Customer Reviews

Hunted

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As the book "Hunted" begins, Edward York is leaving an isolated moonbase around the planet Troyen and, he thinks, finally going home. He is so happy to be leaving, he doesn't question the circumstances of the sudden reprieve from exile. After twenty years away from the rest of civilization, he is having enough trouble simply coping with the flood of attention from the ship's women. But the ship that rescues him never gets to take him home. Instead, Edward finds his innocent ride home was not so innocent at all, and he is suddenly thrown right back into the heart of the intrigue and politics he thought he'd left behind twenty years before. In those days, Edward served as the bodyguard to his genetically perfect, diplomat sister, Samantha-the only job he could get since HIS genetic engineering inexplicably failed to provide him with the intelligence his sister received. When a diplomatic mission to Troyen, the homeworld of the Mandasars, went sour and erupted in civil war, Samantha was killed and Edward banished to an isolated moon outpost by his Admiral father. Edward is convinced this is because his father blames him for his sister's death, and is embarrassed by his "retarded idiot son". With little to do over the past twenty years other than wallow in guilt over his sister's death and contemplate his father's contempt for him, Edward's self esteem is practically nonexistent. He considers himself ill prepared to take on the tasks he is faced with after he leaves the moonbase. But with the help of Admiral Festina Ramos and a collection of Explorers and amusing aliens, Edward will find himself trying to unravel a conspiracy that began twenty years before and that is the source of strife on Troyen . I loved this book. It keeps a brisk pace and the plot is full of surprise twists and turns. Gardner's universe, the same as in other "Expendable" books, is richly-detailed and full of colorful aliens, interesting technologies, and complex politics. The book's characters are wonderful. I always like to cheer for the noble underdog and Edward York is a fabulous character. He is completely convinced of his own uselessness at the opening of the book, yet decency and bravery are so much the core of his personality, the reader cannot help but like him. As the book progresses, he begins to realize that perhaps he is more than just Admiral York's "retarded idiot son". He gains confidence, but never loses his decency. Festina Ramos, familiar to readers of Gardner's other Expendable books, makes a capable and interesting partner for Edward. There is a host of secondary characters that are also very entertaining; I particularly enjoyed Tobit, the wisecracking Explorer who accompanies Edward and Festina to Troyen. If the primary characters in "Hunted" were not so good, the book would still be enjoyable simply because of Gardner's well-developed alien species. Gardner knows how to create believable and well-drawn alien people. The Mandasars become people that you are able to really care about rather than just discard as cardboard curiosities. He even manages to make the Balrog, a sentient moss with a rather malicious and twisted sense of humor, believable. It is not necessary to have read Gardner's other books to be able to follow this one. After reading this excellent offering, I certainly will read the rest of his books now. Highly recommended.

If you LOVE Gardner's female protagonist Festina Ramos (as I do) you'll LIKE "Hunted".

I found this book pleasant but somewhat slow going until I approached the end where it picked me up and kept me up!

Gardner again introduces us to several fascinating and well realized alien races, the Balrog and the Mandasars, and he expertly weaves the thought provoking relationships between them and our questionably "human" race.

A basic question posed in different ways throught the story is "what does it mean to be used by others"? Is it always bad; can it be beneficial to both parties. We are constantly used in our "normal" contemporary Earthly lives by the organizations that we work for, that we join, that provide us information and necessary professional services. In this complex tale Gardner brings that question to it's ultimate expression.

I continue to be fascinated by Gardner's skill as a writer and as a creator of tangible and sensible realities that include a wonderful panoply of possible different beings. I liked "Expendable" more than "Hunted", but I will surely continue to read everything that Gardner generously puts out for our entertainment and deep consideration.

I have read all of Mr. Gardner's previous novels, always coming away feeling as if his characters are people I know. Or will come across at any moment in my life. Edward York is different, not the razor wit people come to expect from a main character. Inherently decent and honorable, he is caught up in some of the horrific circumstances anyone could be expected to face. Anyone with a fully functional intelligence would be excused for going a little crazy, but Edward who had always been put down by his powerful father and treated like an amusing pet by his spectacular twin sister IS the main character. Along with James Gardener's ever popular Festina Ramos, Edward has to get to the bottom of the cover-up he was never supposed to be smart enough to detect. Murder, betrayal, fear and confusion have all been woven by Mr. Gardner into one incredibly entertaining story. I am looking forward to the next book already. :)

Sometimes I think contemporary SF is missing a sense of freedom of imagination. Reading old 50s books I am struck by the insouciance with which authors threw in concepts like easy FTL, psi powers, weird alien species, super technology, and so on. It's not that you can't find these anymore, but often there is a sense of constraint. We are much stricter about scientific plausibility. But there are still writers who let their imaginations go, while sticking to traditional SF ground. And when a good writer does this, the results can be enormously fun.

