Enemies

Rating:
Summary: enjoyable and richly entertaining outer space fairy tale
Review: He was a visionary who saw that the Republic, which earth was a member, was about to devolve into civil war; Andre built a colony in the Lucifer system called Belarus. It was comprised of colonists of Slavic descent, one very much like Russia and the other republics of the former Soviet Union. when civil war came, Belarus was easily able to repel the invaders but that was not the worst of their problems. The planet was inhabited long before the colonists arrived by those who came to be known as the Enemy.

The Enemy was determined to destroy the colonists but biotoxins that Andre released kept the Enemy from destroying his home. Still civilization was set back to Tsarist Russia and when the new Union came to bring back Belarus into the fold, the world would not adhere to the union's new Bill of Rights. Women with birth defects caused by the biotoxins were forced to wear shrouds on their face and had no rights. Yet one of these female lowlifes, the niece of the Tsar, tries to save her people and in doing so, that of the Enemy.

ENEMIES is an enjoyable and richly entertaining work that combines Tsarist Russia and chemical warfare in an outer space fairy tale. The contrast of the modern technology that the Union Star Men have and the medieval life of the people living on Belarus makes for natural conflict. The heroine should be bitter because of the restrictive prejudicial laws that apply to her disfigurement but instead she is an independent thinker who does her best to save society.

Harriet Klausner