duane@anasazi.UUCP (Duane Morse) (10/02/85)
The jacket reads: "The planet seemed like salvation for the dying colony ship Invictus, except...within a day of landing, the colonists found the world to be inhabited and themselves caught between two opposing cannibalistic armies. For Liberty Ibarra, who learned languages fast, the situation called for courage, tact, and a blind faith in the alien's envoy, the brother of the enigmatic emperor...until she learned that her "friend" was also a political schemer with a talent for assassination. Then it began to look as through the humans had dived over the edge of the pan straight into the fire." Well, this is another uninspiring and misleading jacket description, and as is all-too-often the case, if I hadn't already read and enjoyed some books by Lee Killough, I wouldn't have bought this one. Lee Killough is very talented in writing stories about alien cultures. This is a hard subject to handle successfully. One must tread a fine line between giving the aliens too many human characteristics and making them so strange that the reader cannot relate to them. DEADLY SILENTS (by the author) deals with humans and aliens, and my index card for the author tells me that I gave that book my highest rating, 4 stars. THE MONITOR, THE MINERS, AND THE SHREE doesn't have any humans, and I gave it 3.5 stars. The scenario here is as follows. A colony ship develops serious mechanical problems many years away from its destination. The crew votes to look for habitable planets in the nearest appropriate star system. A planet is found and the ship lands, but it can never take off again. The crewmembers come from two Earth backgrounds: essentially advantaged versus disadvantaged. Liberty is from the latter. I'm happy to say the author doesn't beat the reader over the head explaining earth culture; one learns about that obliquely. As the jacket says, the planet is found to be inhabited. The natives' society reminded me of feudal Japan, but there are a number of significant cultural differences. We learn about them through Liberty's adventures. Enough of the plot. The crew follows a version of the Star Trek "Prime Directive" as regards giving technology to a backward people, and I appreciated that. I also liked the way the author treated Liberty's reaction to major cultural differences. The first part of the book seemed a bit slow to me, but the pace picked up appreciably in the second half and maintained my interest through the end. I can't give this book as high a rating as the others I've read by the author, but it still ends up with 3 stars (very good). -- Duane Morse ...!noao!terak!anasazi!duane (602) 870-3330