Krishna
It is a fantasy fiction. Starts off like an ordinary story, with an alien world and several monsters, but it gets incredibly better as you read along.
We learn that Parker delivers children (a capital offence) and takes one child when she is surrounded by cops and disappears.
Years later, a man who hunts grizzen arrives back in the desolate planet – named Jazen Parker so we know who that child is. He meets a girl delivery person where he is camping out for the night. The girl Kit Born, agrees to take him in her vehicle where they are attacked by a gort (some kind of monster – this planet is full of weird creatures and many of them have six legs which seems to be the author’s favourite number when it comes to legs) and kills it with a gun. There are other gorts in the vicinity but they attack the wounded one, leaving them alone.
When he realizes that his partner was killed earlier, he is in trouble as he cannot survive without a job but Kit Born offers her services. After getting approval from Cutler, who agrees after realizing that the payment to Kit is contingent on bagging a grezzen.
This is where the story gets much better and veers off the routine sci fi path you have come to expect in reading so far.
They start on a journey in an armoured hovertank, hunting grezzen. They realize that Cutler does not want to kill them but capture one, to their shock.
And the story goes interesting. The author uses evolutionary theory to suppose that the alien planet (to which mankind came in a ship) had evolved its own intelligent species which rules that planet for millions of years but they were not humanoid. They were huge monsters – imagine dinosaurs expanded hundreds of times – and they had a collective intelligence and could communicate with each other through thought – a kind of shared consciousness. Because it is open to all, they do not understand (and cannot perform among themselves) deceit or lie as the others would instantly see through it. Nor do they believe there can be other worlds and are puzzled when this new species of hairless puny creatures with ‘stings’ (guns) come in. They can pool into the thoughts of people but wisely pretend to be dumb creatures so that man will not exterminate them. So cool. This animal is the grezzen. And of course they have six legs, very sharp teeth and a body armor that can destroy steel.
Now Cutler’s plan is to capture one and sedate it. They do manage to capture an old female – by hitting poison darts at it and then binding it and sedating it to keep it quiescent. But when Cutler finds out that her son is coming after them, he abandons the three people he employed – Kit, Jazen and a Tassini race of man called zzz – and runs away in the only tanker they had for protection. In a fight with the younger grezzen, Kit manages to stick it with a sedative (but mild enough only to numb a paw, which does not even slow it down) and gets killed.
Now Jazen and Kit find out that they are attracted to each other and unaware that they are being ‘watched’ by the grezzen they have sex. Kit seems to know that it is sentient and after realizing it that it is protecting them (as they move back to the camp) except for a very interesting scene with a sea ‘serpent’, they offer a deal to rescue the mother. Grezzen, still playing dumb, tacitly accepts the deal.
Now, the city where Cutler took it – with a harebrained scheme to capture some more and use them as a kind of a telepathic communication network faces a rebellion and runs away – this time to his true home (earth) – abandoning the whole enterprise. Kit and Jazen rush to save the female to fulfil the promise to the son as well as due to their belief that grezzen should be treated as the intellectual equal, which they are.
Now the grezzen finds that his mother is dead and Cutler is trying to flee the planet in a rocket, bound for the earth. He runs to cut Cutler off but is trapped in a big newsteel container that he cannot break out of, and the humans plan to flood it with fuel and burn him alive.
Jazen and Kit race in a mobile to save him before it is too late. They manage to extricate him and take him to a rocket that follows Cutler to earth. But we learn that Jazen is an outlaw whose immunity just expired and one of his ex friends ratted on him and bounty hunters catch up with him. When one of them threatens Jazen – who had a nasty showdown with Kit because he was expecting to be caught and was irritable – near the grezzen, the grezzen comes out of the flimsy cage and drives him away. The guards, in a panic detonate a bomb that punches a hole and sucks them away much to the annoyance and anger of Halder, the commander.
The climax is nail biting, and takes place in (I think) Alaska. The sequences are brilliant and heart stopping and then it all ends in a beautiful climax. Well done, Robert.
It is an exciting book to read in the fantasy world. Just like the recently reviewed Termination Orders, this is a new author (to me) and is eminently enjoyable in its action, narrative power and simply the ability to keep you turning the pages.
8/10
– – Krishna (September 2019)