1984 SF. In a distant future, humans are desperately settling worlds
as their alien-donated FTL ships become increasingly unreliable. Only
native human-level life will prevent the colonisation of a new planet,
and no life has ever been judged to be human-level. But the evaluation
team on Belthannis is faced with something entirely new.
This is a strange and haunting book. What seems to be the overall
plot changes from chapter to chapter (so I'm going to avoid writing
about it in any detail); characters are introduced and described well
before their names are given; technology is very high but ill-defined,
so that one never quite knows what it ought to be able to do.
"I bribed three very respectable planning computers to get you all
here, Jefany. Especially you. It was very difficult. I don't like to
corrupt machines—it's like deceiving children."
There's an infodump of the setting's history in the first chapter,
disguised as a description of a piece of art in a museum. It's that
kind of story. There are many things going on, and if some of the
resolutions are excessively predictable, others definitely aren't.
There's a puzzle-world in the style of Poul Anderson, but it's a
puzzle of biology: why are these things this way, surely not by
coincidence? (And the question is never really answered, but the
journey to get to that non-answer is still remarkably satisfactory.)
The writing is sometimes lyrical, but often oddly disjointed; consider
the order of the phrases in:
Here was a Tech creation embellished by artists: a mechanical mantis
shape in pale green and silver, with many-jointed legs and a pair of
hidden wings that fluttered out for stability in flashes of
iridescence over uncertain terrain.
Wouldn't "that fluttered out in flashes of iridescence for stability
over uncertain terrain" be a more natural progression of concepts?
It's not wrong, but it makes this reader stumble, and that may be
deliberate.
Most definitely an odd book, very much for the sort of SF reader who
doesn't mind piecing together a puzzle rather than being presented
with the solution. Followed by The Pathfinders.
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