James Alan Gardner's new novel, Hunted, is a very fun novel to read. It's set in the same future as his other novels, and a major character is again Festina Ramos of the Explorers, who appeared in Expendable and in Vigilant. Recurrent elements of this future are the League of Peoples, an association of extremely advanced races who enforce just one rule on the many lesser races of the Galaxy (including humans). That rule is that anyone who kills (or intends to kill) another sentient being is killed if they travel out of any solar system. The idea is that wars will thus be restricted to single planets. It's hard to believe in the absolute enforcement of this rule (by mystical means) that we are shown, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief. (The crimes involved in this rule seem to me to be a bit of a moving target, as well.) Perhaps the neatest thing about this setup is that it allows Gardner to play with a whole array of alien races of roughly human intelligence and tech level, while still allowing for races of much greater advancement. Humans themselves are ruled by the Technocracy, controlled by a High Council of Admirals. There are a number of human-colonized planets.

This book deals with Edward York, the son of a member of the High Council. Edward and his sister Samantha were illegally modified genetically, in an attempt to boost their intelligence and strength. Edward's mods failed, so he has spent his life as a dumb bodyguard for his brilliant sister. But 20 years before the action of the book, war broke out on the planet Troyen, where Edward and Samantha were part of the diplomatic corps.

Edward has finally been rescued and taken to Celestia, a human colony which has accepted a great many refugees from Troyen. These refugees were Mandasar children (the Mandasar being the non-human race native to Troyen). The Mandasar are intriguing aliens: they have several "castes", like ants, and they have a Queen, like ants. Once on Celestia, Edward realizes something bad is going on with the refugee Mandasar children, now grown to adulthood. They are being enslaved, victims of the lack of adult Mandasars. He meets Festina Ramos, heroine of Gardner's earlier books, who also suspects wrongdoing. Festina, Edward, and some of the Mandasars are soon on their way back to Troyen, to try to figure out what's really going on behind the scenes. The book is action-packed, and full of neat ideas as well.

It's instructive just to list the ingredients Gardner has thrown into his pot: several neat alien races, nanotechnology, telepathy and some clever uses of it, precognition, a man with a glass stomach, at least two varieties of human/alien hybrid, genetic engineering, some diabolical weapons tech. Mix in plenty of scheming, plenty of action, plenty of colour. The result is a compelling adventure story, and lots of fun for the reader.

The book isn't perfect. You do have to swallow some of the basic implausibilities of the entire series: mainly the League of Peoples' ability to detect and kill "dangerous non-sentients" (and what seem to me to be inconsistent and sometimes changing rules defining "dangerous non-sentients"), as well as the hard-to-believe rationale behind the "expendable" Explorer Corps. In addition, the bad guys are pretty cartoonishly bad. And the ending, while satisfying, has aspects of deus ex machina to it, though those aspects were at least foreshadowed fairly well. (I'd quibble, too, that as psi powers go I hate precognition, but I think that's a personal quirk of mine, and it can't be held against the book.) But these weaknesses didn't stop me from enjoying myself immensely as I gobbled this book down.

For egomaniac Admiral Alexander York, having regular children just isn't good enough. Although such tampering is illegal in the Technocracy, York has his unborn children genetically altered. The result: Samantha is blond, beautiful, athletic and brilliant. When she is grown, she becomes ambassador to the Mandasar on the planet Troyen. Edward is also blond, handsome and athletic, but he is slow mentally. Slower than normal. An embarrassment to his father, Edward is kept out of sight until the Admiral is able to get him commissioned in the "Expendables" and assigned to Sam as her bodyguard. In this position, he can be kept under Sam's supervision. But, when civil war breaks out on Troyen, Sam and the Mandasar hive-queen are killed. All humans are immediately evacuated. Edward finds himself manning a lonely observation outpost on a barren moon in the Troyen system for the next twenty years. Then things start to get interesting...

