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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Covers much the same ground as the previous volume, May 29, 2007
Ally doesn't live up to the standards set in previous chapters of Karen Traviss' Wess'har Wars. This may be due to padding out an otherwise shorter series to sell more books, or perhaps to overwork. Since the publication of the first two Wess'har novels in 2004, Traviss will have through the end of 2007 published an additional 3 Wess'har novels, plus 5 Star Wars novels - with 3 more novels already scheduled for 2008.
Ally disappoints largely because it doesn't go anywhere, covering much the same ground as in Matriarch, which when it finished left us anticipating the eqbas arrival on Earth. By the end of Ally, they're just packing up.
The title refers to partnerships formed among competing factions to protect common interests, the outcome of Ally's most common activity - talk. Having taken the decision to intervene on Umeh, the eqbas matriarch Esganikan finds herself looking at a decade-long occupation, followed by a potentially equally lengthy assignment to Earth, when she'd most like to go home and start a family. To speed things up and get her off Umeh, she allies herself with a new species, the skavu, ruthless reptile-like bipeds Shan Frankland describes as Eco-Jihadis. The skavu are so fierce and so feared that the Bezer'ej wess'har and the isenj set aside their differences, allowing Esganikan to leave for Earth (skavu in tow) secure that the restructuring of Umeh will be properly managed. What Esganikan doesn't yet know, however, is that the ecological balance on Bezer'ej is once more threatened by c'naatat, which Lindsay Neville has given to the bezeri to save them from extinction. In their own private alliance, Aras and Shan promise not to reveal to Esganikan the c'naatat infection provided Lindsay keeps the super-powered squid from reproducing.
While the plot is rather thin, Ally continues to deliver on character development. Perhaps the most endearing person in this volume is Aras, who struggles courageously with conscience and the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. While observing that a lasting sense of betrayal is characteristically human, he is confounded that Deborah Garrod has been able to forgive him for executing her husband. Perhaps, he thinks, he can do the same for the isenj who tortured him while a prisoner of war. And so he visits Umeh to see if perhaps he can relieve himself of the demons that have tortured him for most of the past five centuries.
Traviss also includes more of her cutting observations on humanity. When Eddie Michallat insults a human as a "stupid cow," his adolescent wess'har companion Giyadas is intrigued by his word choice: "So by comparison with what you think of as an inferior species, you insult her. And you also make her not human, and so not worthy of respect." She's also critical of Eddie's excision from his reports of some of the most brutal images of the war: "When you look at something, you remove all that doesn't affect you. You see what you need and feel, nothing else. You see nobody else." This propensity to demean and ignore other sentient creatures is also found, Aras observes, in the commercialization of animal images, such as plush toy Pandas. "... there are many kinds of human who ... [love] the abstract ideal while abusing and destroying the living object."
And finally Traviss continues to develop the big themes that make this series so compelling - the interdependence life, the insubstantiality of reality, and the ability of the mind to condition itself for good or bad - ideas that dovetailed quite nicely with recent readings on Buddhism. As Aras observes: "There is no such thing as continual improvement. Just change."
Hopefully, the final volume, Judge (April 2008), will be a change for the better.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
greater satisfaction than Matriarch delivered, May 5, 2007
With Ally Karen Traviss delivers the fifth entry in her Wess'har Wars series. The aliens are now one step closer to Earth and the Wess'har will cleanse and rebalance life on Earth...which will result in significant loss of human life (but salvation for the other forms of life on the planet). Shan Frankland, once a police officer, a "copper" in her words, once a human much like any other, is, and has been for several books, much more than human. She identifies much more with the Wess'har and due to her infection of c'naatat Shan is nearly immortal. She can die, but even stepping out in the vacuum of space is not enough to kill. Shan's ideas about conversation and the value of the lives of non-humans fall in line with much of Wess'har. She is also married to a Wess'har, Aras, who is also infected with c'naatat and has been alive for five hundred years, and to a human soldier, Abe, who suffers the same fate. Shan knows that she cannot return to Earth ever because humanity should not have access to c'naatat.
But this is only one aspect of what is going on and only identifies who Shan Frankland is. There is war on Umeh, the home planet of the isenj, and the Wess'har have been invited to restore Umeh to a natural balance, but they have not been given full permission to cleanse the planet as they would wish. So, there is conflict on the planet as some of the isenj revolt against the isenj leadership, but in that revolt they pit themselves against the Wess'har and ensure the destruction of the isenj. On Bezer'ej, the world known as Cavanaugh's Star, there is a different problem. The world is in balance and though the bezeri have been nearly exterminated by a couple of humans and a big mistake, there are still survivors and Lindsay Neville, the guilty party here, was infected with c'naatat to serve the survivors in the oceans. Lindsay wonders if that service could be to save the bezeri by infecting these creatures, once thought harmless but recently discovered as overhunters who have destroyed eco-systems, and bringing them on land.
There is less a sense of discovery and raw excitement than there was in the first entries of the Wess'har Wars. This is only to be expected as Traviss is telling an ongoing story and not introducing the reader to an entirely new culture and worldview. One thing that Traviss does well to keep her novels fresh is that each novel introduces something entirely new and shattering which changes everything for the next novel. Earlier in the series it was infecting Shan with c'naatat, infecting Abe, the near destruction of the bezeri, killing Shan (which obviously didn't work), the planned invasion of Earth by the wess'har, and infecting Lindsay and Rayat. Because c'naatat is nearly impossible to eliminate (but it is possible), having more characters infected each with different views on life and what should be done with c'naatat, everything changes. All of this helps keep the series fresh and leaves the reader to end a novel with something shocking and spend the next year wondering what will happen next.
So what about Ally? Well, Traviss gives us our shocking event which changes everything. Something about Ally felt far more compelling than the previous volume, Matriarch. Perhaps it is the sense that in Ally something is really happening and the overarching storyline of bringing the Wess'har to Earth may actually happen in the series. There has been a sense of stasis in recent volumes where there was a bit of a question of whether or not Traviss would actually write about the Wess'har getting to Earth. Real progress on that storyline has been made now. Add this progress to the already fascinating ethical discussions and actions of Shan, the Wess'har on Umeh, the bezeri, and the possibility of Earthly invasion and what we have is an improvement in the series and a step back to what we had in the first three novels. There is simply a greater sense that things are happening in this novel than in the previous one and this leads to greater satisfaction with the novel.
-Joe Sherry
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, not great, April 23, 2007
I really enjoyed the first three books of the series, especially Shan Frankland's gradual immersion in an alien culture and her unlikely but compelling romance. In "Ally", the fifth book of the series, the focus is more on the unfolding ecological/political/military conflicts over Umeh, Bezer'ej and (to come) Earth, which I personally found readable but less compelling than what went before.
To some extent the series is starting to suffer inevitably from its length; there are a number of minor human characters from earlier volumes who are referred to and I had some trouble remembering them all. There number of subplots woven together, some of which I found interesting but others less so. The only truly interesting part of "Ally", to me, concerned the developing story of the bezer'i, which got comparatively little attention. (The bezer'i could have been developed into more interesting characters; I find them an exception to the rule that Traviss's alien characters are always so interesting, as contrasted to her human characters who, except for Shan and Ade, I find rather dull.) The rest of the story, devoted to troubles on Umeh and the introduction of the menacing Skavu, seems to be little more than a lead-in for volume six. These events make the threat that looms for Earth all the more worrisome as we see what happens to Umeh, but most readers will have been well aware of the extent of the danger by the end of "Matriarch".
Of course I'm going to buy and read "Judge" when it comes out. But "Ally" is the least compelling book in the series so far.
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