Krishna
Weird in parts, interesting in parts. But overall, average or even slightly below.
This is part of a trilogy and deals with the Uplift world invented by David. There is Book Two and Three but I am unlikely to read it. Apologies to David Brin fans, but this is not my cup of tea.
A man, half singed, escapes a fire. As he moves in the swamp, he sees a group of strangers. This is the prolog. The story itself starts next.
There are four friends from different species, only one of which is humanoid. They are crazy about books left by humankind eons ago. A girl with eye-stalks (yup, like a snail) suggests that they go to the forbidden area to read the inscriptions on the rocks. There are even friends with wheels instead of feet and some with no feet at all.
Then the story goes to a race that went to Jijo, a distant planet, seemingly disjointed from the original story. There are a few folks who argue about the old ways and the new. Chimps with human intelligence (but inability to talk) and other weird stuff intervene to provide the fantasy atmosphere to the story.
Nelo (Don’t ask who it is. People come and go) visits his daughter Sara’s house where she has saved a stranger from death.
Then the story branches off into a narrative about another man who discovers that a girl was stealing his bow. Then rolls all the way back to a new ship coming to the place and they finally figure out that convicts are being dropped off a la Australia. But then it turns out that they may be scientists, interested only in exchange of knowledge.
Dwer takes the girl for justice for stealing his bow. Then the story alternates between the aliens arriving and killing a spider with acid in its body for blood (yup a la Aliens movie), as well as the girl who stole the bow trying to get at a wounded mechanical bird regardless of the danger to her person and how Dwer saved her.
In the meanwhile human criminals who came up create divisions from the Unified Six because others (k’ger, etc) now suspect the humans among them of disloyalty. And it seems certain that the evil humans will destroy the entire planet to conceal evidence of their theft but the Six in Jijo decide to fight back an enemy with much superior technology, whatever be the odds.
They inform the Jijoans that they intend to take them all back and even the revered Egg was their plan to educate the Six and also that this whole thing was an experiment. Disappointment and despair arise when the Jijoans learn of this.
But in reality they realize that the aliens have been sowing seeds of dissension and their plot is exposed. In addition, the rebels have also destroyed the base they came in.
There are some vignettes worth reading but the story is too pat and too distracted to come together. All those stories do not come together at all and go their separate ways. This ends in miraculous escapes and reversals of the bad boys suddenly through deux ex machina techniques.
Meh.
3/10
– – Krishna (Dec 2018)