HUNTED is set in the same universe as Gardner's earlier books. I read the first of these, EXPENDABLE, several years ago. I thought it was OK, but not entertaining enough to look for its follow-ups. Recently, however, HUNTED caught my eye and I decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did. The story is fun and well-paced, with plenty of action and lots of twists and turns. The characters are an intriguing bunch, including the likable Edward and, from previous "expendables" tales, Festina Ramos and Phylar Tobit. Edward, who is not as dumb as most people think, handles the trials and tribulations that come his way with an engaging degree of acceptance and humor. He isn't "hunted" much, though. He's manipulated endlessly, but he spends only a brief time early in the book "on the run". The Mandasars and other aliens are interesting, and one of the regrets I felt about this story is that they weren't developed more. The "bad guys" are perhaps too unrelentingly evil and uncomplicated, but the story doesn't dwell much on them, either. This IS "space opera" after all, not high literature. As "space opera", it works well enough.

I've never been a big fan of sci-fi that relies on special psych powers, either among humans or aliens. It always strikes me as a cop-out when it becomes the "out" from the complications posed in the plot of a story. There is an element of that in HUNTED, but it doesn't intrude until the very end. I would have liked the story better without it, but it isn't a major distraction.

I liked this book. It wasn't deep, but it didn't profess to be. It was fun and never got boring. A little predictable? Maybe, but the complications kept coming fast enough to raise new questions. I recommend it to fans of this genre. It is one of the best books of this type I've read in recent years.

In the world of the sentient and non-sentient there exists a world of treachery and deceit by those who try to bend the rules. With a multitude of plot twists and turns you will accompany a band of misfit expendables and alien life forms, such as intelligent moss called Balrog and elephant sized Mandassar's (or lobsters as the humans see it), as they try to save their people and themselves from the would-be rulers greedy for more power. Throughout the book the question arises: "Just who is our hero?" as even he himself does not know. Take a ride with some of your favourite expendables as they turn to liquid in "Sperm Tails", battle laughing larries, and try to fight a battle of the pheremones as war rages in the universe.

From reading the back of the novel: It's story of a father that had his two children genetically altered to be absolutely perfect. One turned out fine and joined the diplomatic corps, and the other turned out less than intelligent and joined the Explorers.

You would think that it would follow certain storylines and it doesn't. Mr Gardner excelled in creating a new world in this universe. He introduces several different alien species and manages to captivate you with each paragraph.

I found myself trying to guess the ending and then having to control myself, not to go to the end of the book to find out how it all turns out. It was interesting.

Narrator and protagonist Edward York is a nice guy, handsome, strong as an ox, but dumb as an ox, too. Or at least he thinks he is. He's a failed clone. His "sister," Samantha, has all the brains. At age 20, she's ambassador to Troyen.

Troyen is a hive, with castes evolved to respond to pheromones. But while Samantha is ambassador, it collapses into a messy civil war. Samantha and the Queen are killed, and Edward spends the next 20 years on one of Troyen's moons, watching the only place he ever called home devolve into chaos. When a ship finally picks him up to take him home, disaster ensues when the League kills everyone aboard the spacecraft but Edward under its unfailing rule: nonsentients - persons who kill or assist in killing - are forbidden from interstellar space.

Edward is plunged into an interstellar consiparacy involving half a dozen races. With the help of Festina Ramos, he tries to grope through the cloud of conspiracies around him. In the process, he learns that everything he thought he knew is a lie, and that the biggest lies he has been told were about himself.

Once again, Gardner paints Earth's government as utterly corrupt. It's the least plausible part of the story, worse even than the idea of human pheromones. But despite that ongoing flaw, this is a very good book. It's hard to make a dumb protagonist credible, but Gardner brings it off. The plot twists are as good as "Vigilant." Gardner continues to improve as a writer.

Recommended.

Gardner writes a simple, but fun style. This book, like his others, is just fun to read, without being over complicated. While his stories are not on a scale with series' like Dune or Star Wars, he is quietly creating a science fiction world that is interesting and different than the typical view of the future. He is very imaginative in creating the League of Peoples, where humans are not the top of the evolutionary chain. Sometimes, the story is a little slow, and silly if you think too much, but it's a great book to read if you just want to sit down, zip through some pages, and enjoy yourself.

With science-fiction (or possibly space opera) books as a speciality, this author is not terribly well-known but should be. The Expendables series (of which Hunted is midway in the series) is absolutely joyful to read, with a delicious sense of humor embedded in every chapter.

The main character (Edward) is not your typical hero, and the insect-like aliens don't seem unlikely. I certainly enjoyed Edward's open minded attitude and even affection towards his adopted race, even though he doesn't feel he is "smart" enough to look after them.

This was a delightful surprise to find and read. You do not have to worry about Garner slapping you with too much technology and not enough characterization and plot.