee Mandasar children, now grown to adulthood. They are being enslaved, victims of the lack of adult Mandasars. He meets Festina Ramos, heroine of Gardner's earlier books, who also suspects wrongdoing. Festina, Edward, and some of the Mandasars are soon on their way back to Troyen, to try to figure out what's really going on behind the scenes. The book is action-packed, and full of neat ideas as well.

It's instructive just to list the ingredients Gardner has thrown into his pot: several neat alien races, nanotechnology, telepathy and some clever uses of it, precognition, a man with a glass stomach, at least two varieties of human/alien hybrid, genetic engineering, some diabolical weapons tech. Mix in plenty of scheming, plenty of action, plenty of colour. The result is a compelling adventure story, and lots of fun for the reader.

The book isn't perfect. You do have to swallow some of the basic implausibilities of the entire series: mainly the League of Peoples' ability to detect and kill "dangerous non-sentients" (and what seem to me to be inconsistent and sometimes changing rules defining "dangerous non-sentients"), as well as the hard-to-believe rationale behind the "expendable" Explorer Corps. In addition, the bad guys are pretty cartoonishly bad. And the ending, while satisfying, has aspects of deus ex machina to it, though those aspects were at least foreshadowed fairly well. (I'd quibble, too, that as psi powers go I hate precognition, but I think that's a personal quirk of mine, and it can't be held against the book.) But these weaknesses didn't stop me from enjoying myself immensely as I gobbled this book down.

Rating:
Summary: A Terrific Story with many twists
Review: The Hunted is a terrific book that mixes great science fiction with mysteries that keep you guessing, and some nice touches of humor.

For those of you who are new to James Alan Gardner, I would recommend first reading one of his other books, "Expendable" which sets up some of the characters and space organizations that are in Hunted.

Rating:
Summary: Highly Addictive
Review: There are some books you just want to read, read, read until you get to the end because they're just that good, this was one of those books. Much like Expendable, this is a first-person yarn, and like any good first-person story it has a narrator that the reader can enjoy listening to for 400+ pages. In this story, our narrator Edward York starts out as a Forrest Gump kind of character, a little slow, but also very disarming because he's so kind and gentle. Slowly York becomes tangled in a huge web of deceit and treachery, but is able to save the day with a little help from his friends. Those friends include old favorites like Phylar Tobit and of course Festina Ramos.

Hunted is an exciting, action-packed book with riveting plot twists and great characters. For hardcore SF readers this might not be serious enough or have enough scientific mumbo-jumbo, and maybe some of the plot twists are rather predictable, but this is just an exciting, entertaining read.

After reading Expendable and Hunted, I'm definitely going to pick up the rest of Gardner's books in this series, I'd recommend you do the same. Since there are no immortal see-through people and no choppy subheadings, I can feel good about giving this book five stars.