wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA (06/26/84)
From: Rich Wales <wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA> I recently read a moderately interesting SF book: Llewellyn, Edward. Salvage and Destroy. Daw Books, 1984. ISBN 0-87997-898-8. It isn't a fantastic book that you should race down to your local book- store at top speed to get -- and then stay up all night reading -- but it's not bad either. Without spoiling the plot, I can say that it is about an advanced spacegoing civilization (the Ults) who have been monitoring Earth for several hundred years. When it becomes evident that human civilization is developing spacefaring abilities, the Ults decide to find out as much info as they can, then destroy their telemetry beacon before Earth finds out about it. The main character in the book is an Ultron (an Ult leader) named Lu- cian, who embarks on the "salvage and destroy" mission together with a crew of humans descended from New Englanders taken by spaceship to one of the Ult planets around 1700 AD. The Ults can change their physical form within limits, so Lucian has assumed the shape of a human male for this mission. Ults are hermaphroditic, incidentally, and much of the story is devoted to Lucian's trying to comprehend and deal with human sexuality. Lucian narrates the entire story in first person, which contributes to its readability. The ending was not quite what I had expected. The name "Ult" lends itself easily to some terrible puns, by the way. Apparently, the title of respect for an Ultron translates as "Your Ultimate" -- leading Lucian at one point to ask his human crewmates to stop calling him that because it sounds silly in English. Whether the Ults used Ultrix on their computers is not stated. -- Rich <wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>